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AI Leads B2B Buyer Discovery, But Authentic Content Earns Their Trust – Forrester B2B Summit
By Lee Odden This post features insights from the “Authentic Content Builds Buyer and Customer Trust” panel at Forrester B2B Summit North America 2026.
The room at Forrester B2B Summit North America had all attention to the front for a reason. A panel featuring analysts from Forrester alongside marketing leaders from LinkedIn and SAP Concur who took on one of the most pressing questions facing B2B marketers right now: in a world flooded with AI-generated content, what does authentic content actually mean and what role does it play in modern information discovery, engagement and building decision confidence?
The answer, drawn from Forrester research, practitioner experience, and platform-level data, was both clarifying and actionable. The decision to emphasize authenticity in content is the foundation of building trust. With 94% of B2B marketers agreeing that trust is the most important factor for achieving B2B brand success, that foundation is more important than ever.
The visibility shift: AI has changed the starting line
The session opened with Forrester’s Karen Tran sharing a data point that is an important clarification about modern content discovery. According to Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2025, generative AI conversational search tools now rank as the single most meaningful interaction in the B2B buying process, ahead of social media, industry publications, product experts, and vendor websites.
Buyers go to AI first. Then they seek human validation.
That sequence has direct implications for content strategy according to data shared by Karen from Forrester: 85% of brand mentions come from third-party sources, and 49% of executives report actively questioning how their brand and content appear in AI-powered search. Yet only 50% of B2B marketing decision-makers say they currently optimize content for AI-powered search, and just 47% create content specifically designed to directly answer the questions buyers are asking.
The gap between where buyers are looking and where most brands are present is the both a challenge and an opportunity. B2B brands across the board are seeing a decline in visibility and the sense of urgency to reclaim that lost attention is higher than ever. Of course being more visible is just the start. Being the chosen solution recommended by the trusted sources that influence buyers from AI search to Google to industry media to creators is where attention becomes intent and is at the heart of being the best answer.
Three audiences every B2B content program must serve
Davang Shah, VP of Marketing at LinkedIn, shared some clarity around the role of content in B2B marketing: today’s content programs must influence three distinct entities simultaneously.
“Content is grounded in trust that helps buyers make a decision that answers a question in a way that is useful. There are three entities to influence: end customers, LLMs, and agents. All of them are grounded in building trust.” – Davang Shah, VP Marketing, LinkedIn
For B2B marketers navigating their visibility gap, that framing of customers, language models, and AI agents is a useful one. What earns trust with humans (credibility, consistency, third-party validation) largely also earns inclusion in AI-generated answers. In some ways, those principles of being chosen as …read more
Source:: Top Rank Blog
