Business To Machine (B2M) Marketing

The Most Important Audience You’re Completely Ignoring

About seven years ago, Chris and I sat down and tried to work through an idea that was bugging us. We’d been thinking about audience segmentation — B2B, B2C, the usual suspects — and we kept coming back to this thing that didn’t have a name yet. There was another audience in the mix that nobody was talking about. Not a person. Not a business. A machine.

We called it B2M. Business to machine.

The concept was simple: if you’re doing anything in the digital space, there is an algorithmic layer between you and your audience. Google’s algorithm decides if your content shows up in search. Facebook’s algorithm decides if your post gets seen. Your email provider’s spam filter decides if your message even lands. Before a human ever sees what you’ve made, a machine has already decided whether it’s worth showing.

That was 2019. We talked about it, wrote about it, and then watched the rest of the marketing world continue to ignore it entirely.

Here’s the thing. Seven years later, B2M isn’t just a concept anymore. It’s the whole game.

GEO Is B2M, Fully Grown

If you’ve been hearing about GEO — Generative Engine Optimization, or whatever we’re all going to agree to call it eventually — and you’re thinking, “Great, another thing I have to panic about,” I want you to take a breath.

You don’t need to panic. But you do need to pay attention.

So here’s what’s actually happening. When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude a question — like “who’s a good marketing analytics consultant?” or “what tools should I use for AI readiness?” — the large language model does a few things. First, it checks what it already knows from its training data. Then, depending on the setup, it runs web searches to fill in gaps. Then it synthesizes all of that into an answer.

If the model doesn’t know you exist, it’s not going to search for you. And if it’s not searching for you, you’re not showing up in the answer. Period.

This is B2M. It’s the same concept Chris and I were talking about seven years ago, except now the machine isn’t just a gatekeeper deciding whether to show your blog post in a search result. The machine IS the search result. It’s answering the question directly, and if you’re not part of its knowledge, you’re invisible.

You Have a New Audience. Treat It Like One.

On this week’s episode of In-Ear Insights, Chris and I dug into this. And one of the things I keep coming back to is that GEO is not a brand new strategy. It’s SEO plus. The core tenets of good SEO still matter — technical, on-site, off-site. You still need a functioning website. You still need good content. You still need people linking to you and talking about you.

But now you also have this additional segment of your audience that you need to cater to. The machines.

And they need different things than humans do. They need machine-friendly content — structured descriptions of who you are, what you do, what problems you solve. Not polished marketing copy. Not clever taglines. Clear, direct, keyword-rich information that a model can consume and say, “Oh, this is for me. I’m going to take this in.”

Think about it this way: you already know how to segment your audience. You know B2B looks different from B2C. Different messaging, different channels, different content. B2M is no different. It’s another segment with its own needs, its own preferences, and its own decision-making process. The difference is that this segment decides whether all your other segments ever see you in the first place.

Where to Start (If You Can Only Do Two Things)

I know. It’s a lot. So let me give you the practical version, because I’m not going to leave you hanging.

If you have limited bandwidth — and who doesn’t — here are the two things I would start with.

First, YouTube. Google still owns the majority of search, and YouTube is part of that ecosystem. If you’re already creating video content, great. But here’s the part people miss: the transcript and description matter more than the video itself for B2M purposes. Include a machine-friendly version of your content in the description. Who you are, what you do, what this video is about, stuffed with your keywords and services. It doesn’t have to be beautifully written prose. It’s not for a human. It’s for the machine.

Second, your own website. Look at your About page, your services pages, your product descriptions. Is there enough clear, structured information for a machine to understand what you do and why you’re credible? Maybe it’s adding a section to each page — almost like a footer — that’s written specifically for machine consumption. Talk to your IT team and make sure you’re not blocking AI crawlers. (True story: we had a client whose IT team had been blocking AI crawlers for over a year because they were worried about AI training on their content. They had effectively made themselves invisible to Gemini. That’s really, really bad.)

If you can do those two things, you’re ahead of most companies right now. And that’s not me being dramatic — that’s me being honest about where the market is.

The Part Nobody Wants to Hear

Here’s what I know is going to come up: “But Katie, if AI just gives people the answer, they’ll never come to my website.”

There’s some truth to that. If Gemini says “Trust Insights is the best management consulting firm for AI implementation,” that person might not click through. We don’t see that click. But we will see it downstream — in direct traffic, in referral traffic, in someone who remembers our name because a machine told them about us. It’s basically digital word of mouth. I don’t see the conversation you have with your dog about us (although I’d like to think it’s a good one), but it’s happening, and it shows up later.

And if you still care about driving actual traffic? Make interactive content. Give people a reason to not be satisfied with the AI summary. The more you create things that can’t be easily summarized — tools, assessments, interactive experiences — the more reason people have to actually visit your site. New tech doesn’t solve old problems. You still have to give people a reason to show up.

So What Now?

If you’re sitting there thinking, “We’ve been doing SEO for years, we should be fine” — maybe. But when’s the last time you thought about whether a machine knows you exist? Not whether a machine can find your website. Whether it knows you. Whether it would recommend you. Whether it even has you in its training data.

That’s the question now. And it’s the same question Chris and I were asking seven years ago, just with higher stakes.

If you want to dig into this more, we’re doing a live GEO webinar on April 10th where Chris and I walk through exactly how this works — the three phases of GEO, what to do about each one, and how to stop being invisible to the machines that are now answering your customers’ questions. Come join us. And if you want to talk it through before then, come find us in our free Slack group at trustinsights.ai/analyticsformarketers. Over 4,500 marketers are in there asking and answering questions every day.

I could be wrong about a lot of things. But I don’t think I’m wrong about this one — and I’ve had seven years to think about it.

Are you catering to your B2M audience segment? Reply to this email or join the conversation in our Free Slack community, Analytics for Marketers!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.