What Is A B2B Website For Now
Visitor Shift: Web traffic has dropped significantly as buyers now conduct research primarily through AI-powered tools.
Market Assumption: Traditional web marketing assumptions are outdated; buyers no longer need to visit websites for information.
Website Transformation: Businesses need to rethink website roles as either transactional platforms or thought leadership hubs.
Test Hypothesis: CMOs should develop hypotheses and conduct tests to navigate changes in buyer behavior effectively.
Ownership Clarity: Responsibility for brand presence in AI outputs must be clearly defined beyond current organizational structures.
Think about the last time you rebuilt your website. The brief probably started somewhere innocently enough. A team member suggested we need to better educate our buyers, tell our story more clearly, and move people through the funnel.
That premise is now outdated. Erica Gunn, CMO at Canto, shares her thoughts.
"My hypothesis is they're only really coming to you because they already know who you are."
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The research buyers used to do on your site now happens inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. By the time someone lands on your homepage, the shortlist is already pre-determined..
Canto felt this fast. When AI-powered search arrived at scale, their web traffic dropped nearly 40% almost overnight. The buyers didn't just disappear, it’s that the research migrated to a wholly different source.
The Path Nobody Walks Anymore
Your website was designed around a specific behavior where the buyer has a problem, searches, then lands on your site, and you have a window to educate them.
LLMs closed the timeframe, and this window of opportunity. Buyers now form preferences and narrow a shortlist without clicking a link. The old marketing path, surface the pain, show the solution, build the case, capture the lead all assumed you could reach someone before they'd made up their mind.
This assumption no longer holds up.
"Before, you could put an ad out there, put content out there, and somebody could read it and consume it," Gunn says. "But in order to consume it, they had to come to your website. They don't have to do that anymore."
What arrives on your site now is a different kind of visitor. One marketing agency reported an 80% increase in LLM referrals after restructuring their content for AI indexing.
And, these those visitors came with higher intent than typical web traffic. They aren’t browsing solely looking for answers, instead they are confirming.
If visitors arriving via LLM are already largely decided, your website isn't what's converting them. Now, that credit goes towards whatever LLM surfaced your company name.
The Directions Available To Buyers
Gunn has two hypotheses about where this goes.
The first is that your website becomes primarily transactional, less educational content, less nurture architecture, built for a buyer who needs to confirm rather than be convinced.
The second is that your web presence becomes almost entirely thought leadership, because that's what feeds the LLMs doing the educating now.
"Maybe you're doing less educating and it's far more transactional," she says. "Or maybe your web presence becomes purely thought leadership because that's what's feeding the LLMs.”
“I don't think I know the answer yet, but I have a fair amount of conviction that the websites we all have up today, that we built two years ago, eight years ago, ten years ago, there's going to be a foundational transformation for the job that website does."
Both scenarios require dismantling assumptions that have governed B2B web strategy for two decades.
Your educational website wasn't just a content vehicle. It was the primary mechanism through which you built credibility with buyers who didn't yet know you. If that function has migrated to LLMs, what you feed those systems matters more than anything on your site.
A Hypothesis May Be Your Saving Grace
Gunn's approach to all of it between the traffic drop, the brand investment case, the website question runs through the same framework she's used since her B2C days.
Start by forming a hypothesis, building a test around it, defining what success looks like before you start, and scale only what proves out.
"What is your supposition going on? How can we build a test around it? How do we know if that test is successful or not successful?" she says.
"If we do that based on a hypothesis and run a test, it feels less overwhelming, rather than having to consume everything all at once."
You don't need to know whether your site becomes a transaction engine or a thought leadership feed. Pick one assumption, test it with enough rigor to learn something, and move from there.
The CMOs getting ahead of this aren't the ones who solved it first. They're the ones who stopped waiting to solve it and started running small, deliberate experiments instead.
So Who Actually Owns This?
Who in your organization owns how your brand shows up in an AI-generated answer?
It doesn't live in SEO. It doesn't belong to content, demand gen, or brand in any way that maps to a current org chart.
Your LLM presence emerges from the aggregate of everything published under your name. You're accounting for thought leadership, executive visibility, press coverage, product documentation, and customer reviews.
The brands that surface reliably in LLM outputs share one thing and it's a consistent public presence built over time, not optimized in a sprint.
That means the work isn't technical. It's brand-building at a level most B2B organizations have historically underinvested in, now carrying urgency without a clean measurement framework to justify the spend.
It also requires a board-level conversation most CMOs haven't had. Gunn has insight into where the real accountability sits. Finance can be educated, she says, but the relationship that matters is with the board.
"The people I'm really answering to are the board and the shareholders. That's where the conversation needs to be. In making sure you're articulating what's changed in the market, why that's changed, why the dollars are being deployed the way they're being deployed."
When your board understands the shift, you have room to experiment. When they don't, every test becomes a budget justification.
Nobody Has Figured Out This New Era of B2B
Gunn isn't positioning herself as ahead of this. She's asking the same questions you are, just earlier and with a line of intent.
"We're all kind of forging new paths," she says.
"We're all blind in it together. It makes it a little less frightening when you can say, I just don't know, and then you get on the phone with somebody else who's like, I don't know either, but what are some things we can try?"
That's the right posture. Not coming from a place of certainty. Or pretending you have a framework. Just a human acknowledgment that the website you've spent years optimizing was built to answer a question your buyers have mostly stopped receiving the answer to via your site.
"I think we're on a path of curiosity to see what we can test into," Gunn says, "to see what tomorrow's web experience is going to be."
Start asking that question now, before someone else's answer becomes yours by default.
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