The way that B2B SaaS companies attract and manage inbound organic lead generation has fundamentally changed. Generative search engines now command an ever growing number of searches. Traditional methods of SEO and organic lead generation go half as far as they used to, and the outlook continues to evolve.
I’m often asked how Workato is capitalizing off the new era of AI search. Much of what used to work then no longer works now. But certain truths about audiences and customers remain, and the fundamentals of storytelling and product showcasing are still tested and true.
Here at Workato, our organic traffic patterns have morphed and evolved significantly over the past six months, just like every B2B SaaS company, but by leaning into the strengths of our own product, we’ve not only weathered these changes, we’ve thrived. Here’s how.
AI Search and its Effects on Organic Traffic
Data shows typical organic traffic declines since the rollout of Google’s AI Overviews feature at 25%-35% on average for B2B software. And if you’re like us, Organic is the largest revenue driving channel you have. At first glance, seeing a potential hit like this is understandably devastating.
Full transparency: We’re seeing around a 10% drop in clicks from google. The hit has been blunted because we’ve been implementing AI search optimized content and web architecture for some time. Also, the decline in clicks from google has been more than made up by increases in overall direct traffic. Here’s why:
Your Potential Customers Didn’t Go Anywhere
Unless your product was weakly positioned to begin with, or is easily replicated by AI, your total accessible market looks much the same as it did before generative search came along. The same customers are still looking for it with the same frequency, they’re just searching differently.
Here’s a look at referral traffic from LLM engines to our website over time. You can see how AI search traffic has skyrocketed just over the past four months. But while this graph is great to see direct AI search impact, it still doesn’t tell the whole story. In most cases, LLM search engines don’t link to websites directly unless specifically asked to.
The real powerhouse traffic flow is this:
A user querying an LLM search engine → that search engine mentioning your company → that user going directly to your website either by searching your brand or by typing in your url.
Internally, we’re seeing upwards of 10% of leads are now directly influenced by generative search engines in some form via this user flow.
How do we know this? We ask our customers. You should too. I think you’ll be surprised.
Pivoting from Top of Funnel Optimization
One of the things that has never changed about organic lead gen marketing is that content your customers find interesting and helpful still rises to the top. Traditionally, this type of content has been midfunnel or bottom of funnel content.
Bottom of funnel content has always been the most effective kind of content for users, it just traditionally hasn’t been the most visible because it’s longtail and doesn’t have huge search volume around it.
Today, search volume doesn’t matter as much. Soon, I doubt search volume will matter at all, at least in terms of the concepts we currently associate with it. This is because generative search engines like ChatGPT and Claude have something called query fan out. When these generative search engines query the internet they can generate dozens, sometimes 20-50 impressions per user query. Six months ago, one question received 1 to 5 impressions.
What this means is that In this new era, all content is visible to some extent. Content optimization doesn’t matter as much as content quality does. Which is as it should be.
Leveraging Your Product’s Strengths
Because AI search pings so many different sources per user question, results are much harder to manipulate. And this is a great thing! It is very hard for bad actors to lie about their product or its capabilities online anymore. They can try, but AI ultimately will choose what to pick up and publish as an answer. And AI samples a myriad of sources.
Here’s what modern lead gen marketers need to do to show well in AI search:
- Understand your product’s core strengths and write about them a lot. The more pieces of content you put out that associate your product with its capabilities, the more you can frame the narrative for AI search around your product. And we’re learning just how much AI search likes fresh content.
- Understand where your product is strong and capable, and where your content marketing is quiet. Every SaaS product has capabilities that are overlooked in marketing material. This is the gap analysis that can move the needle.
Where do you start? Well, I’d start by asking the generative search engines you see referring traffic to your website. You’ll find out exactly what it thinks of you and your product. This is important to keep a pulse on, but what’s equally important is tapping your internal information. The information that is proprietary to you and your company. Because this is the information AI search really craves.
This is where strong internal enterprise search capabilities are essential.
The Best Content for AI Search
The best content for AI search is content that adds value for your customers. This may seem obvious, but for years content marketers and SEOs got away with inundating google with content that didn’t provide value, but it still moved the needle for visibility.
Not anymore.
The best content is value-add, and the best way to create value-add content is to provide your company’s unique touch. If your company is like Workato, you have hundreds of talented people creating thousands of documents and slides in all sorts of repositories. Battlecards, feature explanations, use cases, and more. Before, all that info was siloed.
How many talented analysts have spent days making decks to provide unique insights that were then shuffled off into some dusty drive the second their presentation was over?
Now, with strong and secure enterprise search like Workato GO, it’s accessible. You can curate it, vet it, and publish it as you wish. With the power of Workato agents you can even do all of this at once.
It’s your unique touch. It’s the kind of value that really resonates with your customers. And if it really resonates with your customers, it will really resonate in AI search.
