Earlier this month, I spent a day at B2B Marketing Live Manchester in Salford – the day after Tank’s head of digital, Martin Harris, ran a session on AI search and lead generation at Distinct Recruitment's offices in Nottingham. A lot of the same questions came up across both days, from different angles.
Fundamentally, the B2B buyer has changed how they behave, and most marketing strategies haven't kept up.
The buyer you're trying to reach has already made most of the journey without you
Martin covered the numbers side of this thoroughly.
75% of the B2B buyer journey is now happening inside LLMs and dark social – private sharing channels like messaging apps, email, and texts that traditional analytics tools can't track – before anyone lands on your website, calls your team, or fills in a form. 84% of B2B buyers use AI tools for initial research. Google's own data shows 1 billion daily AI Mode users.
This means a buyer can research your category, compare your competitors, and shortlist you entirely inside a single AI conversation – without as much as a website visit, form fill, or CRM event.
The conversion figures put some context around this: ChatGPT referrals are converting at 15.9%, versus 1.76% for organic search. The volume is lower, but by the time someone arrives via an AI recommendation, the qualification has largely already happened.
At B2B Marketing Live, the question kept shifting from "what to say" to "how to be found"
A question that kept surfacing across the day was the gap between reach and what it actually produces in pipeline terms. Andy Johnson at HUT 3 walked through ABM cases built around engagement signals and behavioural data – knowing when a prospect was ready to escalate rather than simply knowing they'd engaged with something. The content still needs to be good to generate those signals, but converting brand work into pipeline takes a specific mechanism on top of it, and most teams aren't running that yet.
Amie Farrell from Deliveroo for Work gave a useful picture of how complicated the B2B buying decision actually is. The buying group is messier than most marketing strategies assume – distributed across people with different priorities, shaped by those who aren't signing off the budget, and harder to map to a clean journey. That matters for what you create and who you're trying to reach.
The Credibility at Scale panel covered some familiar ground on tooling and adoption, but the practical thread running through it was about content. Vague, hedged content structured around what an organisation wants to say rather than what a buyer needs to know is harder for AI to surface – and buyers are increasingly finding things through AI.
The measurement conversation is where the industry hasn't caught up
Year-on-year traffic comparisons have become an unreliable benchmark. SparkToro's 2026 data puts 68% of search results as AI-generated, which means traffic has dropped for most sites regardless of what they're doing. Reporting the same metrics to leadership that were standard in 2022 risks misrepresenting both performance and opportunity.
At the Distinct event, Martin’s answer was practical: look at citations, brand search volume, cost per lead, and self-reported attribution. These track something closer to buying intent.
Across both days, the gap between brand influence and pipeline was clearly one of the biggest challenges for marketers. The storytelling and ABM sessions were operating at different ends of it – awareness on one side, conversion on the other – but how brand-level work feeds through into pipeline over time is still something most teams are working out as they go.
What this means in practice
Brand authority was the overarching theme across both sessions. Earned media, ungated original research, expert presence on LinkedIn, PR in publications that carry weight, reviews on the platforms LLMs read – these are what drive AI visibility, and AI visibility is increasingly where the buyer journey starts. Gated content, paid acquisition, and email sequences still have their place, but they're not how you get into a buyer's consideration set before they've made themselves known.
78% of marketers still have no AI search strategy. Meanwhile SEO has effectively become the full marketing mix: PR, content, brand, and social all feeding the same outcome. Most teams and agencies aren't yet structured to deliver it that way, which is where a big opportunity sits.