There’s data to back that up (mostly). But it’s not the whole picture. And it extends to B2C as well.
The core finding is real and corroborated: ~85% of B2B AI search visibility comes from off-site sources, not your owned domain. That’s important. Founders, CEOs, and CMOs need to absorb that.
But any attention-grabbing “AEO is a scam” framing is too clean. The same study supplying the 85% headline found Claude and Perplexity pull up to 21% of citations from brand-owned content. That’s the validation layer the newsletter author dismisses. Owned content does matter less for AI visibility and discovery, but it still matters — and your site helps deliver confirmation once your brand is already in the conversation.
Calling it useless isn’t quite right. Calling it insufficient on its own is.
The honest read isn’t that on-site work is theater. It’s that it has diminishing returns once technical hygiene is done, and the marginal dollar moves further off-site.
What this means for your 2026 plan
- Keep running the audits. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude. Type your buyer’s actual question. Read the citations. That’s the corpus deciding your category. Rinse and repeat — and you might be surprised how often the answers change (sometimes dramatically) on immediate back-to-back tests. Test in incognito vs. signed in, free vs. paid tiers, different models. Getting the full picture is a complicated process.
- Treat G2 reviews and other off-site content like channels, not a chore. Twenty fresh reviews with specific use-case language move AI visibility more than three months of pillar content.
- Get your SMEs into the corpus under their own names. The sales-slick PDF nobody linked to isn’t in the training data. The CEO’s byline hosted on a trade pub more likely is.
- Fund brand. LinkedIn/Bain found 81% of won deals had broad awareness across the buying committee from day one. That doesn’t form on a page you control.
- Keep on-site AEO cheap and automated. Don’t cancel the work — insist that the funding and the majority of the effort move to off-site placement and review velocity.
AEO and SEO will continue to matter. Allocate your spend accordingly.