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How to Be the Best Answer for B2B Buyers and AI Answer Engines
By Lee Odden Summary:
Modern B2B buyers and AI answer engines are evaluating your content against the same types of criteria: proof, source authority and consensus among credible sources. Original research and unique customer insights can provide the proof. Industry influencers, executives and customers can supply the credible voices. And thought leadership connects them into a platform that earns both visibility and belief across the entire buyer journey.
In Answer Engine: The State of B2B Thought Leadership in 2026, our survey with Ascend2 of 797 B2B marketers found that 97% say thought leadership is critical to full-funnel success, 93% say research-based content is effective at driving engagement and leads, and 72% of marketers who frequently collaborate with influencers rate their research content very effective compared with 29% of everyone else. At the same time, 32% of buyers now discover thought leadership through GenAI tools, a channel that was missing from most marketer distribution lists a year ago.
Who is actually reading your B2B content in 2026?
Most B2B marketers are now dealing with two distinct audiences for their content. The first is a buying group of eight to ten people who are skeptical, short on time, and personally exposed if their recommendation goes wrong. The second is a set of retrieval and reasoning systems that read, summarize, and decide which brands get chosen when someone asks a question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode or Claude.
B2B marketers are wrestling with prioritizing those audiences and often treat them as separate problems with separate sets of resources. The reality is, they respond to pretty much the same signals. Buying groups look for proof they can defend internally. Answer engines look for evidence they can attribute and corroborate. The good news is that original research or proprietary data, credible human voices and a consistent point of view can satisfy the expectations of both.
Our research with Ascend2 found that 35% of B2B marketers say original research is significantly more valuable than AI-generated content for building trust and authority, with another 32% saying it is more impactful overall (The State of B2B Thought Leadership in 2026). This is an important insight for those now relying on AI to generate B2B content. The content most likely to be repeated by a machine is content a machine could never have created on its own. Even synthetic data comes from original source content at some point.
Why is original research the fuel for becoming the best answer?
New knowledge is one of the only assets in your content program that can’t be summarized from somewhere else. When you publish insights that nobody else has, you become the citable source for that fact. The result? Journalists cite it. Analysts reference it. Influencers argue about it. AI systems attribute it. Every one of those actions is a trust signal that points back at your brand.
The data on performance of research based content supports the investment. 93% of B2B marketers using original research based content say it is effective at driving engagement and leads, with 48% calling it very effective …read more
Source:: Top Rank Blog
