Your next B2B buyer probably will not start on Google. They will open ChatGPT, describe their problem, and ask the assistant to name and compare the vendors worth their time, often before they visit a single website or talk to a sales rep. Around 72 percent of B2B software buyers now use ChatGPT during vendor evaluation, and the two things they ask it to do most are generate a vendor list and compare features. If your brand is one of the two or three names the assistant returns, you are in the deal. If it is not, you never even know the conversation happened. Here are the 11 prompts buyers actually type, what each reveals, and exactly how to get named in the answer.

Quick Answer

B2B buyers use a predictable set of prompts to build vendor shortlists in ChatGPT: category best-of prompts (best [category] tools), fit prompts (best [category] for [industry or size]), competitor prompts (alternatives to X, X vs Y), use-case prompts, budget prompts, feature and integration prompts, social-proof prompts (is X any good), and an explicit shortlist-builder prompt. To be named in the answers, you need a clear, factual, well-structured presence for your category, strong third-party validation (reviews, comparisons, mentions on sources the model trusts), and consistent entity signals so the model is confident about who you are and what you do.

Why the prompt is the new keyword

For twenty years, being found meant ranking for keywords, short, decontextualised strings a searcher typed into a box and then sifted through ten blue links. AI-assisted buying breaks that model. A buyer now writes a full sentence that carries their industry, their company size, their constraint and their intent all at once, and the assistant responds not with ten links to sift but with a short, opinionated shortlist and a reason for each name. The buyer treats that shortlist as a starting point and moves straight to evaluating the names on it. The consequence is stark: the competition is no longer for a ranking position you can see in a tool, it is for a mention inside an answer you may never observe. Understanding the exact prompts buyers use is the closest thing to keyword research in this new world, because each prompt is a distinct moment where you are either named or you are not. The eleven below are the ones that show up again and again in how B2B buyers actually research, grouped from broadest to most specific.

The 11 prompts B2B buyers use to shortlist vendors

1. What are the best [category] tools?

This is the broadest and most common opening move: the buyer names their category and asks for the best options. The assistant answers with a handful of names it considers category leaders, usually the brands with the strongest, most consistent representation across the sources it trusts. This prompt rewards entity authority above all: the brands that own a clear, widely-echoed identity as a leader in the category get named, and everyone else is invisible. To show up, you need a plainly-stated, frequently-reinforced claim to your category, on your own site and, crucially, on the third-party pages the model reads. If a buyer asks for the best tools in your space and you are not returned, nothing else on this list matters yet, because you have not established that you belong in the category conversation at all.

2. Best [category] tools for [industry or company size]?

This is the fit prompt, and it is where specialists beat generalists. A buyer rarely wants the abstract best; they want the best for a mid-market manufacturer, or for an enterprise healthcare team, or for a bootstrapped startup. The assistant narrows its shortlist to vendors it associates with that specific segment. If your content and your third-party presence make your fit for a particular industry or size explicit, you get named here even when you would lose the generic best-of prompt to a bigger brand. This is one of the most winnable prompts for smaller and mid-market vendors: pick the segments you genuinely serve best, and make your association with them unmistakable through case studies, industry-specific pages and mentions in the places buyers in that segment congregate.

3. What are the best alternatives to [competitor]?

The alternatives prompt is pure high-intent bottom-of-funnel demand. A buyer already knows a category leader and is actively looking for other options, often because of price, a missing feature or a bad experience. The assistant returns the vendors it associates with being credible alternatives to that named competitor. This is one of the highest-value prompts in all of B2B, and one of the most earnable: honest alternative content, on your own site and echoed by third-party comparison pages, directly teaches the model that you belong in the answer. If a well-known competitor exists in your space and you are not surfacing as an alternative to them, you are missing warm, in-market buyers who have already decided to look beyond the leader.

4. [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B]

The versus prompt is a buyer in the thick of a decision, weighing two named options. Sometimes you are one of the two; sometimes you want to be the third name the assistant adds as it explains the comparison. Either way, being present in the versus conversation requires that credible, balanced comparison content exists about you, ideally third-party, because the model leans on comparison pages, review sites and community threads to answer this. Vendors who only ever publish self-congratulatory copy and never engage with honest comparison are structurally absent from the single most decision-shaping prompt in the funnel. The move is to make sure fair, factual comparisons of you against the obvious competitors exist and are reachable.

5. Which [category] tool is best for [specific use case]?

Use-case prompts are where product depth wins. A buyer asks not for the best tool overall but for the best tool for a specific job: the best CRM for outbound sales teams, the best analytics tool for product-led growth, the best platform for HIPAA-compliant workflows. The assistant matches vendors to the job based on how clearly each one is associated with solving it. To win use-case prompts, your content has to speak the language of the job, not just the category, with dedicated pages and proof for each meaningful use case you serve. This is another prompt where a focused vendor beats a broad one, because specificity is exactly what the model is trying to match.

6. What is the most affordable [category] solution?

The budget prompt filters for price, and it is one many vendors handle badly by hiding their pricing. When a buyer asks for the most affordable or best-value option, the assistant can only include you if it has a clear sense of your pricing and positioning. Vendors with transparent, easily-readable pricing and clear value framing get represented accurately; vendors who bury pricing behind a talk-to-sales wall are often either omitted or described vaguely. If affordability or value is genuinely part of your positioning, make it explicit and machine-readable, because you cannot be named as the value option if the model cannot tell what you cost or who you are cheaper than.

7. Best [category] tools with [specific feature or integration]?

Feature and integration prompts are extremely high-intent and extremely winnable. A buyer with a hard requirement, must integrate with Salesforce, needs SOC 2, has to support single sign-on, asks specifically for tools that have it. The assistant returns vendors it can confidently associate with that capability. If your integrations, certifications and key features are clearly documented and echoed across the web, you get named for exactly the requirements you meet. This is a prompt where a smaller vendor with one killer integration can beat a larger one that has not made its capabilities legible to the model. Document every meaningful feature and integration plainly, because unstated capabilities are, to an AI, capabilities you do not have.

8. Which [category] vendors do [type of company] use?

This is the social-proof-by-association prompt. Buyers want to know what companies like theirs actually use, and the assistant answers based on the associations it has learned from case studies, customer logos, news, and community discussion. If your notable customers and the segments they represent are visible and repeated across the web, you get named when a similar buyer asks who uses what. This rewards vendors who publicise their customer base and case studies and who earn mentions in industry contexts. If your customers are invisible online, the model cannot connect you to the buyers who most resemble them, and you lose a powerful, trust-laden prompt.

9. What are the pros and cons of [vendor]?

Here the buyer names you directly and asks for a balanced assessment. The answer is assembled from reviews, comparisons, community threads and press, not from your marketing site, which means you have less direct control and more reason to care about your third-party reputation. A vendor with a healthy, honest review presence gets a fair, balanced write-up; a vendor with thin or one-sided coverage gets either a shallow answer or one dominated by a few loud complaints. The move is to build genuine review velocity on the platforms the model reads and to engage honestly where your product is discussed, because this prompt is where your earned reputation, not your owned messaging, does the talking.

10. Is [vendor] any good? / [vendor] reviews

Closely related to the pros-and-cons prompt, this is a buyer late in evaluation doing a final trust check on a specific name, often yours. The assistant summarises sentiment from reviews and discussion. A strong, recent, authentic review presence produces a confident, positive summary; a weak one produces hesitation or a recitation of whatever negativity is loudest. This is the prompt where review recency and volume matter most, and where neglecting your presence on review platforms costs you deals at the finish line. Make earning honest, recent reviews a systematic part of your customer flow, because at this stage the buyer is looking for a reason to trust you, and the model will hand them whatever the web says.

11. Help me build a shortlist of [category] vendors to evaluate

The explicit shortlist-builder prompt is the whole game in one line: the buyer asks the assistant to do the shortlisting for them. The answer is a direct synthesis of everything above, entity authority, fit, alternatives, comparisons, use cases, features, social proof and reputation, distilled into the two, three or five names the buyer will actually evaluate. There is no single trick to win it; you win it by being genuinely well-represented across every prompt that feeds it. That is the uncomfortable, honest truth of AEO: the shortlist prompt is not gamed, it is earned, and it is earned by being the clearest, most trusted, most consistently validated answer to all of the more specific questions that lead up to it.

The pattern behind all 11 prompts

Read the eleven together and a single pattern emerges: the assistant names the vendors it is most confident about, and its confidence comes from consistent, corroborated signals across many sources, not from anything you say about yourself on your own site. Every prompt is answered by triangulating your owned content, your third-party representation, and the strength and clarity of your entity. That is why AEO cannot be faked. There is no meta tag, no schema trick, no prompt you can whisper from the vendor side that inserts you into an answer you have not earned. The brands that win are boringly consistent: they state plainly what they do and who they serve, they make their capabilities and pricing legible, they earn real reviews and honest comparisons, and they show up in the communities and publications their buyers already trust. Do that, and you are named across the whole prompt spectrum. Skip it, and you are absent from the exact conversations where deals now begin.

How to get your brand onto the AI shortlist

The work divides into four durable moves. Own your category definition. Publish a clear, factual, well-structured explanation of what you do and which category you lead or belong to, near the top of pages that are easy for crawlers to read, so the model has an unambiguous source for your identity. Earn third-party validation. Reviews on the platforms your buyers trust, honest comparison and alternative content, mentions in industry media and communities, these are what the model actually reads when it answers most of the eleven prompts, and they matter far more than your own marketing copy. Publish honest comparison and use-case content. Cover the versus, alternatives, use-case and feature prompts directly and fairly, including where competitors are a better fit, because the model rewards balanced, trustworthy coverage and punishes thin self-promotion. Keep your entity consistent. Make sure your name, category, positioning and key facts are the same everywhere the model looks, because confusion about who you are is the quiet reason many vendors never surface. None of this is a growth hack; it is the patient construction of a presence the model can trust, which is exactly what AEO is.

The 11 prompts mapped to the buying stage

The eleven prompts are not random; they track the buyer’s journey, and knowing which stage each belongs to tells you where a gap actually hurts. Early, problem-aware stage: the best [category] tools prompt and the best for [industry or size] prompt. Here the buyer is discovering who even belongs in the conversation, and if you are absent you are eliminated before the race starts. Middle, solution-comparison stage: alternatives to X, X versus Y, the use-case prompt, and the feature or integration prompt. The buyer has a shortlist forming and is testing fit, so absence here means you are considered and then dropped. Late, validation stage: pros and cons of X, is X any good, which companies use X, and the explicit shortlist-builder. The buyer is confirming trust before committing, and weakness here loses deals at the finish line where they are most expensive to lose. Mapping your presence against these three stages shows you not just whether you are visible but where in the funnel your visibility breaks, which is far more actionable than a single overall score. A vendor strong on discovery prompts but weak on validation prompts has a very different problem, and a very different fix, from one that is the reverse.

Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode ask the same questions differently

ChatGPT is where most of this behaviour concentrates, but it is not the only engine your buyers use, and the same eleven intents show up across all of them with important differences. Perplexity, used by a large share of buyers building shortlists, is citation-first: it shows its sources inline, which means the third-party pages it pulls from are visible and directly influenceable, and being present on the sources it cites is the whole game. Google AI Mode and AI Overviews blend the AI answer with traditional ranking signals, so pages that already rank well feed the answer, which rewards vendors with a strong classic-SEO foundation as well as AEO. Gemini leans on Google’s index and knowledge graph, making entity clarity and consistent structured information especially important. The practical takeaway is that you cannot optimise for one engine and assume the rest follow. The underlying intents are identical, the eleven prompts hold everywhere, but the sources each engine trusts and the way each assembles its answer differ enough that you must check your presence on each engine separately rather than treating AI visibility as a single number.

Why being absent is invisible and quietly dangerous

The most dangerous thing about losing these prompts is that you cannot see it happen. When a buyer used to search Google and skip your result, at least the impression registered somewhere. When a buyer asks ChatGPT to shortlist vendors and your name is simply not among the three it returns, there is no impression, no click that did not happen, no line in any analytics dashboard. The deal forms and progresses entirely without you, and the first you might hear of it, if you hear of it at all, is losing to a competitor you were never given the chance to compete against. This invisibility is why so many brands are complacent about AEO: their traffic looks fine, their rankings look fine, and yet a growing share of their market is being shortlisted in conversations they never observe. The only way to make the invisible visible is to run the prompts yourself, regularly, and see what your buyers see. A brand that does this discovers its real competitive position in AI answers, which is frequently very different from, and less flattering than, its position in traditional search. Better to learn that from your own testing than from a lost quarter.

What the prompt shift means for your content strategy

If prompts are the new keywords, your content strategy has to change shape. The old model built a page per keyword and optimised it to rank. The new model builds a genuinely authoritative, honest presence around each buyer intent the eleven prompts represent, and accepts that much of the influence lives off your own site. In practice that means a few concrete shifts. Write for the full-sentence question, not the two-word keyword: structure pages so they answer the specific fit, use-case and comparison questions buyers actually ask. Invest in the assets that feed the middle and late prompts, honest alternative pages, fair comparisons, use-case pages with real proof, and documented features and integrations, because these are what the engines read when the buyer is closest to deciding. Treat third-party presence as part of content strategy, not PR overflow: reviews, community answers and industry mentions now directly shape whether you are named. And measure content success by whether it gets you cited in answers, not only by traffic, because a page that earns you a place in a shortlist prompt can drive pipeline without ever showing a big number in your analytics. The brands that internalise this stop asking what should we rank for and start asking which buyer questions must name us, which is a far more useful question in an AI-first market.

A simple framework: from prompt to presence

To turn all of this into a repeatable routine, use a four-step loop for each of the eleven prompts. Step one, capture the prompt with your real category, competitors and use cases filled in, so you are testing what your buyers actually type. Step two, run it across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode and record the answer verbatim, who is named, how they are described, and which sources are cited where visible. Step three, diagnose the gap: if you are absent, ask why, is it weak category authority, missing comparison content, thin reviews, an unclear entity, or absence from a source the engine trusts. Step four, close it by building the specific asset or presence the diagnosis points to, then re-run the prompt weeks later to confirm movement. Repeated across the eleven prompts and refreshed on a schedule, this loop is the entire discipline of getting shortlisted, and it is exactly the systematic, unglamorous work that separates brands that show up in AI answers from brands that assume they do. It is not a campaign with an end date; it is an ongoing practice, because the engines, the sources and your competitors all keep moving.

The bottom line on AI vendor shortlists

The center of gravity in B2B discovery has moved from the search box to the prompt, and the eleven prompts in this guide are where deals now quietly begin. The brands that win are not the ones with the cleverest growth hack; they are the ones a buyer’s assistant is most confident naming, because their category is clearly stated, their fit is unmistakable, their comparisons are honest, their reviews are real and recent, and their identity is consistent everywhere the model looks. That confidence is earned, prompt by prompt, over time, and it compounds: every honest comparison you publish, every review you earn, every use case you document makes the next answer more likely to include you. Start by running the eleven prompts for your own category today, see where you are named and where you are not, and treat every absence as a specific job to be done. In an AI-first buying world, the shortlist is not a nice-to-have; it is the whole game.

Common mistakes that keep brands off the shortlist

Even brands that take AEO seriously fall into a handful of traps that quietly keep them out of the answers. Talking only about themselves. A site full of we-are-the-best copy and no honest comparison or third-party validation gives the model nothing to corroborate, so it stays cautious and omits the brand from comparison and validation prompts. Hiding the facts the model needs. Burying pricing, leaving integrations undocumented, or being vague about which segment you serve makes you unnamable for the budget, feature and fit prompts, because the assistant cannot assert what it cannot find. Neglecting reviews. Thin or stale review presence produces weak, hesitant answers to the is-it-any-good and pros-and-cons prompts, exactly when the buyer is looking for reassurance. Inconsistent identity. Describing yourself as one thing on your site, another on LinkedIn and a third on review platforms confuses the entity and makes the model unsure who you are, which suppresses you across every prompt. Chasing the engine instead of the buyer. Trying to reverse-engineer a single model’s quirks rather than building genuine authority wastes effort, because the engines change constantly and all reward the same underlying trustworthiness. Assuming good SEO is enough. Ranking well helps, since engines read pages that rank, but traditional SEO alone does not guarantee you are named in a synthesized shortlist; the comparison content, reviews and entity clarity still have to be there. Avoiding these six is most of the battle, because they are the reasons capable brands with real products still fail to show up when their buyers ask the assistant who to consider.

How to know if it is working

Measure it the same way buyers experience it: by prompt. Take the eleven prompts above, fill in your real category, competitors and use cases, and run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode on a regular schedule, recording whether you are named, how you are described, and who is named instead of you. That prompt-level tracking, done by hand or with one of the AEO monitoring tools built for it, tells you exactly which of the eleven you are winning and which you are absent from, and therefore where to focus. Treat each prompt you are missing as a specific, addressable gap rather than a vague visibility problem, because that is what turns AEO from an abstract worry into a concrete to-do list. Over time, the goal is simple and measurable: be one of the names that comes back when your buyer asks the assistant to build their shortlist.

Earning that place across every prompt is deliberate, ongoing work, and it is exactly what our AEO services team does, mapping the prompts your buyers use, finding where you are absent, and building the content, reputation and entity signals that get you named. In an AI-first buying world, the shortlist is the whole game, and this is how you get on it.

Keep reading: how brands win AI search, the most-cited websites in AI answers, the best AEO and GEO tools ranked, and how B2B buyers use AI to choose vendors. To get your brand onto the shortlist, our AEO services team maps your buyers’ prompts and earns the citations for you.

Frequently asked questions

What prompts do B2B buyers actually use in ChatGPT to find vendors?

They cluster into a predictable set: best [category] tools, best [category] for a specific industry or company size, alternatives to a named competitor, competitor A versus competitor B, best tool for a specific use case, most affordable or best-value option, best tools with a specific feature or integration, which vendors a type of company uses, pros and cons of a named vendor, is a vendor any good, and an explicit request to build a shortlist. Each maps to a distinct stage of the buying decision.

Can I control whether ChatGPT recommends my brand?

Not directly, and that is the key mindset shift. You cannot insert yourself from the vendor side with a tag, a trick or a prompt. The assistant names the vendors it is confident about based on consistent signals across the sources it reads, your owned content, third-party reviews and comparisons, and your entity clarity. You influence the answer by being genuinely well-represented across those sources, which is earned over time, not switched on.

How many vendors does ChatGPT usually name in a shortlist?

Typically two to five, often just two or three for a broad best-of or shortlist prompt. That scarcity is exactly why AEO matters so much: unlike a page of ten blue links where being fourth still gets some clicks, an AI shortlist that names three vendors and omits you means the buyer may never learn you exist. The competition is for a very short list, so being clearly the best-represented answer is decisive.

Is optimizing for ChatGPT prompts different from SEO?

It overlaps but is not identical. Traditional SEO and AEO share the same foundations, crawlable, authoritative, well-structured content and genuine external validation, and pages that already rank well feed the AI engines. The difference is that AEO optimizes for being named inside a synthesized answer to a full-sentence prompt rather than ranking for a short keyword, which puts far more weight on third-party representation, honest comparison content and entity consistency than classic keyword SEO does.

Which matters more for AI shortlists, my website or third-party sources?

Both matter, but for most of the eleven prompts third-party sources do the heavy lifting. Your own site establishes your category, positioning and facts, which the model needs, but when a buyer asks for pros and cons, alternatives, comparisons or who uses a tool, the assistant leans on reviews, comparison pages, community threads and press. That is why a great website with no external validation still loses: the model trusts corroboration across many sources more than any single self-description.