What buyers ask AI assistants before choosing software

Buyers ask assistants narrow, practical questions with their own constraints in them, and they very rarely type a brand name they have not already heard of. That is why brand focused content does so little here, and why pages built around a specific buyer situation do so much.

The questions, in the words buyers use

These fall into the following seven shapes. The wording is deliberately plain, because that is how people type when they are talking to an assistant rather than searching.

Options with constraints. "Best tool for a team of twenty in India." "Cheapest option that still does X." Every constraint is a chance to be the most relevant answer, and most vendor pages carry none of them.

Alternatives to something. "What else is there apart from the tool we use." A buyer already using a product asks what else exists. These questions are valuable and are usually answered from comparison pages and forum threads rather than from vendor sites.

Price reality checks. "What should this cost." "Is this quote reasonable." "What are the hidden costs." Very few vendors answer these and it is a wide open gap.

Can it do this specific thing. "Does it connect to our accounting system." "Does it keep data in India." One integration, one compliance requirement, one workflow. Documentation usually wins these.

Is this worth it, or should we build it. A question people genuinely ask an assistant, and one where an honest answer earns a lot of trust.

What goes wrong. "What do people complain about." "How hard is it to move off." Community threads dominate here, and a vendor willing to answer it plainly stands out sharply.

How do I choose. "What should I compare." "What questions should I ask a vendor." This one is almost never answered by vendors, and it is the question a buyer asks first.

What a good answer looks like

Take one of those questions and set out the page that deserves to be quoted for it. It has five properties.

• The answer is in the first paragraph, not the conclusion. A summary is lifted from a passage, and a passage at the bottom of a page rarely gets read.
• It contains at least one fact that can be checked: a price, a count, a named list, a date.
• It names the constraints it applies to, including company size, country and who it is not for.
• It says what is not covered. A page that states a limit is more likely to be trusted on everything else.
• It is one question per page. A long guide that covers six questions is harder to quote for any of them.

A worked example

Take the price reality check question: "how much should inventory software cost for a small distributor." Before writing that page, here is what our own record says about how these pages fail.

On 17 September 2026 Claude read two comparison pages belonging to clawlaw.in, our sister company. Both stated competitors' prices with no link, no date and no source. Claude checked those figures independently and they turned out to be correct. It still set the pages aside, because at read time it had no way of knowing they were correct, so it treated them as advocacy and used official sources instead. Correct, and unusable.

So a price reality check page has to carry its own proof. The first paragraph says what the usual charging models are in the category, per user, per location or per order volume, and states the range your own product sits in with the date you last reviewed it. Then a short list of the four things that usually push the price up. Then a plain paragraph on the costs buyers forget, such as data migration, training and the annual increase at renewal. Wherever you state somebody else's price, say where it came from and the day you checked it, because that is exactly the sentence those two pages were missing. Then a line saying which size of business is better served by a spreadsheet, because it is true and saying it costs you nothing you were going to win. Then one sentence on what you charge and where to see the detail.

That page answers the question a buyer asked, carries facts a summariser can repeat, and stays useful to readers who will never buy from you. It also outlives every "book a demo" page in your category, because almost nobody else is willing to write it.

Where you are probably missing

Three gaps show up again and again on software sites.

No page answers a question, because every page describes a feature. Feature pages are written for a keyword and a product tour. A buyer question page is written for a decision. They are not the same document and one cannot do the other's job.

The constraints are absent. Nowhere on the site does it say which size of company you suit, which countries you operate in, which sectors you know. That feels like it keeps your options open. What it actually does is make you irrelevant to every constrained question, which is most of them.

Nothing difficult is admitted. There is no page on what goes wrong, what you do not do, or who should buy something else. So the questions about limits are answered entirely by forum threads and competitors, which is the worst possible arrangement for you.

How to find your real list

Do not guess it. Read your own sales conversations, your support tickets and your lost deal notes, and write down the questions in the words people used. Then ask those questions of two or three assistants without naming yourself, and see who gets named and which sources get cited.

That exercise usually produces two surprises: a question you assumed you owned where you are absent, and a source you had never heard of that keeps appearing.

Keep the wording exactly as your buyers said it, including the awkward phrasing. A question rewritten in your own marketing language is a different question, and it is not the one anybody is asking.

What this list cannot tell you

It cannot tell you which questions are worth money in your business. A question asked often is not necessarily asked by people who buy, and only your own sales record can tell you that.

It cannot be copied from another company. The shapes above are general, and the actual wording that matters is specific to your buyers, your sector and your country.

It cannot include questions that resolve to official sources, because those are not yours to win. If the answer to a question is a government rule, the official page is the right source and a vendor page above it would be a failure.

And it cannot promise that answering a question gets you named. Being the best answer available is the only lever, and no one can guarantee a position in an AI answer.

What to publish first

Publish the price reality check page. It is the question buyers ask earliest, it is the one almost nobody answers, and it is the page that gets quoted for years. If you cannot publish exact prices, publish the charging models, the things that change the price, and the costs people forget, with a date on it.

Common questions

How many of these pages do I need?

Start with five, one per question, each answering it in the first paragraph. Five real pages beat fifty thin ones, and you will learn more from measuring five than from publishing in bulk.

Should one long guide cover all the questions instead?

No. A summariser lifts a passage that answers one thing, so a single page covering seven questions competes with itself. Write one page per question and link them together.

How often should I check whether these pages are working?

Ask the questions monthly on two or three assistants, weekly on the one that retrieves live if you have just published. Record whether you were named and whether your page was cited, because those two move separately.

An assistant answered a buyer question using a competitor's page. What should I do?

Open their page and be honest about what it has that yours does not. Usually it is a number, a dated price or a plainly stated limit. Add the equivalent to your own page rather than adding more words to it.

Is being cited the same as being recommended?

No. Your page can supply the facts in an answer that recommends somebody else. Track the two separately: citation means you are reachable and useful, recommendation means the buyer was pointed at you.

Will publishing our weaknesses cost us deals?

The buyers you lose to an honest limit were going to leave later and more expensively. What you gain is being the source that gets quoted on the difficult questions, which is where trust is actually formed, and a shorter sales cycle with the buyers who do fit.