AI Search is Rewriting the Cleantech Buyer’s Journey — and Many Brands Aren’t Ready

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By Melissa Baldwin

For more than a decade, cleantech marketing has revolved around a steady playbook: rank on Google, drive website traffic, show up at events, and convert clicks to leads.

Today, that playbook must evolve to square with the rapid adoption of AI search. B2B customers are starting their buyer’s journey with AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. They’re asking detailed, conversational questions, comparing vendors, and forming opinions long before they ever click through to a website.

Data from HubSpot suggests that as much as 95% of the B2B buyer’s journey now happens inside AI tools. And that shift has profound implications for how cleantech companies are discovered.

To understand how prepared our sector is for this change, my firm partnered with SEO agency Rampiq to study AI visibility across 100 leading cleantech companies. What we found revealed both serious gaps and a major opportunity.

AI Has Two Brains, and One of Them Doesn’t Remember Your Brand 

Large language models (LLMs) operate with two modes:

1. Memory, based on pre-trained data (the models are trained when a new version comes out, like 3.0 or 4.0)
2. Live search, where they actively scan the web for current information

Because live search is costlier to run, models prefer the energy and compute-saving memory responses whenever possible. That means if your company isn’t well represented in pre-trained knowledge, AI will guess, and potentially misrepresent you entirely.

This is especially risky for startup cleantech companies that lack a long internet history. When an AI doesn’t get a clear understanding of your brand during training, it may misclassify your business, confuse you with competitors, or fail to mention you at all.

If you don’t give clear direction to AI through technical direction on the backend of your site (schema, etc.), it may categorize your company in the wrong bucket. That could mean it’s steering the wrong stakeholders to you, judging you by the wrong criteria, or recommending you for the wrong use cases.

You can’t change what’s already in the current version of an AI model’s memory (e.g., ChatGPT 5.2). But you can influence what it learns the next time it trains the model and how accurately it represents you today when it searches the web.

What 200 AI Audits Revealed About Cleantech Visibility

Using a proprietary tool, we ran 200 AI visibility reports (memory and live) across 100 well-known cleantech brands.

Here are five key takeaways:

First, memory is vague and differentiation appears mostly in live search.

When AI relied on memory, company descriptions were often shallow or inaccurate. When live search was utilized, recent media coverage, accurate competitor lists, and specific claims finally surfaced. The takeaway: You need to be super clear on your website about what you do, who you help, and how you help them.

Second, there is a major citation gap.

Across more than 1,000 citations, we found most mentions came from company-owned channels such as websites or blogs. Far fewer came from earned media or high-authority third-party sites. But this is a missed opportunity, because a  Muck Rack analysis of 1M+ citations across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini found AI overwhelmingly cites non-paid content (94% of links), especially legacy and trade media outlets — suggesting that many cleantech brands are underrepresented where it matters most.

Third, avoid the sea of sameness — find ways to stand out.

Sixty percent of the companies we analyzed shared overlapping taglines with at least one peer. Phrases like “powering a brighter future” could apply to almost everyone in our space. Use unique language to differentiate what you do; numeric proof points are a great way to do this.

Finally, AI values mentions more than backlinks.

Traditional SEO rewards backlinks. AI rewards mentions where your company is being talked about by others. A well placed trade article can influence AI answers more than a perfectly optimized landing page. AI cares less about who links to your site and more about who talks about you, where, and what they say.

SEO Isn’t Dead, But Visibility Has Changed

AI search doesn’t eliminate SEO, it reshapes it.

Companies are seeing fewer website clicks because the answer is available on top of search results. But, when someone does click through to your website, those clicks are more valuable because that person is further along in their buyer’s journey when they arrive.

AI also levels the playing field. Smaller, focused companies can surface as “best answers” in AI tools even if they don’t dominate Google rankings as long as their story is well documented by trusted third parties.

A Practical Framework to Increase AI Visibility: PACT

To make AI visibility actionable, I’ve created a simple framework: PACT

P – Proof

Earn credibility through PR to generate media coverage, guest articles, and third-party mentions. AI trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.

A – Audit

Quarterly, ask multiple AI tools to describe your company, products, and competitors. Look for inaccuracies, gaps, or confusion and fix them through content and PR.

C – Clarify

Escape the sea of sameness. Use specific, measurable proof points in your tagline and “About” copy. Quantifiable outcomes help both buyers and bots understand why you’re different. Be very clear about who you help and how you help them.

T – Tune

Optimize the technical backend of your website for AI readability with clear structure, schema markup, and FAQs. You can build your site in a way that makes it easier for chatbots to read, discover, and understand your content.

The Bottom Line

AI is a game-changer. Data centers are fueling demand for electricity, creating new market opportunities for companies that produce power. And, AI tools are changing the rules of the game when it comes to business visibility and marketplace dynamics.  

The brands that win in this next phase won’t abandon SEO, they’ll expand beyond it, aligning PR, content, and technical strategy around how AI actually works. 

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Melissa Baldwin is the senior vice president of Tigercomm, a PR and marketing communications agency focused exclusively on the energy and cleantech sector.