I cancelled my Semrush subscription last month.

After seven years of tracking keyword rankings, monitoring backlinks, and optimizing for Google's algorithm, I pressed the cancel button. Not because Semrush stopped working. Not because the tool got worse. I cancelled because the metrics it tracks no longer correlate with revenue.

The decision came after reviewing our analytics. We'd spent months climbing from position 12 to position 3 for a high-value keyword. Our traffic increased exactly as predicted. But deals? Zero. Not a single qualified lead from that traffic spike.

Then I ran a different analysis. I asked our best customers a simple question: "How did you first hear about us?"

Ninety-one percent said the same thing: "ChatGPT recommended you when I asked about cybersecurity marketing platforms."

Not one mentioned finding us on Google.

That's when it clicked. The entire foundation of B2B SaaS marketing — the one I'd spent years building expertise in while scaling a Customer Identity and Access Management platform to serve over a billion users — had shifted underneath me. And most companies haven't noticed yet.

The Data That Changes Everything

Here's what's actually happening in enterprise B2B buyer behavior right now.

Ninety percent of B2B buyers now use ChatGPT in their purchasing research, according to comprehensive 2025 buyer behavior studies. That's not "some buyers are experimenting with AI." That's the overwhelming majority making it a core part of their evaluation process.

The numbers get more specific:

Forty-seven percent of enterprise buyers now start vendor research with AI assistants instead of Google Search, per Treble's December 2025 research of 300 CIOs, CISOs, and CTOs. Once they enter evaluation mode, 93% use AI to summarize and compare vendors.

Sales conversions from ChatGPT referrals have increased by 436% compared to traditional organic search traffic. AI-referred visitors convert at 14.2% versus Google organic's 2.8% — a 5.1x advantage.

Let that sink in for a second. Not only are buyers using ChatGPT more than Google for research, but when they do find you through AI search, they're five times more likely to become customers.

And yet, only 22% of marketers currently track AI visibility, and fewer than 26% plan to develop content specifically for AI citations.

The gap between where buyers are and where marketing teams are focused is massive. And it's creating a winner-takes-most dynamic that most companies won't see coming until it's too late.

Why Traditional Outbound Is Dead (And Why You Can't Replace It With More Outbound)

This shift wouldn't matter as much if traditional outbound was still working. But it's not.

I've written extensively about why cold outbound to enterprise buyers — especially CISOs and technical decision-makers — fails at staggering rates. In my analysis of why 99% of cold emails to CISOs fail, the data is clear: outbound spam has made the channel nearly unusable.

CISOs receive an average of 200+ vendor cold emails per week. Their actual response rate? Below 1%. Not because they're unresponsive — because the signal-to-noise ratio makes engagement impossible.

The traditional B2B playbook was: rank on Google, run outbound campaigns, sponsor events, and build a funnel. But all three channels are simultaneously degrading:

SEO traffic is declining. AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites by an estimated 30%+ on pages where they appear. Users get their answers without clicking. Your ranking position matters less when the answer appears above the links.

Outbound is increasingly filtered. Email deliverability is down. Spam filters are smarter. And even when messages land in the inbox, buyers are trained to ignore them. I've covered this extensively in my guide to complete B2B SaaS top-of-funnel growth strategies, but the short version is: volume doesn't fix a broken channel.

Traditional search behavior is changing. Two-thirds of B2B buyers now rely on AI chatbots as much or more than Google when evaluating vendors. The buying journey that used to start with a Google search now starts with a ChatGPT prompt.

So if SEO rankings matter less, outbound doesn't work, and buyers are asking AI for recommendations, where does that leave B2B companies?

It leaves them needing to be cited by the AI systems their buyers are actually using.

From SEO to GEO: The Fundamental Shift

Search Engine Optimization optimized for ranking in a list of blue links. The goal was position: rank 1, 2, or 3, get the click, convert the visitor.

Generative Engine Optimization optimizes for citation inside AI-generated answers. The goal is inclusion: when a buyer asks an AI system "What are the best identity governance platforms for financial services?" your company needs to be in the answer.

LLMs cite only 2 to 7 domains per response on average, compared to Google's 10 blue links. If you're not in that narrow citation window, you don't exist for that query. You can rank #1 on Google and still be completely invisible to the 90% of buyers asking ChatGPT.

The mechanics are different:

SEO relied on backlinks as authority signals. More links from high-authority domains meant higher rankings. GEO research shows brand web mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664, versus only 0.218 for backlinks. What matters is how often your brand is mentioned in authoritative contexts across the web — editorial coverage, analyst reports, community discussions, case studies.

SEO optimized for keywords. GEO optimizes for answering complex buyer questions. A buyer doesn't ask ChatGPT "identity governance platform." They ask "Which identity governance platforms integrate with Okta and support SOX compliance for financial services companies with distributed teams?"

SEO drove traffic. GEO drives credibility. When ChatGPT cites your company as a solution, it's not just sending traffic — it's positioning you as an authoritative answer before the buyer ever visits your website.

This isn't a minor evolution. It's a fundamental change in how discovery works for B2B.

Why This Matters MORE for Cybersecurity and B2B SaaS

Consumer brands can survive being invisible in AI search. If you're looking for running shoes and ChatGPT doesn't mention your brand, the buyer might still discover you through Instagram ads, influencer content, or retail placement.

B2B cybersecurity doesn't have those fallbacks.

Enterprise security purchases are high-consideration, long sales cycles with 10+ person buying committees. The evaluation process involves months of research, vendor comparisons, technical assessments, and stakeholder alignment.

And here's the critical part: Buyers complete 61% of their evaluation journey before first contacting a vendor, according to Forrester and 6sense's 2025 research. They're building shortlists, comparing capabilities, and forming preliminary preferences before you ever know they're in-market.

If your company isn't cited when they ask ChatGPT to compare vendors, you're not making the shortlist. You don't get the chance to pitch. The deal is lost before it starts.

Traditional demand generation assumed you could identify in-market buyers through intent signals and intercept them with targeted outbound. But if buyers are doing their primary research in ChatGPT conversations that leave zero digital footprint, those intent signals arrive too late.

By the time a buyer visits your website — the point where intent data starts tracking them — they've already narrowed their options from 50 potential vendors to 3 or 4 finalists. If you weren't in the AI-generated comparison that got them there, you're not in the conversation.

For cybersecurity companies specifically, the trust layer matters even more. Security purchases require demonstrating authority, credibility, and proven expertise. When ChatGPT cites you as a trusted source, it's an implicit endorsement that carries weight with technical buyers in a way that ad clicks never did.

What GrackerAI Does (And Why We Built It)

This is why we built GrackerAI.

Not as an SEO tool that tracks rankings. As a Generative Engine Optimization platform specifically designed for B2B SaaS and cybersecurity companies to get cited by the AI systems their buyers are actually using.

The core insight came from our own research analyzing citation patterns across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. We found that only 11% of domains appear in both ChatGPT and Perplexity citations. There's almost no overlap. A company can dominate Perplexity and be completely absent from ChatGPT, or vice versa.

Each AI system has different source preferences, different trust signals, and different citation patterns. Optimizing for one doesn't automatically translate to the others. And critically, ChatGPT and Google Gemini are the dominant platforms at 66% usage each among enterprise buyers.

GrackerAI solves three specific problems:

Citation tracking across platforms. You can't optimize what you don't measure. We track how (and whether) your company appears when buyers ask AI systems the questions that matter in your category. Not hypothetical queries — the actual prompts enterprise buyers use when building vendor shortlists.

Authority signal optimization. Getting cited requires building the right trust signals. That means earned media in publications AI systems trust, community presence where technical buyers congregate, analyst coverage, case studies, and technical content that demonstrates expertise. We identify which signals matter most for your specific category and help you build them systematically.

Content structured for AI extraction. AI systems need content they can parse, understand, and cite accurately. That means structured data, clear answers to specific questions, verifiable facts, and attribution. Most B2B content is written for human readers and Google's algorithm. It's not optimized for how LLMs extract and synthesize information.

We're not the only platform doing GEO. But we're the only one built specifically for the B2B SaaS and cybersecurity use case — where the buying journey is long, technical, committee-driven, and increasingly mediated by AI research.

When a CISO asks ChatGPT "Which CIAM platforms support passkeys and have SOC 2 Type II certification?" we make sure you're in that answer if you actually meet those requirements.

The Practical Implications for B2B Companies Right Now

If you're running marketing for a B2B SaaS or cybersecurity company, here's what this means for you:

Your Google rankings are becoming a lagging indicator of pipeline. They still matter — SEO is the foundation GEO builds on — but ranking position no longer predicts revenue the way it used to. Track AI visibility separately.

Your content strategy needs to shift from keyword targeting to question answering. Instead of "What keywords can we rank for?" ask "What questions do buyers ask AI when evaluating our category?" Then create definitive answers to those questions.

Earned media is now a distribution strategy, not just a PR tactic. Every press mention, analyst report, case study, and third-party article creates training data that AI systems use to understand your authority. AI does not generate credibility; it aggregates it.

You need to track different metrics. SEO metrics (rankings, traffic, backlinks) tell you how you perform in Google. GEO metrics tell you whether you're cited when buyers ask the questions that drive deals. Citation frequency, source diversity, sentiment in AI-generated comparisons — these are the new KPIs.

Outbound needs to become inbound support. You can't cold-email your way into deals anymore. But you can use targeted outreach to buyers who've already been exposed to your brand through AI-mediated research. The sequencing matters: get cited by AI first, then use outbound to engage the buyers who've discovered you there.

Technical accuracy matters more than ever. AI systems fact-check claims against multiple sources. If your website says you support a capability and there's no corroborating evidence elsewhere, the AI won't cite you. Accuracy and verification are table stakes.

The Winner-Takes-Most Dynamic Nobody's Talking About

There's a timing element here that most companies are missing.

Once an LLM selects a trusted source, it reinforces that choice across related prompts — creating compounding citation patterns that late-movers struggle to displace. This was identified in Princeton's 2024 research as a structural property of how generative engines learn.

Translation: the companies that establish GEO authority now — while most competitors are still optimizing exclusively for SEO — are training AI models to recognize them as authoritative references in their category. Those citation patterns compound over time.

If you wait until GEO becomes obvious and everyone's doing it, you're fighting against established patterns. The AI has already learned to cite your competitors. Reversing that is harder than establishing it early.

This is the same dynamic that made early SEO adopters nearly impossible to displace. The companies that built domain authority when Google was new created compounding advantages that lasted decades.

We're at that moment again. Except this time, the window is narrower because the adoption curve is steeper.

What Hasn't Changed (And Why That Matters)

Before this starts sounding like "SEO is dead, burn your content strategy and start over," let me be clear about what hasn't changed.

Buyers still need to trust you before they buy. They still need to see proof that you can deliver. They still evaluate based on capabilities, pricing, integration complexity, and implementation timelines. None of that is different.

What changed is where they do that evaluation.

The average buying group size remains at 10.1 people, and interactions with the winning vendor average 16 per person. B2B sales are still complex, committee-driven, and relationship-intensive.

But 61% of that journey now happens before first contact. And an increasing share of that 61% happens inside AI conversations.

Your job isn't to replace your entire go-to-market strategy. It's to adapt it for a world where discovery happens differently.

The Bottom Line

I didn't cancel Semrush because keyword rankings don't matter. I cancelled because they no longer predict whether we'll hit our revenue targets.

The correlation broke.

When a metric stops predicting the outcome you care about, continuing to optimize for it is just expensive theater. You're measuring the wrong thing and calling it progress.

For B2B SaaS and cybersecurity companies specifically, the outcome that matters is: do qualified buyers discover us when they're building their vendor shortlist?

Twelve months ago, tracking Google rankings told you the answer to that question. Today, it doesn't.

Ninety percent of B2B buyers are using ChatGPT for research. Sales conversions from AI referrals are 436% higher than traditional search. Forty-seven percent start with AI tools instead of Google.

These aren't future predictions. This is current buyer behavior, measured and documented across multiple independent studies.

The companies that win in B2B over the next five years will be the ones that get cited when their buyers ask AI for recommendations. The ones that lose will be the ones still optimizing for a discovery channel that buyers have already moved past.

I'm not saying throw away your SEO strategy tomorrow morning. I'm saying add GEO to it. Track both. Measure whether AI systems cite you when buyers ask the questions that drive deals in your category.

And if you're in B2B SaaS or cybersecurity and you're not tracking AI visibility yet — you're optimizing for metrics that no longer correlate with revenue.

The game changed. Most companies haven't noticed yet.

That's the opportunity.

Deepak Gupta is the CEO & Co-founder of GrackerAI, a Generative Engine Optimization platform for B2B SaaS and cybersecurity companies. previously co-founded and scaled a CIAM platform to serve 1B+ users and writes about AI, identity management, and B2B growth at guptadeepak.com.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Deepak Gupta | AI & Cybersecurity Innovation Leader | Founder's Journey from Code to Scale authored by Deepak Gupta - Tech Entrepreneur, Cybersecurity Author. Read the original post at: https://guptadeepak.com/why-i-cancelled-semrush-after-7-years-and-why-geo-is-the-only-b2b-growth-strategy-that-matters-now/