How Global Buyers Use AI to Find Suppliers: 4 Steps

A buyer using AI to find suppliers usually goes through four steps: understand the product category, list candidates, compare and narrow down, then check the websites. At every step the AI may read your website. If it can't read or understand you at any step, you drop out at that step.

Here is a hypothetical example: an equipment buyer at a South African mining company needs hydraulic power units for a new mine.

Step 1: Understand the question

His first question is usually not "who is best" but "how do I choose":

What specifications matter for hydraulic power units used in mining? What should I watch for in hot, dusty conditions?

The AI looks for articles that explain selection. Whoever has a clear selection guide on their website has a chance to be cited as a source. This is the real value of a factory's technical articles: buyers read you before they even start choosing suppliers.

Step 2: Ask the AI for a shortlist

Recommend some Chinese manufacturers of hydraulic power units for mining, with ISO 9001, custom builds and project experience in Africa.

This is the most important step. The AI combines what it can find: website product pages, company profiles, LinkedIn company pages, industry directories, trade fair exhibitor lists and press coverage. Every condition in the buyer's question is a filter:

Many factories have these capabilities but don't say so on their website, or show only a photo of the certificate. The AI may not be able to read text inside an image, so for the AI that capability doesn't exist.

Step 3: Compare and follow up

Which of these is best suited to high temperatures? What are typical lead times?

At this point the AI may open the candidates' web pages on the spot. ChatGPT, for example, uses ChatGPT-User to visit pages when a user asks a question, and Claude uses Claude-User (Anthropic documentation). If your site returns a 403 or loads too slowly at that moment, the AI can only answer from other companies' material.

In GEOmonitorai's log monitoring, these user-triggered visits deserve special attention: each one means a real person asked an AI a question related to you.

Step 4: Check the website and send an enquiry

Finally, the buyer clicks a link in the AI answer, or searches for the company name, and opens the website. He looks at factory photos, equipment, certifications and case studies, and he may check LinkedIn to see whether the company and its sales staff are real and active.

These visits appear in the GA4 "AI Assistant" channel. But if the buyer reads the AI answer and then searches for your company name, the visit counts as organic search or direct. The real impact of AI is often larger than what analytics shows.

Self-check: where would you drop out?

• Does your website have selection guides or application notes that answer "how do I choose"?
• Are your certifications, custom capabilities and export markets written as text on the page, not only in images?
• Can AI crawlers and AI user requests open your pages normally?
• Is your LinkedIn company page consistent with your website?

The third point can only be checked in your server logs. You can check the other three yourself against your website.

Further reading: How AI Search Finds Suppliers: A B2B Buyer's Path · Why ChatGPT Doesn't Mention Your Company: 7 Technical Causes · Free AI crawler robots.txt checker

GEO Basics series, part 3 of 10. Next: Why AI Crawlers Never Show Up in Your Analytics