By the time a B2B prospect reaches out to your sales team, they have already made a preliminary decision about your brand. They have read your content, checked your executives’ LinkedIn profiles, searched your company name in Google and quite possibly in an AI engine, and formed a working hypothesis about whether you are worth their time. The conversation your sales team thinks is the beginning of the buyer journey is, for most buyers, several steps in.
The research phase has expanded in scope and accelerated in speed. Generative AI search tools have added a layer that most B2B marketing teams are not accounting for. Buyers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude about vendors in their category. They are getting summarized answers that draw on your content, your competitors’ content, and third-party sources. The brand cited in those answers has a compounding advantage. The brand absent from them has a problem it cannot see in its analytics.
According to 2025 thought leadership research compiled by Column Content citing the Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 64% of B2B buyers say thought leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing a company’s capabilities than its marketing materials. Buyers are actively looking for signals of credibility that exist outside of what you publish about yourself. The research phase is where those signals get found or missed.
What the modern B2B research phase looks like
The buyer research journey in B2B has expanded significantly in the past two years. What used to be a linear process has become a multi-channel sequence that marketing teams have historically treated as secondary.
A typical B2B buyer researching a vendor category in 2026 moves through a sequence that looks something like this:
- An AI-powered search query asking which vendors are leaders in the category, generating a summarized answer that may or may not include your brand
- LinkedIn profile reviews of your executives and senior team members to assess expertise and credibility
- Content consumption across your blog, LinkedIn posts, and any media coverage or third-party mentions
- Peer validation through review platforms, community conversations, or direct outreach to their network
- Direct website review to confirm that what they found externally matches what you claim internally
The website visit, which most B2B marketing teams treat as the beginning of measurement, is often step five in a process that started days or weeks earlier. The impression your brand made before the first tracked session is the impression that determines whether the visit happens at all.
Why the pre-contact research phase matters more now
Gartner’s B2B Buying Journey research has consistently documented that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total purchase journey in direct conversations with suppliers. The remaining 83% is spent on independent research. That research increasingly happens in channels that traditional marketing attribution does not capture: AI search engines, LinkedIn, peer communities, and editorial content on third-party platforms.
Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, addresses this directly. GEO is the practice of structuring your content so that AI search engines can accurately represent your brand, cite your expertise, and surface your company as a credible answer to relevant queries. The goal is to be included in the synthesized answer that an AI engine generates, not just to rank in a results page.
Brands with consistent, well-structured thought leadership content are significantly more likely to appear in AI-generated answers for B2B category queries. A brand that publishes authoritative content regularly builds a citation footprint that generative engines draw on. A brand that does not is increasingly invisible in the research phase before any sales conversation begins.
There is also a trust dimension. Forrester’s 2025 research on the B2B buying journey found that 92% of B2B buyers arrive at the purchase process with a shortlist already formed, and 41% already have a single preferred vendor in mind. Brand preference is built long before the first conversation. The research phase is where it forms.
How to build a presence in the research phase
Closing the gap between where buyers are researching and where most B2B marketing teams are investing requires three connected changes.
Build content that earns citations: AI search engines prioritize content that is structured clearly, makes specific and verifiable claims, and comes from sources with a demonstrable track record of publishing on a topic. Long-form articles with clear section structure, data-backed arguments with sourced references, and consistent publishing that establishes topical authority over time all contribute to a citation footprint. A single well-written piece does less than a sustained body of work on a defined set of themes.
Make your executives findable and credible: Buyers researching your brand will look for the people behind it. An executive team with active, substantive LinkedIn profiles that demonstrate real expertise is a trust signal. An executive team with sparse profiles or no public presence is a gap that buyers notice and interpret. Building and maintaining executive voice programs is one of the highest-leverage investments a B2B marketing team can make in the current research environment.
Distribute beyond owned channels: Content that only lives on your own website has a limited citation footprint. Guest articles, contributions to industry publications, media coverage, and podcast appearances all create third-party references that both human researchers and AI engines treat as more credible than self-published content. A distribution strategy that extends your content beyond your own properties is a direct investment in how your brand appears during the research phase.
| Invisible in the research phase | Present in the research phase |
| Content only published on owned channels | Content distributed to third-party publications |
| No executive LinkedIn presence | Active executive voice programs on LinkedIn |
| No GEO or AI search optimization | Content structured for AI citation |
| Attribution starts at website visit | Tracking dark social and pre-contact signals |
| Thought leadership produced occasionally | Consistent publishing cadence on defined topics |
What’s next for B2B teams serious about the research phase
The starting point is a visibility audit. Search for your brand and your category in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Note what comes back. If your brand is absent from AI-generated answers in your category, that absence is costing you buyer consideration you will never be able to measure directly.
The second step is a content audit against GEO criteria. Does your existing content make specific, sourced claims? Is it structured in a way that AI engines can parse and cite? Is it published on a cadence that establishes topical authority? Most B2B content archives fail at least two of these three criteria.
The third step is connecting your content strategy to your executive presence strategy. The brands appearing most consistently in AI-generated B2B answers share a common characteristic: multiple credible voices publishing consistently on a defined set of topics. The content compounds. The citations accumulate. The research phase becomes an asset rather than a blind spot.
The research phase is where buyer decisions start
Most B2B marketing investment is concentrated at the bottom of the funnel, where buyers are already in conversation. The research phase, where the majority of the buying journey actually happens, receives a fraction of the attention and investment it warrants.
The brands building a presence in that phase today are developing advantages that will be measurable in pipeline quality and sales cycle length within two to three quarters. The brands not addressing it are getting evaluated and filtered out before the conversation begins.
Marketing Mob builds GEO-integrated content programs that make B2B brands visible and credible during the research phase. Through full-service retainers, project-based engagements, and staff augmentation, we help marketing teams develop the content infrastructure, executive voice programs, and distribution strategies that determine how a brand appears before the first conversation. If you are not sure how your brand is being represented in AI search right now, that is where the audit starts.
Book a 20-minute call: calendly.com/annelle-marketing-mob/20-minute-consultation
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