Buyers increasingly start research with AI chatbots, and unbranded how-to questions can lead ChatGPT to select a vendor when no brand is named, according to the article. In a lead nurturing test, a prompt asking how to set up automated lead nurturing workflows in a marketing automation platform without naming one led ChatGPT to add HubSpot to both searches it ran and read just two sources: HubSpot’s own workflow guide and a YouTube tutorial on HubSpot, while every other vendor was missing. The article says AI visibility reports typically track a few dozen prompts, mostly keywords rewritten as questions, so how-to questions with no brand name rarely make the list. It also says ChatGPT prompts carry context that keyword tools strip out: Similarweb’s 2025 generative AI data puts the average ChatGPT prompt at about 60 words, against 3.4 for a Google search, and Google’s data from AI Mode’s first year in the U.S. says the average AI Mode search is triple the length of a traditional Search query. SparkToro found 142 people wrote nearly unrelated prompts for one shared task. In G2’s 2026 AI search report, 51% of 1,076 B2B software buyers said they now start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year earlier, and 69% said a chatbot surfaced information that led them to a different vendor than the one they expected.