There was a time when getting on a main contractor’s approved supplier list was critical – and once you were on it, you tended to stay there. However, Paul Houston, co-founder of Catalyst Marketing Agency, warns that AI-assisted research is now rapidly rebuilding many construction and manufacturing procurement shortlists from scratch
I’ve spent more than two decades working within or with manufacturers and contractors across the UK, and a good chunk of that has been spent inside the construction supply chain. So it’s no surprise I’ve talked to a lot of building product manufacturers, fabricators and specialist subcontractors in that time, all bidding for a place on a main contractor’s or housebuilder’s approved list.
The holy grail would be to get yourself on that approved suppliers’ list, build a relationship with the buyer or specifier, and then get specified by name on project after project. And by doing so, you massively improve your chances of many years’ repeat business. It wasn’t the only way to win business, but it was definitely the goal of every supplier.
The changing model
Fast forward to today, and the model is changing. Not gradually over the past 10, 15 or 20 years, but rapidly over the past five. And it’s still changing, faster than most of the sector has clocked, and because it’s largely driven by AI, it’s evolving on the job.
The reason is that quantity surveyors, procurement managers and specifiers are increasingly opening ChatGPT before they open Google, rather than picking up the phone or visiting a website. And the approved supplier lists that companies spent decades building their way on to are being completely rebuilt by AI-assisted research. ChatGPT alone now gets around 5.6bn visits a month, and over 71% of people now use the available suite of AI tools to search.
This is happening across pretty much every sector we work with, but there seems to be added pressure on buyers in construction and manufacturing, which impacts this further, most probably because sourcing decisions in this sector carry a heavy weight.
Whether it’s structural steel, cladding systems, MEP components or a specialist groundworks contractor, buyers can be weighed down by compliance, programme pressure and, naturally, budgets.
This makes them a prime candidate for AI, given it’s quick and easy to simply ask: “Suggest five UK manufacturers of fire-rated cladding who are UKCA marked and have experience on high-rise residential schemes.”
Interestingly, UK data found construction is one of the lowest-adopting sectors for AI internally – around 1% adoption in construction firms themselves, versus 37% in professional/technical small firms. This suggests the businesses being searched for are, on average, way behind the people doing the searching.
And hey presto, an instant shortlist, and guess what, there’s also no need to click through to a supplier’s website. Across search more broadly, 60% of Google searches now end without anyone clicking through to a site at all. In construction procurement, where buyers are working to tight programmes and can’t afford a compliance error, I’d expect that number to be even higher.
As buyers and consumers, the rise of AI search over the past few years has taught us we can ask a question and get a pretty accurate answer. Previously, it would direct us, and we would still have to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
An optimised website is no longer all you need
What has become apparent during this change is that a Google ranking and an optimised website no longer guarantee you’re making that shortlist. AI tools aren’t ranking pages, they’re gathering content they can find, understand and trust, and giving you an answer. If your certifications, project case studies, technical data sheets and thought leadership aren’t structured in a way that’s easy for an AI model to extract and cite, you simply won’t be mentioned.
It doesn’t matter how good your relationship with the outgoing buyer was, or how long you’ve been on the framework, lists are being rebuilt by a machine that has never met you or your sales team.
But we are now seeing suppliers in this space doing things a bit differently. First, they’re treating their credentials as content and making it work harder.
Accreditations, project case studies and performance data are being repurposed and clearly visible on their websites, in language that answers the exact questions a buyer or an AI tool would ask.
Secondly, AI tools look for credibility from outside your own website, such as trade press, industry bodies and review platforms, so being mentioned and linked to by trusted sources in the construction and manufacturing press carries more weight now than it did five years ago. It’s one of the key reasons why digital PR campaigns are on the rise, and working hand-in-hand with search, or generative engine optimisation (GEO) teams.
Finally, they’re keeping content current, because news about a win from 2020 or a case study that hasn’t been updated since before the pandemic is stale to both buyers and AI. Web presence is something that needs to be fluid rather than built and forgotten.
None of this means relationship building is no longer important, nor should we stop networking with people who buy and specify; we just need to understand that AI is bypassing this, and there’s something we can do about it. Our own research into how search and procurement behaviour is shifting backs this up, and we see it across every single sector we work in.
So, has AI killed the approved supplier list? Not quite, but it’s changing the rules on how we get there. We still need to be trusted, but by machines as well as humans.
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