A growing share of US B2B research now starts inside ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews. The buyer gets a few named sources and a summary, and often never clicks a traditional result at all.
Ranking still matters, but it no longer guarantees the mention. Answer engines quote structured, extractable content and trust brands they can verify across third party sources. If you are not in that set, you are invisible at the exact moment of consideration.
The fix is deliberate: clean entity signals, content shaped to be quoted, and presence on the sources these models actually read. We track the mentions and report share of answer, not just rankings.