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AI Visibility & GEO

AI search is changing B2B buying: How Massman Companies gained AI visibility with IBT Online’s help

What years of SEO investment prove about staying visible as buyers turn to ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and other search/answer engines.

Search used to mean a results page and a click. Increasingly, it means a conversation: a buyer asks ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, or Claude a question and gets an answer, often with no clicks through to any website at all. Ranking well on Google used to be the whole job. Now it’s half the job; showing up inside the answer is the other half, and most B2B marketing programs aren’t built for that yet.

Massman Companies, a US-based group of packaging machinery manufacturers, addressed that challenge directly: would years of SEO investment survive the shift to AI search, or would the rules reset to zero? Together with their digital marketing partner IBT Online, the response is a useful proof point for any B2B company that values its online presence.

Ross Gencheff, Massman Companies testimonial

Why AI visibility matters for international B2B companies

The importance of AI visibility is clear from the numbers. In early 2024, Gartner predicted that AI chatbots would cut traditional search volume by 25% by 2026. Independent clickstream research from SparkToro and Similarweb, reported by Search Engine Land in June 2026, found that 68% of US Google searches in early 2026, ended with no click at all, and that click-through rates fall by nearly 60% when an AI Overview appears. Google’s own I/O 2026 keynote put AI Overviews at 2.5 billion monthly users, with AI Mode above 1 billion within a year of launch.

For B2B buyers specifically, Forrester’s 2026 research found that 94% of U.S. B2Bs now use AI somewhere in their purchase process, and name it as their single most valuable information source, ahead of vendor websites and sales reps. A Gartner survey of 645 B2B buyers found 45% had used generative AI during a recent purchase.

Market localization and language add a further, often-missed, layer for companies selling internationally. A 2026 Weglot study of 1.3 million AI citations found localized websites get a 327% visibility boost and 24% more citations per query than untranslated competitors, and that Google’s AI Overviews favor local language sources by a wide margin. A website that hasn’t been localized for a market is, in practical terms, invisible to that market’s AI-generated responses.

None of this replaces organic search. BrightEdge’s data shows AI referrals still under 1% of total traffic, with Google holding over 90% market share. AI search is growing on top of SEO, exactly as Massman found.

Massman Companies: what changed, and what held

IBT Online is proud to be a digital marketing partner for Massman and had been running Massman’s SEO for several years when generative AI search became impossible to ignore. As Ross Gencheff, Senior Director of Marketing at Massman Companies, noted:

It doesn’t mean as much to be number one anymore. You have to have all of the avenues covered: paid search, organic, and now SEO and GEO.

The good news is the work we’ve been doing over the last number of years with SEO is really translating into GEO results as well. The content and everything we’ve been doing isn’t lost as this transition occurs.

Generative engine optimization (GEO), i.e. making content findable and citable by LLMs, rewarded the same discipline that had already earned Massman its top SEO rankings: clear, authoritative, well-structured content.

That success reflects the close collaboration between the two teams. As Ross noted:

It’s one of our favorite topics in our core team meetings with IBT Online. It’s fun to have like-minded individuals who are passionate about AI and where the market is going. They’re on the forefront of these discussions, and they bring those discussions back to our internal meetings.

That close collaboration turned into a specific, verifiable project. Working together, we created a list of short-tail and long-tail prompts that Massman ideal customer profiles would be likely to be searching for. These were then tested in the background to see how Massman was being found and cited across the various LLMs. The results gave clear data to work with to ensure Massman’s AI visibility.

This year we expanded our relationship with IBT Online from SEO only to also include GEO, to make sure we’re visible across the different LLMs. The research, analysis, and recommendations they’ve given us have allowed us to implement changes on our website, and we’ve seen an increase in referral traffic from the LLMs, and leads coming in through channels we hadn’t seen before.

There’s obviously a lot of work still to be done. It’s forever changing, but I know IBT Online is definitely monitoring and tweaking those strategies, and they’re on the forefront of it.

What this means for your business

What worked for Massman mirrors the approach IBT Online used to build its AI-first engagement marketing programs ever since generative search started reshaping B2B buyer behavior:

  • Audit what AI systems can actually read. A well-written page an AI system can’t crawl or trust doesn’t get cited. IBT Online starts every engagement with technical readiness: structured data, semantic HTML, and crawler access for the AI systems that matter, before touching content strategy.
  • Measure visibility with real prompts. Most companies have no idea how they’re described when an AI system answers a question about their category. The prompt-level monitoring IBT Online builds allows for measurable, improvable data.
  • Localization earns AI visibility on its own. With localized websites earning more than 300% more AI visibility, a company selling into multiple markets that hasn’t localized its best content has a fixable gap.
  • Existing SEO content is the raw material for GEO. Massman’s SEO content became the foundation for its GEO results. The same is true for most established B2B websites: the work is redirection and enhancement of what’s already there.

The takeaway

Massman protected an SEO investment by extending it into AI search, resulting in referral traffic and leads from channels it didn’t have before. For international B2B companies, the same playbook applies with one addition: visibility has to be tested market by market, and language by language.

IBT Online has spent over two decades building full-funnel digital marketing programs for B2B companies growing across borders, including search, paid media, content, web, and now AI visibility. AI is built into every engagement rather than added on afterward.

Massman’s wider story, how one successful digital marketing partnership grew into a tailored growth strategy across its whole portfolio of brands, is covered in Scaling a Five-Brand Portfolio: How Massman Companies Built One Digital Marketing Partnership With IBT Online.

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