We are seeing a shift. Procurement managers in the Bay Area are skipping Google. They are going straight to ChatGPT and Perplexity to build their shortlists. If you are not the answer they find, you do not exist in that deal.
Why Are Industrial Buyers Using AI to Find Suppliers?
Traditional search is slow. A buyer spends hours clicking through generic websites and filtering out marketing noise. AI is fast. It synthesizes technical data in seconds.
We ran a test with a buyer looking for AS9100-certified shops. Perplexity gave them three qualified names in 15 seconds. Google took 20 minutes of manual filtering to find the same data. Buyers value that speed. They are not looking for a "partner"—they are looking for a match for their spec.
What Does an AI Procurement Query Actually Look Like?
Queries are not keywords anymore. They are conversations. A buyer asks: "Which machine shops in San Jose can hold +/- 0.0005 tolerances on INCONEL 718?"
This is a technical hurdle. If your site does not state those numbers plainly, the AI will guess. Usually, it guesses wrong or stays silent. We have noticed that when specific tolerances are missing, AI systems default to the most well-known brand, even if they are less qualified.
Which AI Platforms Are Industrial Buyers Using?
ChatGPT: The entry point. We see buyers use GPT-4o as a research assistant to map out industry standards and typical pricing models.
Perplexity: The serious tool. It cites its sources. Buyers click those links to verify your certifications. If your link leads to a 404 or a generic home page, you lose the trust.
Google Gemini: Rising fast. It lives inside the Google Workspace tools procurement teams already use. It is the easiest way for a team to compare three vendors directly from a spreadsheet.
Why Most SF Bay Area Industrial Suppliers Are Invisible
Most websites in the East Bay are digital brochures from 2015. They hide specifications in PDFs. AI models often fail to parse these correctly.
In our audits, we found that 84% of technical data locked in scanned PDFs was missed by standard retrieval agents. To a machine, if the data is not text on a page, it does not exist. Generic marketing copy about "quality" and "service" creates zero citation signals.
Winning the AI Procurement Search
Open with the answer. Don't say "Welcome." Say "We provide 5-axis CNC machining for aerospace OEMs in the SF Bay Area."
Move your specs out of the PDF. Put them in an HTML table. We have seen this simple change move a supplier from zero citations to the top of a Perplexity results list in 6 weeks.
Update your content for the machine. If the AI can read your capabilities, it can recommend you to the human.