How buyers verify vendors now — and what it demands of your content?
B2B buyers are changing how they research and verify vendors. More buyers now start their research with an AI tool, but they are also becoming more careful about what they believe.
Two shifts happening at once
Two things are happening in B2B buying at the same time, and they seem to point in opposite directions.
First, more buyers are using AI during their research. According to TrustRadius’ 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report, 63% of buyers used AI during their purchase journey.
At the same time, buyers are becoming more cautious about the information they find online. In the same report, 47% said they trust online resources less than they did before, up from 39% the previous year.
So buyers are using AI to find information faster, while becoming more sceptical about the information they find online. They want the speed of AI, but they still want to know that the information is accurate and trustworthy.
Why more information made buyers more careful?
It would be reasonable to assume that easier research makes buyers more confident. The data says the opposite. Nearly seven in ten buyers ended up choosing a different vendor from the one they first had in mind after using AI in their research. AI tools give buyers more options, but those options can also create more uncertainty.
Trust also drops when buyers think the content they are reading was created by a machine. AI-generated content is less trusted than content created by people, and a large share of buyers say they do not trust content they believe was produced by AI.
94% of buyers who used AI to research a purchase said they fact-check its responses at least some of the time, according to TrustRadius’ 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report. The need to verify information did not disappear when AI arrived. It simply moved to a different part of the buying process.
The content that passes both tests
Put these two shifts together and the requirements for good content become clearer. It needs to pass two tests at the same time. First, it needs to be easy for AI systems to understand, with a clear structure and direct answers to real questions. This makes it easier for AI to find, understand and cite the content accurately.
Second, it needs to be credible to human readers who are becoming more sceptical of content that feels automated. That means showing real expertise, having a clear point of view and making it clear that someone with knowledge of the subject stands behind the content.
This is also where publishing more content stops helping. When B2B marketers were asked why their content performed better last year, the leading answer was quality and expertise, not how much they published. Depth is now doing the work that volume used to do.
That changes how you should think about content production. The goal is no longer to publish a certain number of posts every month. It is to create fewer pieces of content that are useful enough to be cited by AI and valuable enough for a buyer to keep reading. A single, well-structured answer to a question your buyers actually ask an AI system can do more than a dozen generic updates that neither a machine nor a human has a reason to trust.
What does this mean for a lean team?
For a small team, this can be bad news or good news, depending on how you look at it. It is bad news if the plan was to publish more, publish faster and rely on volume. That approach now runs into buyers who are more sceptical about what they read.
But it is good news if you were never going to compete on volume. A technical topic explained clearly by someone who knows it well, and structured so an AI system can understand and reference it, is exactly the kind of content a lean company with real expertise can create. AI helps people find the content and understand its structure. Human expertise gives them a reason to trust it. Both are now important because buyers are looking for both.
There’s another thing to consider. As buyers use AI to find and compare vendors, the content that gets cited can influence which companies make it onto the shortlist. Content that looks automated may be filtered out before a human ever sees it. For a lean team, this creates an opportunity: a small amount of genuinely useful, expert and well-structured content can reach further than a large amount of forgettable content.
The next time you brief a piece of content, check it against both questions before it goes out: Could an AI system understand and reference it accurately? And would a sceptical buyer believe that a real person stands behind it?
