Picture your next discovery call blowing up before you even hit Dial…
Until recently, your website was your frontline. SEO helped build authority, generate inbound leads, and usher prospects into a funnel you could control. It was a narrative crafted by Marketing and executed by Sales. Pricing was the final card you played, after lengthy discussions about customer needs, stakeholder dynamics, and product demos.
But AI Overviews in search are turning that process on its head.
Today, a buyer can simply ask Google for your product’s enterprise pricing and get an answer pulled from scraped content across forums, Reddit threads, or third-party sites. Often inaccurate. Always unaffiliated. Presented as fact.
Now imagine your ideal prospect sees that number and walks away before ever talking to your team. “Too expensive. Not worth the hassle.” Game over. You never even entered the conversation.
And here’s where it gets more complicated: 71% of B2B buyers are now Millennials or Gen Z, according to LinkedIn’s B2B Institute. They’re digital-first, research-heavy, and operate asynchronously. If your content isn’t showing up in the sources AI pulls from, or if what does surface is outdated, fragmented, or flat-out wrong, your pipeline ghosts before it’s even built.
Zero-click searches (answers visible in Google, no site visit required) are on the rise. Buyers explore your product, evaluate pricing, and form opinions based on content you didn’t create and can’t verify.
Transparency is no longer a differentiator. It’s the cost of entry. The classic model of building trust, teasing value, and revealing pricing at the end no longer holds. You may have to lead with price and work backward because your buyer has already formed a perception before the first call.
That’s going to create a new kind of tension between Sales and Marketing.
Content creation and distribution are still sales enablers, but not in the way we used to think. It’s no longer about gated PDFs that capture leads. It’s about creating meaningful, discoverable content in the wild—on forums, in community conversations, and across third-party platforms. A strong organic content strategy isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a survival tool.
But showing up in those spaces at scale isn’t free. It takes headcount and hours, long-term investment, and a tolerance for delayed returns. Picture a Sales team trying to close deals while AI Overviews feed prospects outdated or inaccurate information. Meanwhile, Marketing is tasked with creating content in new, unproven spaces that may or may not influence AI-generated answers. Results might take three, six, or even twelve months to show up.
There’s no playbook. AI search is evolving by the day. And anyone claiming they’ve cracked the code is probably trying to sell you something. The only real path forward is disciplined experimentation: test, measure, learn, repeat, and figure out what signals the AI actually responds to.
And look, I get it. Hearing this from someone in Marketing might raise an eyebrow. But if you want to truly understand what’s changing, I recommend reading Michael King’s deep dive into AI Overviews, grounded in Google’s patent filings. Spoiler: it’s not simple.
I don’t want to end this on a doom-and-gloom note. So here are a few things you can start doing tomorrow to take back control:
- SDR Pre-Call Prep
- Google “[Your Product] pricing” before every call and read the AI Overview you’ll be up against.
- Note any inaccuracies so you can address them proactively.
- First-Five-Seconds Script
- “You may have seen Google quote us at $X. Let me give you the real range and why customers your size usually pay less over time.”
- Objection-Handling Rebuttal
- Prospect: “Google says you’re $200k a year.”
- You: “That figure bundles every optional module. Most customers start nearer $120k, prove ROI in quarter one, then scale. Let me show you how that rollout looks.”
- Feed Real-World Intel to Marketing
- Spin up a shared Slack channel or weekly stand-up where reps drop AI-scraped screenshots and call clips. Those nuggets tell Marketing which myths to tackle first.