4. Buyers use ten different sources. Most marketing budgets fund two or three.

For Marketing

There is no dominant channel in B2B buying. Buyers draw from internal discussions, existing knowledge, vendor web content, peer recommendations, analyst input, LLMs, free trials, review sites, industry events, and channel partners. The figures are close together. No single source has a decisive lead. No single channel is optional.

LLMs deserve particular attention because they are widely misread.

81% of buyers globally use them during their evaluation, which sounds significant until you look at what they are actually doing: synthesizing information, comparing vendor offerings, analyzing reviews. Only around one in five buyers cite LLMs as an influential source in their decision process, and they rank last as a source for staying informed between buying cycles. AI is a processing tool in the buyer’s toolkit, not a discovery channel.

Build your LLM presence strategy accordingly.

Our GTM 2027 recommendations

1.

Audit your current channel presence against the sources buyers actually use. Where are you absent or underinvested? Peer and community channels are consistently influential and consistently underserved.

2.

Review site presence is a baseline, not a nice to have.
An unmanaged review site profile is a gap in your pre-contact brand story.

3.

Invest in LLM visibility, but frame it correctly. Focus on being present in the content buyers are synthesizing, not on appearing in cold discovery queries.

4.

Build answer engine optimization around the roles in your buying group, not just your brand. The CFO and the IT architect are asking very different questions.

5.

In markets with high distributor and channel partner involvement, being present in the channels that intermediaries use to stay informed matters as much as direct vendor visibility.

One more point on AI visibility worth
making explicitly.

Most tools and platforms that measure a brand's AI visibility do so at account level. That is problematic. Visibility depends greatly on how each member of the buying group uses LLMs and what questions they bring to them. A CFO asking about risk and ROI is not asking what a technical evaluator is asking. AI visibility at account level masks the role-level differences that actually matter.

Breaking it down by buying group role would be considerably more useful. LeadFabric has developed a solution for this. Contact us here if you are interested.