Winning hearts & machines in the age of AI

The B2B buyer landscape in 2026

Today, 94% of B2B buyers use LLMs during the purchase process. If you’ve noticed your organic traffic declining while your search rankings hold steady, congratulations – you’ve discovered the central paradox of B2B marketing in 2026.

AI adoption for B2B content exists on a spectrum. Some teams quietly question whether they should be doing something with AI in their content strategy. And some are already knee-deep, optimizing in ways us mere mortals could only dream of.

Search (the age-old engine room of B2B content strategy) and the ‘drive traffic, capture leads, nurture, and convert’ model have fundamentally changed. The good news? Knowing what’s broken is the first step to fixing it. And that’s one step further than 50% of teams that are only using AI on an ad hoc basis.

Wherever you are in your journey, we’re here to help. We’ll show you what AI means for your content strategy, and why appealing to the human behind the persona is still a key part of getting chosen today.

Integrating AI into your content strategy

It’s easy to feel that if you haven’t already started with AI, you’re behind. But the truth is somewhere in the middle: for teams at or near zero with AI in their content workflow, the opportunity is enormous and the barrier to entry, minimal.

Here’s how to get started:

Content strategy

AI is incredibly good at gap and whitespace analysis, helping you find editorial angles that tap into emotive pain points faster. This will help you create more relevant, resonant content that you can feed into briefs.

Research

Desk research used to be a laborious process. AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can compress what used to be hours of research into minutes. If you aren’t already automating competitor analysis or market research, it’s a great place to start.

Repurposing at scale

Have an interview or original whitepaper that you spent a significant amount of resource and time on? Turn it into a series of LinkedIn posts, blogs, or an email nurture sequence with a good prompt and the click of a button.

First draft efficiency

A blank page is the hardest part of the creation process. AI takes the initial burden of getting started off your shoulders by giving you a starting point. 81% of marketers now use AI at some point in the content creation process. It’s table stakes now.

Avoid these common pitfalls

Only 17% of marketers rate AI outputs as ‘excellent’. If you’ve ever heard of the term ‘AI slop’, you’ll know what we’re talking about. AI is great at shouldering the heavy lifting of research, synthesis, and structure to give you a first draft. But you should only start with AI. Don’t stop there.

Per SEO veteran, Lily Ray:

Don’t mistake volume for value

More content doesn’t necessarily lead to higher traffic. In fact, it can actively work against you. Google’s ‘Scaled Content Abuse’ policy punishes sites that don’t produce anything original or of sufficient value. In simple terms, that means if you aren’t providing your audience with unique analysis from verified subject matter experts, transparent authorship from said SMEs, or content that answers questions better than your competitors competing, you’ll be penalized.

Self-promotional listicles only get you so far

Another common tactic touted today that, much like grey-area SEO approaches of the past, will likely be punished in the future. Google’s crackdown on such listicles also happens to be a topic Lily Ray has covered in more depth here.

Don’t sacrifice SEO performance

The overarching lesson in this section is simple: SEO and GEO are two sides of the same coin. Strong SEO visibility is the foundation for strong AI search visibility. If you read advice that runs against SEO best practice, it’s not advice worth following.

Don’t believe us? There’s mounting evidence that ChatGPT falls back on Google search to answer queries. 

“AI makes it easy to produce more. But more of what’s wrong is just noise. This exposes the real risk with AI: mistaking volume for value. The real standard for AI in content isn’t speed, it’s quality: better positioning, sharper insights, content that genuinely fills a gap. The greatest value AI brings is accelerating the analysis: identifying whitespace in your category, understanding what your buyers already have access to, and finding where a real value vacuum exists.”

Joe Livingstone, Head of Web Strategy at Transmission

Valuable localization vs. duplicate content

AI tools can be a huge boon to your business if your audience is spread across geographies. However, avoid simply translating content without paying attention to market/region-specific intent. Google Search’s March 2026 core and spam updates has revealed that pages with identical structures across markets, shared offers, and CTAs are being increasingly treated as redundant.

The key to getting past gatekeepers

A strong organic presence (your website, LinkedIn, etc.) is the first step to being shown in AI answers. But if your content isn’t structured to be surfaced, cited, and synthesised by AI tools, you might as well be invisible. This is where Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) comes in.

What machines are really looking for:

Fact density

Having a statistic every 150-200 words signals authoritative content. Stats themselves provide a boost of up to 30-40%, and quotes from named experts, 25-30%.

Direct answers, fast

Answer your buyers’ burning questions in the first 40-60 words of each section. For long-form blog pieces or online reports, put a 50-80 word ‘information capsule’ at the top of the article summarising the narrative to communicate “what’s in it for me?”.

Schema & structure

FAQs, how-tos, and organisation schema markup have a tangible effect on AI discoverability. Citing authoritative sources can give lower-ranked sites a 115% boost in visibility. These have been SEO best practice for years, and GEO is no different.

“The same content that resonates with buyers also performs better with algorithms. Google, LinkedIn, and ChatGPT are built to reward helpfulness. High traffic, strong engagement, and citation signals aren’t just vanity metrics, they’re proof you’re creating something worth finding. Focus your content on the problems your buyers lose sleep over, and bring real expertise to the answer.”

Joe Livingstone, Head of Web Strategy at Transmission

Understanding the dark funnel

For those of you further along your AI journey, this is where things get murky – and their most important.

70% of the B2B buyer journey now happens in channels your analytics can’t see. Slack DMs, WhatsApp groups, internal email threads. None of these interactions show up in attribution reports. But they all shape a deal.

Today’s B2B buyers are more distracted, sceptical, and time-poor than ever before. The buying journey has become more complex, and decision-making units now include up to 10 people. AI tools give them a neat list of options to consider at the start of the research phase.

But they often have a ‘Day One List’ of brands in mind before they even start their prompt. Remember: Buyer behavior has changed. The nature of the people behind the job title hasn’t.

“The dark funnel isn’t a gap in your data, it’s a mirror showing you where buyers trust each other more than they trust you. Partner introductions, WhatsApp messages, a recommendation over a pint. The brands winning in B2B right now aren’t the ones with the cleanest attribution models. They’re the ones who’ve accepted that the most important conversations happen when they aren’t in the room.”

David Gyertson, Digital Director at Transmission

Remember, buyers are more than their business priorities

This is where the strength of your brand comes in, and how leveraging behavioural biases can make what you’re already doing to build your brand more effective:

Stand out & stick

Turn case studies into customer stories. Testimonials into talking head videos. Brand building isn’t always about going big – it’s about finding inspired ways to make your point. That’s the Isolation Effect in action.

Positive associations have a halo effect

Today, trust is more personal and peer-driven. Name dropping well-known clients and collaborating with industry figureheads puts a spotlight on where your brand excels. Those positive associations have a tangible effect on brand perception.

Find the right story to tell

What’s relatable is not only easier to digest, it also makes your point more effective. Think about the impact your product/solution/service has had on your industry or clientele. Find the right framing and anything becomes a story worth telling.

Turn behavioral science into a business booster

Discover how to apply behavioral science to your B2B marketing campaigns, and create stickier brands as a result in B2B’s first-ever behavioral science research, The Yes Advantage.

GET THE REPORT

Turn dark intent into insights

That spike in ‘Direct’ referral traffic you see in your GA4 dashboard is directly attributable to the rise of AI platform usage. Not knowing the true source of traffic is frustrating, yes. But the way forward isn’t to treat it as a failure in measurement, but rather a known variable.

You can’t currently know what happens in a buyer’s ChatGPT session, their Slack thread, or conversations at the coffee shop. You can design around it:

Conduct targeted qualitative research

Building research programmes designed specifically to shed light on the ‘dark’ stages of the buyer journey is the first step to illuminating the dark funnel. Customer interviews, win/loss analyses, community listening give you qualitative answers to quantitative questions.

Contextually interpret the data you can see

Adding a simple “how did you hear about us?” open-text field to your contact forms is a great way to make later decisions about nurture sequences, sales follow-up timings, and content investment. It’s not sophisticated, but it works.

“Every gate you put in front of your content is a tax on your own discoverability. In a world where buyers form shortlists in private channels, friction won’t just slow the journey down – it’ll remove you from it entirely. Reframe your thinking from capturing leads to building credibility. That way you’re optimising for the 95% of the journey where decisions are made, not the last 5%.”

Rick Harrison, ABM Strategy Director at Transmission

Building a mature measurement framework

For the most AI-mature among you, the frontier is measurement. More specifically: how do you demonstrate Marketing’s true contribution to revenue where attribution falls short?

The truth is you can get closer to the answer, but not all the way there. The upside is, it’s close enough to make materially better decisions.

Most B2B marketing teams still work at the channel level without a coherent model for how they interact. Cross-channel attribution addresses the limitations of last-click models, and beyond that, predictive modelling uses historical patterns to forecast pipeline contribution.

But the most mature organisations leverage full-funnel optimisation that incorporates brand measurement, qualitative insight, and AI visibility alongside traditional performance data.

Here’s how to get started:

Create a first-party data strategy

Avoid depending on third-party cookies. Instead, capture declared intent through form fields, preference centres, and direct buyer conversations.

Look at a new attribution model

Present ranges and confidence levels rather than traditional metrics that generate false precision. Decisions made from overconfident numbers leads to worse outcomes than leadership that understands the uncertainty.

Use brand measurement

Doing so helps you understand influence beyond direct response, including voice in AI outputs, analyst citations, and community presence.

Introduce AI visibility monitoring

This is a genuinely new form of measurement, allowing you to track where and how your brand is represented in the LLM responses your buyers are reading.

Build custom GA4 channel groups

Use regex patterns to match AI referrer domains positioned above Referral in channel group ordering.

Towards the future

AI and LLMs have rewritten the rules of content strategy faster than many B2B organisations can keep up.

Buyers are researching without ever chatting to Sales Reps, search engines are no longer sending prospects to your website, and influence has looped back around to close-knit peer communities.

History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes – and today’s landscape closely resembles the early days of the internet. To the businesses that embraced the then new tech went the spoils. To those who didn’t, a perpetual game of catch-up.

That’s why we created Story Engine to help clients identify white spaces in their content strategy and create middle-funnel content that shows up and stands out in LLMs – allowing them to focus their time and resources wherever it’s needed most across the modern B2B buyer journey.

If you’re interested in learning more, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re always one click away.