The Buyer You Can't See (But AI Can)

“You’re not selling to a person. You’re selling to their assistant. And that assistant is AI.” – Marketing Futurist

Most marketers still write for people.
But increasingly, it's AI that reviews your site, scores your product, and surfaces your company—before a human ever gets involved.

We call it the AI Shadow Buyer.

It's the hidden layer between your funnel and your prospect.
And if you don’t optimize for it, your best prospects never even see you.

The Framework: Human vs AI Shadow Buyer

• Human buyer: browses, clicks, reads, books demos
• AI shadow buyer: scrapes, summarizes, filters, ranks

Today, that “executive assistant” role is played by GPTs, Perplexity, ChatGPT plugins, enterprise copilots, and internal AI research agents.

If your messaging isn’t clear to them, the human buyer never gets the nudge.

Use Case: How You're Already Being Evaluated

AI tools used by your buyers already:

• ChatGPT + browsing: parsing your landing page copy for clarity
• Perplexity: indexing you as a relevant vendor in responses
• Gartner's AI copilots: filtering your solution in research workflows
• Internal GPTs: summarizing your site or proposal for execs

And most sites fail these tests. Why?

They’re optimized for “clever humans,” not “fast AI.”

Tool + Prompt Section

Use Claude or GPT-4 with this prompt on your homepage or landing page:

“You are an AI assistant for a B2B buyer researching [category]. Analyze this website: [URL].
Extract key value props, ICP, differentiators, and urgency signals. Give a buyer score out of 10 and suggest improvements.”

This reveals exactly what an AI sees—and what it misses.

Action Step

Try that prompt on your site right now.
If GPT gives your homepage a 4/10, don’t be surprised if your pipeline feels the same.

PS
If ChatGPT wouldn’t recommend your product, why would your buyer?