How do you get your wholesale terms cited by AI assistants?

A wholesale buyer asking an AI assistant whether a supplier can serve their account is asking a factual question with a checkable answer. Minimum order quantity, per-unit tier pricing, lead time, whether the price already includes duty, whether the range can ship pre-labelled — these are statements, not positioning. Most B2B catalogues bury them in a downloadable PDF, a "contact us for pricing" form, or a trade page that describes the programme in narrative prose. The assistant has nothing to read, so it declines to shortlist.

This article covers what wholesale and trade buyers actually ask assistants, why a request-a-quote wall removes you from consideration, and how to restructure a trade page so the answers are extractable.

## Why pricing on request fails with assistants

An assistant's job is to produce a usable answer. When it encounters "contact us for pricing", it faces a dead end: there is no value it can carry forward into a shortlist or a comparison. It does not guess, and it does not send the buyer to fill in a form on your behalf. It moves to a supplier whose terms it can state.

The commercial logic that justified hiding pricing — protecting margin, qualifying leads, avoiding competition from other retailers seeing your trade rates — is real. But it collides with how assistants work. An assistant that cannot state your terms cannot include you. A buyer who has to open a form to learn whether you are even in their price range will often not bother.

## The seven facts wholesale buyers need stated

Working from trade enquiry patterns across 2026, these are the facts that appear in almost every B2B question and that assistants need in plain text:

1. Minimum order quantity — per SKU and per order. State whether it is by units, by carton, or by value. 2. Tier pricing — the actual break points and per-unit price at each tier. "Volume discounts available" is not an answer. 3. Lead time — stated as a range with the shipping origin, so it can be matched against a buyer's reorder date. 4. Shipping and duty terms — DDP, DAP, or ex-works, and which party clears customs. 5. MOQ for mixed orders — whether a buyer can combine SKUs to reach the minimum, which is the single most common follow-up question. 6. Private label and customisation — whether you offer it, the minimum quantity, and the lead time for a first production run. 7. Account requirements — whether a reseller certificate or business number is needed, and whether a trade account is required to order at all.

Each of these is one clean sentence. Seven sentences replace an entire gated PDF, and unlike the PDF they can be quoted.

## Restructuring a trade page for extraction

Keep the entrance where it is, and put the facts behind it. A short qualification step is fine. What breaks extraction is hiding the facts from the crawler as well as the visitor. Put the terms in text on the page, then gate the quote request — not the information. You keep lead qualification and lose nothing.

Publish the tier table as a real table. Assistants read HTML tables well. A markdown-style tier table with quantity range, unit price, and currency is one of the highest-value blocks you can add to a B2B page. It also removes pricing ambiguity between your sales team and your site. Our earlier article on [spec tables that AI assistants cite](/en/blog/spec-tables-that-ai-assistants-cite) covers why tables extract so much more reliably than prose.

Give the trade page its own entity. Wholesale terms belong on a page that is clearly about wholesale — not buried ten paragraphs into a general contact page. Give it a title that states the programme, a clear URL, and Product or Offer structured data in JSON-LD where you genuinely publish published terms. Our guide to [which JSON-LD schema types matter for AI product citations](/en/blog/which-jsonld-schema-types-matter-ai-product-citations-2026) explains the boundary between structured data that reinforces a fact and structured data that has no text behind it.

State currency and unit explicitly. "12.50" is ambiguous. "USD 12.50 per unit, from 500 units" is not. Assistants that produce landed-cost comparisons need the currency to do the arithmetic; without it the number is unusable.

Make your sales copy and your terms agree. The most common wholesale citation failure is not a missing fact — it is two versions of the same fact. A trade page that says "5-day dispatch" while the shipping policy says 7-10 days leaves the assistant with a conflict it cannot resolve, and unresolvable conflicts usually resolve to exclusion. Our article on [fixing catalogue consistency](/en/blog/batch-fixing-catalog-consistency-ai-citations-2026) walks through the audit approach.

## Where B2B buyers ask

An important 2026 shift is where the questions are being asked. Wholesale buyers used to begin with a search and a directory. A growing share now begins with an assistant, because the assistant can pre-filter: it can take "who can supply organic cotton tote bags, 500 minimum, DDP to the UK, under 4 USD per unit" and produce a shortlist in one turn. That query shape is exactly the one your trade page needs to survive — and it survives only if each constraint has a stated value.

This is the same dynamic we describe for direct-to-consumer stores in [does GEO replace SEO](/en/blog/does-geo-replace-seo-2026), with one addition: B2B buyers carry more constraints per question, so the number of facts you must state is higher.

## FAQ

You can publish tier pricing on a trade page that also states the account requirement. Many suppliers do. If you genuinely cannot, publish bands ("from 500 units, pricing moves into the single-digit USD range per unit") rather than nothing. A stated band still lets an assistant place you; a locked page lets it place somebody else.

It helps if the answers are also in the page text. FAQ markup that restates on-page answers is reinforcement. FAQ markup about questions the page never answers is a mismatch, and our piece on [whether FAQ schema helps Shopify product citations](/en/blog/does-faq-schema-help-shopify-product-citations-2026) explains why that backfires. You can read more about how Visora treats markup versus text on the [FAQ page](/faq).

State it per product line in a table, with the SKUs grouped. "MOQ varies" tells an assistant nothing; a table with three rows tells it everything. Variability is not the problem — the absence of a value is.

Run a scan. Visora's free audit reports which facts on your trade and product pages are extractable and which are effectively invisible, so you can prioritise the missing sentences rather than guessing. Start at [geovisora.com/audit](/audit) — the scan takes a few minutes and the report names the specific gaps.

Wholesale was always a relationship business, and it still is. But the first filter on that relationship is increasingly a machine checking whether your terms are stated. Publish them as text, state them once, and keep them consistent — the sales conversation then starts with a qualified buyer instead of a form submission.