Marketing
What Is B2A Marketing? How to Market to AI Agents
ChatGPTB2A marketing (business-to-agent marketing) is an approach that makes a brand’s products, services, and credibility signals discoverable, understandable, and trustworthy not only to human buyers but also to AI agents that research, compare suppliers, and make recommendations on their behalf. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 90% of B2B purchases will be mediated by AI agents, with more than $15 trillion in B2B spending flowing through these agents. Announcements from Demandbase, Salesforce, and Visa in October 2026 demonstrate that this transformation is no longer theoretical—it is already taking shape through products and live pilots.
The implication for B2B companies is clear: the first interaction with a buyer will increasingly happen through an AI agent, and that agent needs to be able to “see” your business.
What Is B2A Marketing?
In traditional B2B marketing, the target audience consists of people on the buying committee: procurement managers, technical evaluators, finance executives, and managing directors. B2A marketing adds another layer to this audience: AI agents acting on behalf of buyers.
According to Demandbase’s announcement on October 20, 2026, the B2A model makes a company’s brand and products discoverable, understandable, and trustworthy to AI agents that research suppliers and recommend them to buyers (Demandbase, 2026).
These three principles summarize B2A:
Discoverability: Can an agent find your company when answering a relevant question?
Understandability: Are your product specifications, production capacity, certifications, pricing, and delivery information presented in a format that machines can accurately interpret?
Trustworthiness: Is there sufficient independent evidence, customer references, and up-to-date content for an agent to confidently recommend your company?
What Is the Difference Between B2A, GEO, and SEO?
SEO aims to improve visibility in search engine results for queries entered by human users.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) aims to ensure that a brand is accurately represented in AI-generated answers on platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode.
B2A marketing goes one step further: an agent does not simply generate an answer. It can research suppliers, create shortlists, request quotations, and even execute authorized payments. The objective therefore expands from being mentioned in an answer to being selected during the purchasing process.
Gartner also describes this transition explicitly, suggesting that traditional SEO and pay-per-click advertising will give way to “agent engine optimization,” that products will need to become machine-readable, and that purchasing will increasingly shift toward autonomous machine-to-machine transactions (Gartner, 2026).
Why Now?
1. Demandbase: “Buyers No Longer Start with Search. They Start with an Agent.”
On October 20, 2026, Demandbase announced three new AI agents at its GO conference in New York. One of them, the AEO Agent, monitors how major AI assistants describe and recommend a brand to different members of a buying group. It identifies the sources influencing AI-generated answers, outdated information, and content gaps. The company states that its analysis draws on data covering more than 342 million individuals across 13 million companies. The agent also identifies anonymous AI-referred website traffic at the company and individual levels to support sales follow-up (Demandbase, 2026).
Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol summarized the transformation by explaining that buyers increasingly begin with an agent rather than a search, and those agents influence which brands are discovered or overlooked.
2. Salesforce Hunter: AI Agents Are Also Transforming Sales
The seller side is changing as well. At Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce introduced Hunter, an outbound sales agent. Hunter learns successful patterns from top-performing sales representatives, researches and prioritizes prospects, prepares personalized outreach messages, and advances opportunities through the proposal and forecasting stages.
Customer-facing actions may require sales representative approval according to company-defined rules, and every action is recorded (Salesforce, 2026a). Hunter is currently in the pilot stage, with general availability planned for November 2026 (Salesforce Ben, 2026). ZoomInfo, Demandbase, and Apollo were announced as Hunter’s flagship data partners (DestinationCRM, 2026).
During the same week, Salesforce also detailed its Agent Context Engine, which enables agents operating across different platforms to share the same governed customer context (Salesforce, 2026b).
3. Visa, BILL, and Billtrust: AI Agents Can Now Make Payments
The development that moves B2A beyond a marketing trend and toward commercial reality is happening in payments.
On October 20, 2026, Visa, BILL, and Billtrust launched the first live pilot in which authorized AI agents could complete payments for buyer-approved supplier invoices through supplier portals.
In the pilot, agents are identified and verified through the Visa Trusted Agent Protocol. Tokenized payment credentials are used instead of shared portal passwords. Importantly, the agent does not independently decide whether to make a payment; it only executes payments previously approved by the buyer (Visa, 2026).
Together, these developments demonstrate how AI agents are becoming involved throughout the B2B purchasing journey, from research and shortlisting to communication and payment.
How Do AI Agents Select a Supplier?
Although the decision-making logic of AI agents differs across platforms, publicly available findings point to several common factors.
Freshness Can Be a Deciding Factor
An analysis published in Search Engine Journal on October 21, 2026, observed that ChatGPT requested freshness windows in its background search queries depending on the query type. For commercial comparison queries such as “best software,” a 30-day window was observed (Technical SEO News, 2026).
Researchers emphasized that these patterns change frequently and should be interpreted as a snapshot rather than a permanent rule. Nevertheless, the practical implication is significant: product and comparison pages that have not been updated for a long time may be less likely to appear among the sources an agent evaluates.
Structured and Machine-Readable Information
As Gartner emphasizes, products need to be machine-readable (Gartner, 2026).
If technical specifications are locked inside PDF catalogs, or if pricing and minimum order information are unavailable, an agent may be unable to include your company in a meaningful supplier comparison.
Independent Evidence and Consistency
AI agents compile their answers from multiple sources.
If your website, LinkedIn page, industry directories, and media coverage contain conflicting information, an agent may be less likely to recommend your business.
Demandbase’s AEO Agent is designed to address precisely this challenge by monitoring the sources influencing AI-generated answers and identifying outdated information.
Trusted Identity and Control
As demonstrated by the Visa pilot, trust is fundamental to the agent economy: verified agent identities, clearly defined authorization boundaries, and traceable transactions.
Suppliers that are prepared to work with AI agents will be those capable of adapting to this trust infrastructure.
What Does B2A Marketing Mean for Businesses?
For B2B companies in Türkiye, particularly exporting manufacturers and technology companies, B2A has three practical implications:
The first interaction becomes invisible. When a procurement manager in Germany asks an AI assistant to research suppliers, a shortlist may be created without the buyer ever visiting your website. If your company is not included, you may never enter the competitive evaluation process.
Marketing and sales data must speak the same language. Agents read information about your business while seller-side agents research potential customers. Fragmented CRM data, outdated website content, and inconsistent messaging can create missed opportunities on both sides.
Human oversight remains a strategic advantage. In both Salesforce Hunter and the Visa pilot, customer-facing actions and financial transactions operate within predefined rules and approval mechanisms. The companies best positioned to succeed will not be those that automate without limits, but those that manage automation with appropriate controls.
B2A Readiness Plan for B2B Companies: 6 Steps
1. Measure How AI Systems Perceive Your Brand
Identify 30–50 questions your target customers might ask, such as “ISO-certified industrial pump manufacturers in Türkiye” or “packaging suppliers exporting to Europe.”
Test these queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. Record how your brand is represented and where competitors appear more prominently.
2. Make Your Product and Service Information Machine-Readable
Publish technical specifications, production capacities, certifications, delivery times, and service details on HTML pages using clear headings and structured tables.
Avoid keeping critical information exclusively in PDFs or images, and implement appropriate schema markup.
3. Create and Maintain Decision-Support Content
AI agents perform comparisons.
Develop content addressing questions such as “What is the difference between X and Y?”, “How do you choose the right solution?”, and “How is the cost calculated?”
Keep your commercial pages updated through meaningful content revisions rather than superficial date changes.
4. Strengthen Independent Credibility Signals
Customer case studies, industry media coverage, directory listings, regular expert content on LinkedIn, and verifiable certifications can help AI agents assess your company’s credibility.
Ensure that your business information remains consistent across all channels.
5. Identify and Convert AI-Referred Traffic
Track visitors arriving from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar platforms separately in your analytics.
These visitors may already be in advanced stages of their research. Use visitor identification and intelligent conversion mechanisms to guide relevant prospects toward sales conversations.
6. Introduce Controlled AI Agents into Your Own Sales Processes
As buyers increasingly use AI agents, relying entirely on manual sales processes can create operational disadvantages.
Implement AI-powered systems for prospect research, ideal customer profile (ICP) filtering, and personalized initial outreach. Maintain human approval mechanisms and clearly defined rules for customer-facing communications.
How Can Nera Innovations Help You Prepare for B2A Marketing?
B2A (Business to Agent) marketing requires brands to reach not only human buyers but also the AI agents supporting their research and decision-making processes.
Successfully navigating this transformation requires more than simply adopting AI tools. Your brand must be discoverable, understandable, and trustworthy to AI systems, while also being capable of converting the resulting interest into real business opportunities.
At Nera Innovations, we help brands adapt to this new era across three key areas.
1. We Improve Your Brand’s Visibility in AI-Powered Search
When a potential customer uses ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to research solution providers in your industry, does your brand appear? Can AI systems accurately understand and describe your products and services?
Through our Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) service, we analyze your brand’s existing visibility across more than 50 queries relevant to your target audience, evaluate where your competitors are gaining visibility, and assess your website’s readiness for AI-powered search systems using a checklist of more than 100 criteria.
Our goal is not simply to improve search visibility, but to ensure your brand is associated with the right questions, relevant areas of expertise, and trustworthy information.
To understand your website’s current position, you can run an initial assessment in just 30 seconds using our free GEO Analyzer.
2. We Help You Reach New B2B Customers with AI-Powered Systems
The AI transformation is changing not only how customers discover businesses, but also how companies identify and reach new customers.
With Nera’s AI Sales Assistant approach, we bring together the entire sales development process—from defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) and researching target companies and decision-makers to personalized LinkedIn and email outreach and evaluating incoming responses.
By designing AI-powered workflows with human oversight, we aim to help sales teams spend less time on manual research and repetitive follow-up tasks and more time on qualified customer conversations and genuine sales opportunities.
3. We Turn Digital Visibility into Measurable Customer Opportunities
Being discovered through AI-powered search is an important starting point. However, a visitor reaching your website does not automatically translate into a new customer.
At Nera, we develop conversion optimization systems that analyze visitor behavior, deliver personalized interactions at the right moments, and guide potential customers toward contact or quotation requests.
Through intelligent pop-ups, behavior-based triggers, CRM integrations, and relevant remarketing scenarios, we aim to turn interest generated through digital channels into trackable and measurable sales opportunities.
Prepare Your Brand for the New Customer Journey in the AI Era
Transitioning to B2A marketing is not simply about opening another communication channel. It means rethinking the entire customer journey, from brand discovery and evaluation to initial engagement and sales opportunities.
With Nera Innovations, you can analyze your brand’s current position in AI-powered search, improve your customer acquisition processes, and develop a roadmap to transform digital visibility into measurable growth opportunities.
In Summary: Does Your Buyer’s AI Agent Know Your Brand?
The defining question in the new era of B2B purchasing is no longer simply, “Can my customers find me on Google?” It is also, “Does my customer’s AI agent know, understand, and recommend my business?”
Gartner’s forecast and the concrete product announcements and live pilots from October 2026 suggest that the answer could directly influence market share over the next two years.
Companies that act early will be better positioned to establish a lasting presence on AI agents’ supplier shortlists.
