Win the AI Answer, Not Just the Citations with Tim Sanders, Chief Innovation Officer at G2 - Ep 85

Tim Sanders is the Chief Innovation Officer at G2 and a New York Times best-selling author of five books, including Love is the Killer App and Dealstorming.

Tim joins Co-Host Craig Rosenberg to discuss why "being cited" by ChatGPT and other LLMs means almost nothing compared to "winning the answer", which self-inflicted AI visibility mistakes that B2B marketers are making, and how to overcome the “Prompt Problem” by better understanding your customers.

Also, Craig discusses his children’s taste in music, Matt is strangely absent, and Producer Sam briefly steers things down an extremely tactical rabbit hole for his own edification.

Critical Takeaways

• Audit every place you block AI crawlers, immediately. G2 blocked robot crawling for years before realizing the "big check" they thought they were protecting was worth less than the AI visibility they were sacrificing. Check every robots.txt block to see if the crawl-blocking upside actually outweighs the lost AI citation and recommendation value.
• Being cited by AI isn't the same as being recommended. In one example of asking an LLM for a product recommendation, Adobe was cited by the AI 13 times, but it did not make the final shortlist. Marketers should track whether their brand appears in the final "these are the three vendors" recommendation, not just whether they show up somewhere in the response.
• Unblock and re-platform gated content that models can't read. G2 learned models don't read PDFs or JavaScript-rendered pages during retrieval, only flat HTML. Audit your highest-value content (reports, comparison guides) and republish it in crawlable HTML instead of gated PDFs if AI visibility matters more than the lead-gen capture.
• Treat LLM relations as a new function, not a subset of SEO or PR. LLMs are now bigger influencers than traditional analysts. Because of this, G2, for example, explicitly unblocked Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp after acquiring them from Gartner to capture this. GTM leaders should assign explicit ownership of "AI visibility" the way they already own analyst relations.
• Write answer-shaped content, not message-shaped content. Content structured as problem-solution-feature-benefit-CTA reads as "vendor speak" and lowers model confidence, while FAQ-style, conversational content that mirrors real Reddit-thread discussions earns more citations. Marketing teams should rewrite cornerstone content to directly resolve open questions in a natural, human tone rather than a sales pitch structure.
• Stop relying on web traffic as a north-star metric. With chat-driven buyers compressing research into a single prompt, overall website traffic will fall even as pipeline quality rises. Shift dashboards from sessions/pageviews to revenue attribution and closing ratio by traffic source.

Chapters

00:00 - Episode Preview

03:11 - Introducing Tim Sanders, Chief Innovation Officer at G2

10:00 - Two Stories about Marketing Stunts and The World Series of Poker Finals

19:01 - Answer Engine Optimization & Content Strategy in the AI Age

26:32 - Optimizing Your YouTube Videos for AI LLMs to Index & Cite Your Content

28:51 - Seeding Branded Content into Reddit to Influence the Outputs of LLMs

36:59 - Does Your Company Website Still Matter in the AI Age?

43:58 - The Misaligned Prompt Problem Hurting Your Understanding of Customers & Prospects

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Epic Quotes

• “You have to get away from the addiction that traffic is a meaningful metric. It's not. Pipeline is the only metric that matters.” - Tim Sanders

Connect with Tim

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanderssays/
• G2 Website: https://www.g2.com/
• Love Is the Killer App by Tim Sanders: https://timsanders.com/love-is-the-killer-app/
• Website: https://timsanders.com/

Shoutouts

• On The Edge by Nate Silver: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529280/on-the-edge-by-nate-silver/
• Josh Blyskal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-blyskal/
• JH Scherck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhtscherck/

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