Method + Metric Industry Report
WEBSITES IN THE AI ERA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Traffic is falling. Website dependency is rising. For business-to-business (B2B) vendors, those two facts describe the same shift, and only one of them shows up in your analytics.
Buyers are removing sales reps from the research stage, not from the deal. Preference for a rep-free experience is trending up
A website has two jobs. Demand capture is weakening. Evaluation support is strengthening.
Artificial intelligence (AI) did not remove the verification step. 94% of buyers who used AI checked its answers against something else.
Behavior Changed before the teCH
Gartner asked the same question in two consecutive years, of two comparable samples, and got a six-point move. In 2024, 61% of 632 B2B buyers said they would prefer an overall rep-free buying experience. One year later, 67% of buyers said the same.
Gartner B2B buyer surveys fielded August to September 2024 and August to September 2025. Same question, comparable samples.
Gartner asked B2B buyers the same question in two consecutive years and got a six-point move: 61% preferred a rep-free buying experience in 2024, and 67% in 2025. The preference isn’t new. In 2020, before ChatGPT launched, Gartner’s Future of Sales research found a third of buyers already wanted a seller-free experience. AI didn’t start this shift. It’s speeding up one that was already underway.
Buyers Have Not Stopped Talking to Sellers
The rep-free finding is regularly misread as sellers being cut out. Gartner’s own activity counts say otherwise. Across all engagement stages, buyers reported completing averages of:
- 3.0 activities both online and with supplier representatives,
- 2.3 activities with representatives,
- 1.8 through digital self-service.
Sellers are still in the deal.
What moved is which work gets done with a sales rep. Information gathering is now self-service. Sellers are brought in for judgment calls, negotiation, and confirmation. By the time your rep is in the room, the information the buyer is checking against was gathered somewhere else.
70%
Of buyers prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience
80%
Of deals are won by the vendor the buyer preferred before engaging sellers
94%
Of buying groups rank preferred vendors before first contact
6sense surveyed more than 4,000 buyers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific and found that the shortlist a buying group forms before contacting a seller wins most of the time. The commercial consequence is direct: the work that decides the deal happens before anyone on your team reaches out.
A Website Has Two Jobs
One is weakening. The other is strengthening. AI is not removing the website from the buying journey. It is reassigning which of the two jobs the website is being paid for.
Job 1: CAPTURING DEMAND
Attract a visitor, convert them into a lead. This is the job that traffic measured, and the job that AI answers are absorbing.
- AI answers resolve more queries without a click
- Top-of-funnel explanatory content is the most summarizable category on your site
- Sessions fall regardless of ranking position
Job 2: SUPPORT EVALUATION
Serve the buyer who already knows who you are and is deciding whether to shortlist you. This job was always there.
- Buyers evaluate alternatives without a representative
- Buyers check AI answers against the vendor’s site
- Most of the buying group never speaks to your sales team
- Preference forms before first contact
For years the traffic number was the reason to invest in your site. The traffic number is falling. The reasons to invest are not.
Distrust Is Why the Second Job Grows
In Gartner’s 2025 survey, 51% of buyers said they were more likely to encounter misleading information from generative AI, and 49% said the same about a sales representative. Those two numbers are close enough to be read as one finding: buyers do not fully trust either channel.
That is not a reason to expect them to stop using AI or stop taking sales calls. It is the reason they check both against a third source. Documentation, specifications, pricing, certifications, and customer evidence are what a buyer reaches for to settle the question. For most vendors, those live on their website.
Evaluation Runs 10 months
6sense put the 2025 global average B2B buying cycle at roughly ten months, down from roughly eleven the year before. The compression came from faster AI-assisted research, not from less of it.
A shorter cycle with the same amount of investigation means the investigation got denser. Gartner found buyers used an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase. Your website is competing for position among those seven, repeatedly, across most of a year.
- Revisits the product page
- Forwards a case study to their manager
- Runs a branded search on your company name
- Asks an AI assistant about you
- Returns to your site to check that answer
- Inspects your security documentation
- Compares your pricing
- Returns after each sales meeting
- Sends the integration page to IT
- Reviews deployment requirements
Ten website touches. None of them require a human interaction, and none of them are attributable to a campaign.
Where the Website Does the Work
Each stage of the journey asks the website for something different. A gap at any stages means that your potential buyer finds the answer on a third-party property, where you have no control over how the answer is framed.
| Stage | Buyer need | Website role |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Understand the problem | Content, research, category education |
| Initial research | Understand the offer | Product pages, solutions, use cases |
| Consideration | Determine fit | Case studies, demos, FAQs, pricing |
| Validation | Determine credibility | Evidence, reviews, credentials |
| Technical evaluation | Determine feasibility | Documentation, integrations, architecture, security |
| Commercial evaluation | Determine viability | Pricing, return on investment, implementation |
| Internal justification | Convince stakeholders | Case studies, research, business case resources |
| Purchase | Remove uncertainty | Contact options, expectations |
| Post-sale | Increase adoption | Documentation, support, training |
Stages 4 through 7 are where most B2B sites are thinnest, and they are the stages that decide the shortlist.
Buying Group You Never Meet
B2B buying groups can range from five to sixteen people across as many as four functions. Security, IT, procurement, finance, and legal evaluate you independently, on their own timelines, against their own criteria.
5-16
People involved in a B2B buying decision, across up to four functions
74%
Of buyer teams are in conflict during the decision process
Gartner defines conflict as buying team members holding conflicting objectives, disagreeing on the best course of action, or being overruled by external decision-makers. In three out of four deals, your point of contact is arguing your case in a room that does not agree.
Your salesperson holds a relationship with one or two contacts. The rest of the committee meets you through whatever your contact can forward them.
What they can forward is what they can win with.
How Buyers Actually Use AI
Two independent studies put AI adoption in the buying process between 45% and 63%. The more useful finding is what buyers do afterwards.
45%
Of 645 B2B buyers used generative AI during a recent purchase
63%
Of 1,862 technology buyers used AI during the purchase journey
94%
Of buyers who used AI fact-checked its responses at least some of the time
69%
Of buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales representative
AI accelerated research. It did not replace evaluation. In TrustRadius’s survey of technology buyers, 94% of those who used AI fact-checked its answers at least some of the time. In a separate Gartner survey, 69% of B2B buyers said they prefer to check AI-generated insights with a sales rep.
Ask, Verify, Repeat
In practice the two surfaces are used together during a research session. Each pass narrows the question. Both ends of the loop read from the same pages, which means neglecting one surface neglects both.
-
Asks AI engine
A category question, in the buyer's own constraints.
-
Gets an answer
A few vendors named, a small number of sources cited.
-
Search to verify
The answer goes through verification.
-
Lands on a page
From organic results, or the AI answer's citation.
-
Returns to the AI
A sharper follow-up and a narrower question.
The loop repeats, narrower every pass
What to do about it
Audit pages against buyer journey
Take the stage table in section three and mark each row: has a page, has a file nobody can find, has nothing. Most B2B sites are complete through stage three and thin from stage four onward, which is exactly where the shortlist is decided.
Write for the Verification Pass
Discovery content answers the category questions. Verification content answers the specific ones: versions, dates, named certifications, supported configurations. Vague pages fail the check that the buyer came to perform.
Make the Pages Machine-Readable
State answers in text rather than implying them in an image or a chart. Keep headings descriptive, use structured data, and follow Google’s published guidance on generative AI features in Search. A page that cannot be parsed cannot be cited.
Ensure that evidence is shareable
Every proof asset needs its own URL and title that survives being pasted into an internal message, email, social share. If your contact cannot send it to procurement in one action, it does not reach the committee.
Change what you measure
Sessions measure job one. If job two is the one growing, the reporting has to follow it: depth on evaluation pages, returning-visitor behaviour, branded search volume, share of AI citations, all influence in closed-won interviews.
Reconcile site information with sales deck
At the evaluation stage, the buyer’s explicit job is risk assessment. An inconsistency between what the site says and what the representative says reads as a risk signal.
Where This leaves us
None of this shows up as a win in your analytics. Sessions keep falling while the pages that decide deals get read more carefully, by more people, over a longer stretch of time than any report you currently run will show you. That gap between what your website is doing and what you can see it doing is the actual problem, and chasing the traffic back does not close it. It closes when you fund the pages a buying committee reads while you are not in the room, and measure the site against the job it does now rather than the one it used to be paid for.
Most of your buying committee will never speak to your sales team. They meet you through your documentation, your pricing page, and whatever your champion can forward them. We audit B2B sites against the stages that decide the shortlist, then fix the pages that committee actually reads. Book a discovery session to find out where your website stands.
Find Out Where Your Site Fails the Check
Method and Metric audits B2B sites against the stages that decide the shortlist, then fixes the pages the buying committee actually reads.
References
- 6sense. (2025). 2025 B2B buyer experience report. Surveyed more than 4,000 buyers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. 6sense.com/science-of-b2b/buyer-experience-report-2025
- Gartner. (2025, June 25). Gartner sales survey finds 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience [Press release]. Survey of 632 B2B buyers, August to September 2024. gartner.com
- Gartner. (2025, May 7). Gartner sales survey finds 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate “unhealthy conflict” during the decision process [Press release]. Survey of 632 B2B buyers, August to September 2024. gartner.com
- Gartner. (2026, March 9). Gartner sales survey finds 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience [Press release]. Survey of 646 B2B buyers, August to September 2025. gartner.com
- Gartner. (2026, May 20). Gartner survey finds 69% of B2B buyers turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights [Press release]. Survey of 645 B2B buyers, August to September 2025. gartner.com
- HG Insights. (2026, July 15). TrustRadius 2026 B2B buying disconnect report reveals AI has changed how buyers research, but not what they trust [Press release]. Survey of 1,862 technology buyers and 444 vendors, January 2026. hginsights.com
- Google. (2026, July 10). Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. Google Search Central. developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide