No. B2B is further ahead, with well over half of B2B buyers now using AI before contacting a vendor, but consumer AI search is growing quickly and around 30% of UK consumers have used AI to research a purchase. The gap is closing rather than holding.
The short version
- B2B adopted first because B2B buying is research-heavy and committee-driven.
- Consumer AI search is growing fast, particularly for considered and high-value purchases.
- Consumer exposure concentrates in categories where people already researched before buying.
- Low-consideration and impulse retail remains largely unaffected for now.
- The B2B lead is a timing difference, not a permanent structural one.
Why B2B moved first
B2B buying has the properties AI assistants are good at. The purchase is expensive, the decision is made by several people, the buyer is often not an expert in what they are buying, and there is a genuine shortlisting stage before anyone speaks to a supplier. An assistant that returns three credible named options with reasons is genuinely useful in that situation.
Consumer buying splits. For a bottle of shampoo, nobody opens an assistant. For a £2,000 mattress, a holiday, a car, a private clinic or a solicitor, people already read reviews and comparison articles, and asking an assistant is simply a faster version of what they were doing anyway.
That is the line worth drawing. The relevant variable is consideration, not the letter B. A consumer brand selling something people research is more exposed than a B2B firm selling something transactional and repeat.
Where consumer GEO already matters
Private healthcare, legal services for individuals, financial advice, education, home improvement at the higher end, travel, and any purchase where people are worried about getting it wrong. These are categories where a wrong choice costs money or hurts, so buyers do their homework.
Retail is the interesting frontier. Assistants are increasingly used to compare products, and product recommendation is a different problem from either classic SEO or classic ecommerce. That work is covered separately under GEO for e-commerce.
How to check it yourself
Ask an assistant the question a real customer would ask about your category, and see whether the answer names businesses at all. Some categories return generic advice with no brands in it, which means the citation opportunity has not arrived yet. Others return two or three named businesses, which means it has, and you are either in that list or you are not.
That single check tells you more than any general claim about your sector, including this one.
What to do about it
- Run the category query and note whether brands get named.
- If they do, find out who. Those are your real competitors in this channel, and they are not always the ones you track.
- If they do not, revisit in a quarter. Categories flip faster than most marketing plans.
- Either way, fix your entity. It costs little, it is the foundation for everything else, and it protects you against being described inaccurately in the meantime.