Two articles ran in The Drum this month on subjects that look unrelated. One is about how B2B buyers build a vendor shortlist. The other is about AI and the related collapse of organic traffic to B2B websites. I think the two are intimately connected, and that both of them stop before reaching the real takeaway.

Start with the shortlist. Cos Mingides at True discussed Bain's new Likelihood to Buy metric, which begins with what they describe as the Day 1 list: the vendors a buyer group has in mind when a purchase process opens. Around 90% of buyers end up buying from that list. True's own research puts its usual length at three names.

What follows from these numbers doesn't make comfortable reading for a B2B marketer. If nine in ten purchases come off a list of roughly three names, and you were not one of the three, then simply being invited into a procurement process is not evidence that you actually have a chance of winning it. You can be shortlisted, briefed, scored and thanked, and never have had a genuine shot.

The second article is about what happens during the buying process. Forrester expected organic traffic to B2B sites to fall by half to three quarters within eighteen months as buyers handed their diligence over to AI. Apparently that forecast was overly conservative.

The industry's response has been to rebuild content so the machines find it and quote it accurately. This has spawned an inevitable three-letter acronym, AEO, with budgets, agencies and job titles attached.

Being named is not being trusted

Bain and the B2B Institute found that in 81% of purchases, everyone or almost everyone in the buying group already knew the winning brand before the process began. So although your AEO strategy might get your name in front of a buyer, that doesn't mean the buying group will consider it.

By the way, this is not an argument against AEO. B2B site traffic really has collapsed, being absent from the AI answer really can be fatal, and a model that describes you wrongly will lose you deals. AEO is an effective tactic. But it's not what gets you on the shortlist in the first place.

What to do about it

So here's what we know. Buyers choose from brands they already know and feel confident defending, and the objective is to become the obvious choice. But how?

Three things come to mind. Start by measuring how often you make the initial shortlist. Take the three or four problems that trigger a purchase in your category and ask buyers unprompted who they would consider for each one.

Second, point marketing investment at the 95% of prospects who are not actively buying. Most B2B demand generation aims at the 5% actually in-market, as flagged by intent data. Of course, by the time intent shows up, the buyer already has their three names, and you’re either one of them or you’re not.

Third, your content strategy has to do two jobs, and they're not written the same way. One job is to be found and quoted, which means content that is plain, specific and structured enough for a model to lift. The other job is to build human buyer memory, and that’s much harder. It has to reach someone with no active need, get noticed, and still be there months later when an RFP process is triggered. That takes work that’s distinctive enough to be remembered, which is where B2B marketing loses its nerve.

The purchase process is risk-averse (the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" truism), so the campaign is made risk-averse to match. Careful, reasonable, indistinguishable from the other four companies in the category.

But nobody in the buying committee is judging whether your advertising was tasteful. They are deciding whether the brand is one they remember and recognize. Mingides says fame changes how people evaluate risk, and changes what gets chosen. Which makes forgettable work the risky option. Brave work is what makes you the safe choice.

Sadly, brand work loses budget because you can't prove it worked. Performance marketing wins it because you can. That is why most teams overspend on the latter, and why the three names in your category have been the same three names for years.

Over the years channels have changed, sales teams have evolved, and of course our machine overlords are now influencing buyer decision-making. What hasn't changed is the imperative to build brands that are known, trusted and defensible.

Sources

Cos Mingides, "Bain's new B2B metric is all about surviving buyer elimination," The Drum, September 16, 2026.

Reuben Webb's interview with Forrester's Nicky Briggs, "Want to close the visibility vacuum? Learn to speak lazy Vulcan," The Drum, September 23, 2026.