What Generative Search Really Means For B2B Content

The rise of generative search is sending marketers into panic mode. LinkedIn is flooded with posts declaring the death of SEO, wild predictions based on limited data, and enough fear-mongering to paralyze entire marketing teams. 

We're seeing it firsthand with our own clients; teams second-guessing their strategies, hesitating on investments, and creating massive setbacks that really don't have to happen.

It’s all going to be ok, though. 

SEO isn't dying. It's evolving, and the fundamentals still matter more than ever.

The brands thriving in generative search aren't doing anything revolutionary; they're just doing what good content strategy always demanded.

That should be a refreshing thought. Right?

Why Some Brands Are Thriving in Generative Search

While some marketers panic that AI is killing SEO, focused and consistent B2B businesses are capturing more qualified traffic than ever across multiple industries and verticals.  

The difference isn't their SEO tactics, it's their approach to content and product marketing.

Why? Generative engines don't just pull from your blog posts. They also surface core marketing pages, reviews, social mentions, third-party publications, and community discussions. 

When AI aggregates information across the internet to address user inquiries, exceptional content alone can no longer compensate for a subpar product, platform, or service. Third-party information is gaining algorithmic priority and diminishing narrative control.

This means your content strategy and your product quality are more intimately connected than ever before. 

This creates a higher bar, but also a clearer path forward. The brands winning in generative search share three characteristics: genuinely valuable content backed by strong product marketing and useful products.

What does this look like in practice? 

• Content that goes beyond surface-level insights
• Products that generate positive third-party mentions
• Marketing that focuses on solving real problems, rather than hitting keyword targets

If you can back it all up with 1st-party data, even better.

Content that thrives in generative search isn't optimized for algorithms. It's built for humans who have real problems to solve, backed by products that actually solve them.

Why Teams Are Getting Pushback on Organic Investment

If a good content strategy is still the answer, why are so many teams getting pushback on their organic investments? 

When leadership asks, "Is this still worth the budget allocation?" the problem likely isn't performance but the perspective on what performance means.

The traditional model of organic search focused almost entirely on surface metrics: search volume, rankings, and traffic. We'd obsess over keyword positions and organic sessions while not spending time understanding what happened after the click. 

This approach missed the real value, which lies in conversions, pipeline influence, and direct business impact.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, though. We should all have been oriented around down-funnel content, metrics, and business impact for a long time now. 

Here's what's really changed: today's organic channels are more distributed, and our systems for measuring success haven't caught up.

What do we mean by distributed? Your content doesn't just show up in traditional search results anymore. It appears across multiple organic touchpoints:

• Google's AI Overviews and featured snippets - Pull concise answers and relevant site links directly from top-ranking or semantically matched content to address user queries.
• ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLM responses - Summarize or cite brand content when it aligns closely with the query intent or appears in widely referenced articles and domains.
• Branded queries and high-intent non-brand searches - Reflect increased brand awareness and discovery driven by helpful content seen or shared elsewhere, prompting deeper product or solution research.
• Social media shares and community discussions on Reddit, LinkedIn, and industry forums/Slack channels - Highlight and recommend content when it’s perceived as uniquely insightful, trustworthy, or directly useful in real-world problem-solving.

Each of these touchpoints represents earned visibility that your content strategy made possible.

The problem is that these new channels are miscategorized or unaccounted for in our analytics and, more importantly, misunderstood in strategy conversations. 

What shows up as "referral traffic" or “direct traffic” is often organic in intent and earned in nature. 

That social media mention that drove a demo request? It might have started with your content being discovered through any number of organic touchpoints: search, social discovery, community discussions, and yes, now generative search results.

So what sounds like doubt: "With all these changes in search, should we be pulling back on organic investment?"

Is often a misunderstanding: Organic is influencing more touchpoints than ever; you just need to expand how you measure it.

The Attribution Problem That's Killing Budgets

This measurement challenge isn't just a reporting problem; it's a strategic one.

Here's the contradiction we're seeing everywhere: marketing leaders intellectually understand that high traffic doesn't equal high intent, but they're still panicking about declining traffic numbers. They know pageviews don't close deals, yet they're desperately trying to get those page views back.

They aren’t coming back. At least, not in the same form they were in.

More and more marketing leaders are realizing that:

• High traffic doesn't equal high intent - A thousand visitors who bounce tell you nothing about content quality or business impact
• Rankings don't reflect multi-channel visibility - Your content may lose organic rankings and CTRs, but that's because those URLs are driving LLM referrals, and you're not accounting for it
• Analytics platforms miss LLM visibility - Tools like GSC & GA4 weren’t built to track citations or traffic from generative platforms, keeping the impact of those channels out of view.

If your reporting is still tied to traditional metrics, you're underreporting the business impact of your organic program. If you're trying to reclaim pageviews instead of optimizing for business impact, you're building the wrong thing entirely. 

The reality is simpler than most teams want to admit: conversions, qualified leads, and pipeline influence are the metrics that matter (or however your business defines these KPIs).

Everything else is just noise.

Measuring What Actually Moves the Business

How do you influence these metrics and report on them? This is exactly why we've developed the C.L.E.A.R. framework. 

This framework enables teams to measure organic success that accurately tracks business impact across all channels where your content drives results:

• Conversion - What kind of leads come directly and indirectly from organic efforts?
• Loyalty - Are we building brand loyalty and retaining customers through our content?
• Engagement - How and where are people interacting with our company and brand?
• Awareness - How is our overall visibility and brand awareness increasing?
• Reputation - Are we establishing ourselves as an authority in our space?

This framework captures the full spectrum of organic impact. Our approach, spanning immediate conversions to long-term brand building, covers traditional search, generative engines, social platforms, and community discussions. There are specific KPIs for each marketing segment (we’ll dive deeper into that later), but these are the segments where teams should be focused. 

Mature marketing leaders are already making this shift. They’re measuring organic success across the full customer journey. They understand and report on how content impacts key business outcomes, such as:

• Qualified leads and pipeline - How much direct and assisted pipeline content drives (Conversion)
• Repeat visits and customer retention - Signals of brand affinity and stickiness (Loyalty)
• Time on site, content shares, and scroll depth - How users interact and engage across content (Engagement)
• Branded search growth and reach across channels - Indicators of growing brand visibility (Awareness)
• Backlinks, influencer mentions, and community recognition - Signals of authority and credibility (Reputation)

They track these outcomes across multiple touchpoints to understand how content contributes at each point in the journey.

True attribution in a multi-touch environment requires a more holistic approach.

From Panic to Competitive Advantage

This shift toward generative search isn't the end of organic; it's the beginning of a more strategic, more accountable era. Teams that succeed won’t be the ones chasing the most clicks. They’ll be the ones focused on influence, intent, and measurable business outcomes.

The marketers who adapt to this reality will outperform those clinging to outdated playbooks. The teams that embrace organic as a modern, multi-channel strategy will capture the next wave of growth while their competitors are still arguing whether SEO is dead.

But to lead in this new era, you need better tools for understanding what’s working.

That’s where we’re headed next.

In the next post in this series, we’ll show you how to track performance in a world of AI Overviews, zero-click searches, and multi-touch influence. We’ll share practical reporting ideas, dashboards, and a new framework for defining success, one rooted in efficient traffic, not just activity.

Want a preview? Check out our article on Efficient Traffic: Measuring Impact Over Activity in the Age of AI.

Ready to Build a More Impactful Organic Strategy?

At Ten Speed, we help B2B companies move beyond vanity metrics and build content strategies that prioritize business impact. 

Whether you need to audit your existing performance or map a smarter path forward, we’ll help you make sense of what’s working—and what’s not—in today’s evolving landscape.

👉 Let’s talk.

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