The news: Even as AI becomes central to B2B marketing strategies, a significant gap remains between marketers’ growing AI ambitions and their readiness to manage AI visibility, per a new Corporate Ink report.

• Among US marketers at the vice president level and CMOs, 88% say leadership is asking about AI visibility, yet only 34% of B2B tech marketers overall say they have a defined AI visibility strategy they feel prepared to execute.
• 51% of marketers say their top AI visibility challenge is limited internal generative engine optimization (GEO) knowledge and expertise. A lack of coordination across teams (39%), difficulty measuring success (31%), and a lack of tools and budgets (28%) followed.
• Only 29% of marketers are actively tracking and measuring AI visibility.

For marketers, that readiness gap presents a major issue as genAI answers increasingly shape how buyers discover, evaluate, and shortlist vendors before deciding whether to purchase.

Readiness barriers: Marketers are navigating a rapidly changing AI visibility landscape, marked by fragmented tracking methods, little standardization, and opaque algorithms.

There’s no single, definitive way to track AI visibility. Instead, marketers are using a mix of tools and tactics to gauge their presence in AI-generated results, including monitoring traffic shifts in Google Analytics (52.7% of US marketers), using social listening tools (42.5%), tracking brand mentions in AI Overviews (29.7%), and conducting manual search engine results page (SERP) spot-checks (13.7%), among other methods, per NP Digital.

GenAI search is difficult to diagnose. Results and overviews are shaped by complex, evolving algorithms that often don’t clearly explain why certain content is surfaced. Without unified tools or industry standards, marketers may end up with inconsistent data that makes it harder to understand whether AI visibility efforts are actually working.

Implications for marketers:

• As pressure to integrate AI into marketing workflows grows, marketers must define who is responsible for monitoring, measuring, and improving how brands appear in genAI results. Internal education should be a near-term priority.
• Prompt strategy is key. Marketers should carefully identify the buyer-centric prompts they want to appear for to improve chances of surfacing in AI search. Clear, authoritative, and well-structured content is also important.
• Measurement will likely require multiple signals until AI visibility tracking becomes more standardized. Marketers will need to combine mention tracking, traffic analysis, and manual checks to understand performance.