Your next customer could be looking for you and never find your products.
B2B product discovery has changed. A procurement team might start with Google, a product manager might ask an AI assistant for recommendations, and a buyer may compare specifications across supplier portals or procurement systems long before reaching a supplier’s e-commerce site.
Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey 2025 found that 94% of business buyers now use AI somewhere in their buying process. The more telling number is what it displaced: buyers named generative AI their most meaningful source of information twice as many times as any other source, ahead of vendor websites, product experts, and sales.
The question for B2B e-commerce organizations is whether the right customers, and the systems helping them, can find and understand what the business offers and no longer simply whether customers can find their website.
That is the challenge of discoverability and the focus of the first three of nine fundamentals in this series.
Across three articles, this series explores the broader questions shaping B2B digital commerce:
Can customers find you?
Can you deliver the experience they expect?
Can you see what is working and keep improving it?
These are not steps in a maturity ladder. Organizations often face all three challenges at the same time.
In this first article, we look at discoverability: making your business, products, and digital experience visible to the right customers.
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Search engines still matter. However, being online is not the same as being findable.
Complex B2B e-commerce environments can hide technical barriers, from poorly indexed pages and inaccessible content to site structures that make products difficult to crawl. We have seen this firsthand at Data Realm, where underlying issues made parts of a large product catalogue harder for search engines to discover.
A website can look perfectly functional to a customer while remaining surprisingly difficult for search engines to navigate.
Before investing in driving more traffic, look at what is happening underneath. If the answer is unclear, more traffic will mean more people arriving at the same problem.
Discoverability is no longer limited to traditional search. As AI-powered search and answer engines become an increasingly relied on part of the buying journey, the information on a site needs to be understandable to machines as much as people. It is not enough for a page to exist; these systems need enough context to understand what the business and its products actually offer.
That makes discoverability a technical challenge as much as a marketing one. The way a commerce environment is structured, and how its systems connect, directly determines what customers are able to find.
This is where B2B e-commerce gets particularly interesting.
A product page is what a customer sees. A product model is what the systems behind that page need to understand.
For a product to be discoverable across search engines, AI systems, marketplaces, procurement platforms, and other digital channels, the information describing it needs to be structured, consistent, and meaningful.
That means more than a product name. It includes specifications, identifiers, categories, product relationships, variants, compatibility, availability, pricing, and customer-specific information.
Those relationships matter in B2B. A product family, variant, and sellable SKU may represent different things, just as replacement parts, accessories, and compatible products have different relationships to an item. Buyers need to understand those differences, but so do the systems helping them search.
A buyer might search by manufacturer part number, distributor SKU, a particular specification, or compatibility. Technical documents, certifications, application information, and related products may be what helps them narrow down the options and reach the right item.
The challenge is that this information rarely lives in one place. It is usually spread across an ERP, PIM, commerce platform, spreadsheets, documents, or other systems. When those sources do not line up, the right product can be difficult to find even when it already exists in the catalogue.
That inconsistency is expensive. McKinsey’s 2026 Global B2B Pulse, based on responses from close to 4,000 decision makers across 13 countries, found the single biggest reason B2B buyers switch suppliers is inconsistent information. Not the price they pay, not the product. Whether a supplier’s systems and teams tell the same story.
AI adds another reason that consistency matters. Traditional search can often match keywords to a page. AI search and answer tools need more context: what a product is, what it does, how it differs from similar products, and where it fits.
Incomplete descriptions, inconsistent terminology, image-only specifications, or important details buried in PDFs or disconnected systems make that context harder to interpret.
The goal is not to optimize for every new AI tool. It is to ensure the digital representation of a product makes sense wherever customers or machines encounter it.
Authentication is often necessary for contract pricing, customer-specific catalogs, sensitive commercial information, and other account-level data.
However, prospective customers and discovery tools still need enough public information to understand what a company offers.
So the question is not whether a catalogue should be completely open or locked behind a portal. It is whether the two experiences work together. A prospective customer needs to understand what a supplier offers, while an existing customer should be able to quickly reach the products, pricing, availability, and terms that apply to them.
That means being deliberate about what needs to be protected and what needs to be discoverable.
Finding that balance takes work. B2B organizations have to weigh security, commercial requirements, customer expectations, and the technical realities of the systems behind the experience.
The goal is to create a clear connection between the information customers can discover and the deeper product data that powers the authenticated experience — a balance Data Realm has successfully helped businesses establish time and again.
This is why product data and commerce architecture are part of the discoverability equation. The easier it is for your systems to understand your products, the easier it becomes for customers, and the assisting digital tools, to find the right ones.
Finding your company is only the beginning.
In B2B, not every customer needs to see the same thing. The right products, prices, availability, catalogs, and ordering options can depend on who the customer is, where they operate, and their relationship with your business.
The challenge is making those needs accessible rather than making customers work to find what applies to them.
In practice, that means adapting the experience based on customer accounts, regions, purchasing roles, commercial relationships, or entitlements, while keeping the broader experience intuitive and easy to navigate.
The goal is to make sure that when the right customer arrives, the right information is there for them.
Being discoverable is about being visible AND relevant.
Before investing in more traffic, new functionality, or another major e-commerce initiative, identify where discoverability is actually breaking down.
Look at the gap between what your business offers, what customers can find, and what your systems can reliably communicate. That might mean reviewing site structure, product data and relationships, authentication requirements, regional experiences, or connections between your commerce platform and other systems.
The goal is to identify the friction that matters most and determine the right next move - not to fix all at once.
This approach aligns with the Intershop playbook: understand where friction exists, the business and technical constraints behind it, and where investment can create the greatest impact.
At Data Realm, we apply that same thinking by challenging assumptions and helping businesses determine what needs to change and what does not.
The right next move is not always a new platform or major rebuild. Sometimes, it is fixing the foundation that is already there.
To learn more about how Data Realm helps businesses improve and evolve complex digital commerce environments, visit data-realm.com.
What is to Come
These are the first three of the nine fundamentals shaping B2B digital commerce.
In the next article, we move from discoverability to customer experience:
(4) Build a clear path to purchase
(5) Create clear paths to your business and sales channels
(6) create an experience that works for everyone
References
Buten, J. (2026, January 22). B2B buyers make zero-click buying number one. Forrester.
Dierks, A., Huber, I., Valdivieso, M., & Deveau, R. (2026, July 16). The future of B2B sales: How growth champions rewire their playbooks with AI. McKinsey & Company.
Gartner. (2026, March 9). Gartner sales survey finds 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience. Gartner.