How to influence construction buyers in an AI world

The great discovery shift - Why construction marketing is entering a new era

When KHL first came into existence more than 35 years ago, construction marketing followed a relatively predictable formula. Manufacturers launched new products at major exhibitions, advertised in industry publications and produced brochures and specification sheets.

Then, as everyone moved online, marketers had to rapidly adapt. Learning SEO, creating more content, managing various ad platforms and realising that going viral was a good thing. Email campaigns, videos, webinars, and whitepapers all had to be produced with the goal of driving potential customers to the brand website, where they’d be converted into leads and then sales.

And now, it’s all change again.

The reasonably predictable behaviour of someone researching on Google, coming to a website, converting into a lead, then a sale has been blown apart by AI. And if that wasn’t enough, social media companies want users to stay within their platforms, more and more onsite and email activity is hidden from us due to the increase in both bots and data privacy, and buyer journeys are as murky and opaque as they ever have been.

An equipment buyer researching a new excavator might begin by reading an article from a trusted industry publication. They may then search Google for technical specifications, ask an AI assistant to compare competing models, watch demonstration videos on YouTube, discuss the topic on LinkedIn, attend a webinar, speak with colleagues and only then visit a manufacturer’s website.

Along with these changes, construction buyers are under increasing pressure to make the correct purchases, opting for options that they see as risk-free and offer excellent lifetime value, while abiding by new regulations.

The result is what we believe is the biggest change to construction marketing since the arrival of the internet. It is no longer enough to drive people to your website.

You need to be creating excellent content that buyers discover, trust and engage with wherever they are choosing to do their research.

The Modern Construction Buyer

At KHL we’re continually listening to our audience – what are they researching? What are they asking? What do they need to know to help them do their jobs better?

With the backdrop of global uncertainty, tight deadlines and budgets, construction buyers are feeling the pressure of their decisions like never before. Construction leaders stay awake at night worrying about machine uptime, reliability and the lifetime value of the equipment that they sign off on.

On top of that purchasing timeframes are short, with the majority of buyers dedicating only 1 – 3 months to research, decisions and sign off. This means that most buyers will have already sought answers to questions before entering the formal procurement process, whether that is through AI, industry media, or talking with colleagues.

Construction is inherently a risky business. Construction leaders spend a lot of resource on reducing risk throughout their operations and through their procurement. They need to know that equipment is reliable and won’t let them down in the middle of a major project.

The latest tech being built into equipment is, of course, of interest to construction buyers as they look for ways to improve efficiency, meet emissions targets and fast track operator training to combat the labour shortage. But the big questions being raised before and during procurement are:

• Is this product reliable?
• How much downtime will there be if something breaks?
• Is it a solid long term investment?

These are the questions that suppliers need to answer in the channels where buyers are researching. You can go into more detail here.

Where are we now?

With the rapid rate of change, it is becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to know where they should be focussing, what they should be investing in, and which platforms should be prioritised.

The one channel that marketers get asked the most about right now is AI, but do we know how effective is for brands and do we know how to properly use the channel? Has anyone truly mastered AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation, or GEO – Generative Engine Optimisation for those who don’t get too confused by using geo for geography) yet?

As marketers, we will obviously answer “it depends” and this is likely a very accurate answer for now.

Similarweb recently published an in-depth report: 2026 Generative AI Landscape: The Evolution of AI Search. You can download the full report here and it is well worth a read for any marketers that are tasked with including AEO in their strategy.

The report makes it very clear that AI is the internet’s fastest growing discovery channel, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone in the industry. However, what is perhaps more surprising is that where marketers should be focussing is much more nuanced than the AI-hype would have you believe.

We’ll dig a little deeper into the report and take a look at current AEO best practice.

How influential is AI?

According to the Similarweb report, average monthly unique visitors for desktop and mobile web has grown by 57% in a year to 0.65billion. These are stats we can’t ignore. AI is growing, and growing fast, with a substantial customer base. But (and this is a big but) search also grew by 2%, to a whopping 3.3billion, so staggeringly more popular than AI, and still growing. Social also grew by 7% to 2.4billion.

One major statistic that KHL has a vested interest in highlighting is that news sites, although struggling in the post-click era, are still 3 times as popular as AI chatbots. So, if your marketing department is throwing more resource into AEO than into editorial and partnerships with media, you should be rethinking this strategy.

It is not enough to just know the numbers of a channel. Like all good marketers, we need to understand more about the audience to know if they are relevant.

When Chatgpt first launched in the dim and distant past of 2022, it was overwhelmingly a young audience using it. Fast forward to 2026 and it is now actually decreasing in popularity with the younger generations and increasing with older ones. A more balanced and mature age range suggests that AI is not just a whim of the young (6-7, anyone?) but is now an established part of people’s personal and professional lives and adoption will increase.

AI and the buyer journey

With the increase of chatbot usage teamed with the coverage and discussion about them, many people could assume that a typical buyer journey now starts and ends with ChatGPT.

I’m not going to pretend that ChatGPT plays no part in the buyer journey, but we do need to approach it with caution. In the Similarweb report they highlight that 95% of ChatGPT users also use Google. This means that people are including AI in their journeys, not replacing any channels.

What we used to consider to be a neat marketing funnel is now getting messier than ever, as a user might ask ChatGPT a passing thought, go away and Google some of the answers for more clarity, get distracted and browse through Facebook, go to the office and open a newsletter, check a few news stories, chat to a colleague, and only then start thinking about actual procurement, after all the different points of influence.

As marketers we need to ensure our brands are present and effective at each stage of the buyer journey.

AEO best practice

Although the new skill of AEO is likely to change rapidly, there are already some best practices that you can follow for chatbots to talk positively and regularly about your brand, and luckily, most of it you should either be doing already. If you’re not, then adding it to your work will have positive effects beyond AI.

Content structure

For your owned media, AI bots like clear content structure, much like the Google bots that read and rank your content in traditional SEO. Rather than understanding what they’re saying they have learned natural language through patterns, so your content needs to be clear, concise and use clean sentence structure.

If you write for SEO, you won’t have to change much about how you structure content. Some things that you can add that will help are question and answer style subheadings and paragraphs, similar to a question that someone might type into a chatbot. FAQ sections are also a clear way of helping AI bots to get a clear picture about your brand and brand messaging.

Don’t be afraid to include summaries at either the start or end of long content, as this works for both bots and time poor people.

As with SEO, interlinking articles, category or pillar pages help bots discover more of your content and to analyse it correctly.

Authority

The bots have the entire internet to crawl and choose from when answering queries. So how do you make them pick your brand?

For both AEO and SEO brand mentions in reputable sites are the best way to gain regular AI citations. If your brand is mentioned regularly alongside the topics that you want to be associated with, then every time the bots crawl the web, they will associate your brand with that topic and become more likely to include it in citations.

You don’t need to include a link back to your website any more for brand mentions to be effective. In fact, research by Ahrefs shows that mentions carry more authority than back links.

What does this mean for marketers?

In order to succeed in the new world of AI citations we need to go back to some good old-fashioned PR. For B2B industries such as construction, working with industry publications to ensure you have regular editorial mentions and partner content opportunities is a sure-fire way to increase AI citations. The more regularly your brand is mentioned alongside relevant topics, the more the AI bots will associate your brand with that topic.

For construction marketers this is particularly important as our own research showed that construction buyers value industry media as highly as recommendations from colleagues when making purchasing decisions.

How can KHL help construction marketers?

With our 500,000 plus audience of construction buyers and purchase influencers, along with our 37-year history and strong global position, KHL is in the perfect position to help construction marketers. By working with us you will not only help your AEO efforts but also influence our audience directly.

Our editors are always keen to receive your news and press releases and cover developments in the industry. You can download media kits which will tell you which editorial features are coming up. By ensuring you have a steady stream of news and press releases, you will increase the number of brand mentions that influence responses in LLMs.

You can also choose to work with KHL Content Studio. By partnering with our content studio, one of our journalists will create compelling content for your brand that will appear natively across our websites and newsletters. Although marked as Partner Content to differentiate it from our independent editorial, due to it being native content, the AI bots treat it the same as all our other editorial. This gives you the opportunity to put your brand messaging in front of the AI bots, as well as guaranteed results with our audience.

Other recommended sources

As well as working with trusted industry news publications, there are other sources recommended for getting noticed by AI and Google bots.

Comparison and review sites

Comparison and review sites are easy for AI bots to understand and often cited in both chatbots and Google’s AI responses. It is worth keeping up to date with where you and your competitors are mentioned and looking for opportunities for more positive coverage.

YouTube

Video content is still increasing in popularity and both Google and dedicated Chatbots use YouTube as a source of information and as recommended links for further information. Having a strong video strategy will help you with AEO and give you content to repurpose across other social media.

A note on measurement

When we put lots of effort into something, it’s nice to know if it’s paying off. Unfortunately, with AEO this is where things get a little tricky. Some research by Rand Fishkin showed that AI answers vary so greatly, that trying to track is close to impossible. It is worth reading his in-depth study here, so you have some ammunition when asked “how do we rank in AI?”

There are tools that can help you get some idea, but truthfully, we may never know what ChatGPT is saying about our brand in the millions of conversations that are going on. This is something that is unnerving for marketers, as we are used to providing direct results for all activity. However, it is also quite freeing, as there are some solid principles to AEO, such as content structure and PR that will ensure your marketing is an all-round success story.

Conclusions

Reaching construction buyers in an AI world requires marketers to be more flexible and confident than ever before. We will struggle more and more to directly attribute the work we do to the positive results we’re seeing. But as construction buyers are under increasing pressure to make the right choices, the best marketing strategy for this new era is to simply ensure you are providing the right information to the right audience in a format that both humans and bots can easily understand. Be very clear on what you want to say, then say it clearly on the channels that are relevant to your audience.