What B2B Buyers Check Before They Trust Your Content

Guest post by Stefan Kalpachev.

By the time a B2B buyer agrees to a first call, most of the deciding is done. Around 4,000 buyers took part in the 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report, and on average they reached out to a vendor about 61% of the way through their journey.

By then the shortlist is usually settled. The winning vendor was already on the day-one shortlist 95% of the time, and four deals in five went to the vendor the buyer favored before speaking to anyone.

Buyers also seem happy to keep it that way. Two in three would rather skip the rep altogether: 67% said so in a Gartner survey out in March 2026.

That leaves content doing most of the persuading, usually while nobody from the vendor is watching. It also changes what content has to do. Being found is step one. If the buyer lands on the page and finds nothing they can check, they go and look at someone else.

Who reads the content first now?

Increasingly, a machine does. Half of B2B software buyers (51%) now open their research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, according to G2’s Answer Economy research from April 2026. A year before, it was 29%. The number I keep coming back to is a different one: 69% of those buyers chose a different vendor than the one they had planned on, because of what a chatbot told them.

Estimates of AI use vary with the definition. Forrester puts the share of business buyers using AI somewhere in the process at 94%, in its 2025 Buyers’ Journey Survey. What stands out more in that survey is that twice as many buyers as the year before rated generative AI or conversational search above every other source, vendor websites and salespeople included.

Gartner’s narrower question found that 45% used AI during a recent purchase. Either way, the first summary a buyer reads about a category is often written by an assistant, put together from whatever sources it can find and is willing to repeat. Webbiquity’s recent post on Livestorm’s Claude connector showed marketers running webinars by asking an assistant for what they want. Buyers have started doing their research the same way.

The click data shows the cost. Pew Research Center found that Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% for users who saw no summary. Links inside the summary itself got clicked in about 1% of visits. Ahrefs measured a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appears.

Being cited inside the answer helps a great deal. Seer Interactive’s 2026 analysis of 5.47 million queries found that brands cited in an AI Overview earned about 120% more organic clicks per impression than brands that weren’t cited. Seer is careful to say the data doesn’t prove the citation causes the extra clicks, but the gap is large.

What makes a buyer, or an assistant, trust a page?

Google doesn’t hedge on this one. Its Search Quality Rater Guidelines put trust in the middle of E-E-A-T, and say a page that can’t be trusted gets a low rating, however expert it looks. Buyers apply much the same test.

When Redpoint Insights asked B2B professionals what makes them trust a piece of content, original research topped the list at 70%. Expert opinion got 64%, peer insight 62%, case studies 54%. A byline by itself? 22%. So putting a name on a post does very little on its own. Put that same name next to data the person gathered, or a project they actually ran, and buyers start paying attention.

Edelman and LinkedIn found something similar in their 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report. Asked how they judge what a company can really do, 73% of decision-makers said they trust its thought leadership more than its marketing materials and product sheets. And 86% said a company that keeps publishing good thought leadership is likely to get an invite to their RFP.

Meanwhile, buyers have gotten warier. Almost half (47%) told TrustRadius, for its 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect report, that they trust online resources less than they used to. Among those using AI, 94% go back and fact-check what it tells them at least some of the time.

And Gartner found 69% of buyers spotting differences between what a vendor’s website claimed and what its salespeople said. A buyer who is checking will keep checking until something either holds up or doesn’t.

How common are these signals on real company websites?

Less common than all of that would suggest. Content RevOps spent much of 2026 auditing close to 14,000 company websites across seven B2B sectors for its State of Content Marketing 2026 study, and read about 5,500 marketing job posts alongside them. For each site the question was simple enough: what does it publish, what proof is on it, who stands behind the content, and does any of it show up in search or in AI answers?

Original research shows the widest spread. Among companies that publish content regularly, it appears on about 71% of life sciences sites, where publishing data is close to standard practice. The figure is 42% in manufacturing, 35% in fintech, roughly 3 in 10 in pharma and education, and about 1 in 8 in construction.

A construction firm with even a modest annual benchmark of bid volumes or project timelines would be doing something seven in eight of its peers don’t.

Named authors are common. Somewhere between 56% and 82% of content-active sites in most sectors put a name on their content. Credentials are another matter. Author bios that show credentials appear on about 60% of life sciences sites and about half in pharma, then drop to 28% in fintech, 26% in education, and below 20% in manufacturing.

Most of these sites tell the reader who wrote the piece and not why that person should be believed, which is the part Redpoint’s respondents care about.

In fintech, the two signals most closely linked to content excellence were original research and credentialed authorship.

Where is the trust gap widest?

At the point of decision. Take the average content library of a company that publishes regularly. Roughly 40% of it is there to get attention. About 1 in 6 pieces is written for someone ready to pick a vendor. Manufacturing sits lowest at around 15%, pharma highest at about 25%, and nobody is anywhere near an even split.

Pricing shows how thin decision-stage proof can get. TrustRadius has found transparent pricing to be the top item on buyers’ wish lists for four years running, with 59% wishing vendors were more open about it in 2026.

In the audit, some form of pricing information appeared on about 38% of construction sites and about 23% of active education sites, then fell to 8% in manufacturing, under 5% in life sciences, 1.5% among asset managers, and 0.5% in pharma. Comparison pages appeared on 5% of sites or fewer in every sector where they were measured, and ROI calculators were rarer still.

This matters more as buying groups grow. Forrester’s 2026 research puts the typical B2B purchase at 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, and Gartner found that 74% of buyer teams show unhealthy conflict while they decide.

The person who found a vendor has to justify the choice to people who never read the original blog post. A pricing range, an honest comparison, and a named case study with numbers are the materials that make that conversation possible. When they’re missing, the champion has nothing to forward to the rest of the group.

The audit scored this kind of material, which it called sales enablement, out of four. Education averaged 1.57, manufacturing 1.42, and asset management 0.20, so even the better sectors give buyers far more reasons to notice them than to pick them.

What do AI assistants find when they look?

Often, very little from the companies themselves. AI Overviews appeared on about 85% of high-intent education searches tested in the study and on every life sciences query tested. Yet company websites were largely absent from AI-generated answers in six of the seven sectors. In construction, the cited sources were mostly Reddit, Wikipedia, Indeed, and OSHA rather than any construction firm.

Fintech was the exception, with roughly 60% of established firms appearing in AI answers. Why fintech? Mostly because those firms are all over review sites like G2, Capterra, and NerdWallet. That fits the wider data. Muck Rack’s analysis of more than 25 million links found that earned media accounts for 84% of AI citations, and 45% of buyers in G2’s research said citations from software review sites are the most reassuring signal in an AI-generated answer.

Assistants lean on sources they can verify and on what other people say about a company. A company with no data of its own, no named experts, and little third-party coverage gets described by whoever else has written about its category.

Few teams are organized to deal with this yet. Answer-engine optimization came up in well under 1 in 50 marketing job posts across the sectors studied, and in roughly 1 in 200 in construction and pharma.

Does any of this connect to growth?

Probably, though the study is careful to call these signals and not proven causes. Maturity went up with company size, growth rate, and funding stage in every one of the seven sectors. Among education companies, 52% of the high-growth ones had an active content presence, against 43% of the slow growers.

Construction showed 39% against 31%. And inside each sector, the same companies kept turning up together: the ones that were clear about who they serve, that gave buyers material to decide with, and that bothered to publish for the late stage of the deal.

Volume isn’t what’s missing. In CMI’s 2026 research, 96% of B2B marketers said their company produces thought leadership, yet in many of those companies fewer than 5% of employees ever contribute to it.

Think of an engineering firm whose blog is written entirely by the marketing coordinator, while the project director who has delivered forty hospitals never appears. The expertise buyers are looking for exists. It just isn’t on the page.

Picture the buyer at the end of all this. They built the shortlist on their own, quite possibly with ChatGPT or Gemini reading alongside them, and now they have to walk a finance lead, an IT manager, and two skeptical colleagues through why this vendor.

What they need in that meeting is something to point at: a number the vendor published, a named person with the right background, a customer story with figures in it, a price range. Most of the company websites in the study had very little of that to offer.

Stefan Kalpachev is the founder of Content RevOps, a demand generation agency that builds content, data, and automation systems for B2B companies with long, trust-led sales. He leads its research into how companies across seven sectors market, hire, and show up in AI search, and previously worked on content for Pearson Online Learning and King’s College London.