AEO fundamentals

Why do I need AEO and GEO?

By Arnav Mukherjee, founder of TofuBofu · July 4, 2026

I run a sales platform called Thriwin, so I spend my days watching how B2B buyers actually behave. Over the last year one change kept surfacing: buyers were arriving to conversations already informed, already carrying a shortlist, and when I asked how they built it, the answer more and more often was some version of "I asked ChatGPT." Not Google. Not a directory. An AI chatbot, before they visited anyone's website.

That is the whole reason I built TofuBofu, and it is the short answer to why you need AEO and GEO: the shortlist is now being written somewhere you cannot see, and if your name is not on it, you never get the chance to compete.

The buyer already moved

This is not a prediction. It is measured behavior. G2's 2026 research found 51% of B2B buyers now start their research on an AI chatbot, up from 29% just a year earlier. And 69% chose a different vendor than they originally intended, based on an AI recommendation. Forrester found 94% of B2B buyers now use AI somewhere in their buying process.

Read that middle number again. More than two out of three buyers changed their mind about who to hire because of what an AI told them. The answer layer is not a nice-to-have channel. It is increasingly where the decision gets shaped.

The cost is invisible, which is the danger

A lost SEO ranking shows up in your analytics. A lost AI recommendation shows up nowhere. When an engine hands a buyer three names and yours is not among them, that buyer does not visit your site, does not bounce off a page, does not fill a form and abandon it. There is no data point. They simply proceed with your competitors, and you never learn the deal existed.

This is why so many good companies feel their pipeline quietly tightening without a clear cause. The leak is upstream of everything they measure.

Why now beats later

Here is the part that should make you move rather than despair. Most companies in your category have not done any of this work. That means the specific questions your buyers ask AI, the narrow, high-intent ones, are frequently unclaimed. When AI has no strong source for "best cybersecurity firm for a Series B startup's SOC 2 audit," the first firm to publish a thorough, structured answer tends to become the answer, and to hold it for months.

And because AI search does not weight company size or ad budget, this is one of the rare channels where a smaller, sharper firm can beat a larger one outright. The window is open precisely because it is early. That is an advantage with an expiry date.

Who needs this most

If you sell expertise, IT services, managed services, cybersecurity, consulting, an agency, this is aimed at you. Your buyers research before they buy, they ask AI who to trust, and your hard-won reputation does not automatically travel into an AI answer. It has to be expressed in content and structure the engines can read. That translation is what AEO and GEO do.