Your website traffic may be falling. That doesn't mean customers stopped researching. It means the research moved elsewhere.
Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity to compare products and recommend solutions, getting one synthesized answer instead of a list of links. For home improvement and building products manufacturers, that changes what visibility means. Ranking for a keyword is no longer enough. Your product information has to be legible to machines, your claims need sources those machines trust, and your brand has to appear consistently across the retailers, trade media, and customers AI systems draw on. Reputation is the new ranking.
For years, marketers watched demand through a simple lens: someone searched, Google returned links, the buyer clicked. AI search breaks that chain. A buyer can now ask which insulation meets coastal building code and get an answer without visiting most of the sites that supplied it.
The shift is documented. Traditional B2B organic traffic fell an average of 34% between 2024 and 2025, and most searches now end without a click to any website. Seventy-three percent of B2B buyers use AI tools for vendor research, yet the median brand appears in just 3% of relevant AI Overviews.
roofing, adhesives, and power tools.
Three terms describe the discovery stack. SEO helps search engines find and rank your pages. AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, structures information so an engine can pull a direct answer to a specific question. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, helps AI systems understand your brand, retrieve evidence, and cite it in a response. These are layers of one system, not competing strategies, and your brand wins when evidence on durability, code compliance, warranty, and price is easy for a machine to retrieve and verify. New metrics matter alongside rankings: how often you're mentioned in AI answers, which sources get cited, and which competitors show up when you don't.
Third-party sources supply most of the citations AI systems draw on; owned brand sites supply a much smaller share. That reframes the value of PR, social media, and events. A trade article quoting your engineer, an installation video, or a customer review is not just awareness; it is evidence your brand exists, has expertise, and can back a claim.
AI engines lean heavily on earned, third-party validation over owned brand content.
Manufacturer expertise often lives inside PDFs: specifications, installation guides, compliance documents. Those work for downloading and printing, less well as the only place an AI system can find your facts. Move critical specs onto product pages as real HTML tables instead.
Structured data helps too. JSON-LD is code that labels a page's content so a machine can identify a product, dimension, or FAQ. An llms.txt file is a simple directory pointing AI systems toward your most authoritative resources, like a signpost for machines. Structure alone isn't enough. Owned content gains measurable visibility from expert quotations (roughly a 41% lift), concrete statistics (32% to 37%), and authoritative citations (30% to 40%). Replace “industry-leading performance” with the tested number, and name the engineer, not anonymous expertise.
Expert quotations, hard numbers, and credible citations each measurably lift AI visibility.
Find out what AI already says about you: run the questions customers actually ask across major AI tools, and note whether your brand appears. Fix what machines can't read: move key specifications and certifications out of PDFs into structured web content. Build the evidence around it: audit trade coverage, retailer listings, and reviews for the same product story. None of this is isolated; it takes marketing, e-commerce, product, and channel teams working from the same facts.
Your website's job hasn't disappeared; it has changed. It must operate as a source of structured, verifiable product truth, while your wider ecosystem of retailers, experts, and customers supplies the outside evidence that backs it up. The brands that win will be easiest to understand, verify, and recommend, well before the click.
To learn more, Register for our webinar on Thursday, October 15, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET to hear Jess Van Wagenen, SVP Client Strategy at Adcom, and Ken Holmes, Leader, Integrated Marketing, North America at Rheem, break down what AI search has changed for home improvement and building products manufacturers. You will learn how answer engines decide which brands to cite, and why the pivot from keyword tracking to AI optimization comes down to machine-legible data, protected retail pricing, and third-party trust signals.
This article was written by Adcom, a HIRI Strategic Partner.
Adcom is a full-service marketing and communications agency specializing in the home improvement, building products, and construction industries. We help brands connect with contractors, dealers, distributors, and end consumers through strategic marketing programs that drive measurable results. Our deep vertical expertise makes us a trusted partner for companies looking to grow their share in the home improvement and building products space.