Buyers are researching vendors differently than they were even two years ago, and some industrial websites haven’t caught up.
AI Search Is Changing How Buyers Find You
Buyers increasingly reach vendors through AI answer engines instead of scrolling a page of search results.
Forrester’s 2026 Buyers’ Journey Survey of nearly 18,000 global business buyers found that: 94% used AI during their most recent purchase, often for more than one reason. 55% to compare vendors, 54% to research products, and 47% to build an internal business case before a vendor was ever contacted. AI answer engines now outrank company websites, sales reps, and product experts as the number one research source, and companies still optimizing for website traffic alone are seeing that traffic decline 10–40% as research shifts into these tools.
These systems favor sites with clear, specific answers over vague marketing copy. If a site can’t state plainly what it does, who it serves, and how, it gets passed over. Thin content that used to rank on keywords alone no longer holds up. Sites built around real industry language, actual specs, and concrete capability statements are the ones getting pulled into AI-generated answers, which means the writing on a site now matters as much as the design.
Buyers Are Comparing Evidence, Not Brand Stories
The buying committee scanning a site today is looking for evidence, not a brand story — certifications, tolerances, materials, lead times, compliance documentation, and language specific to their industry rather than boilerplate. Competitors who’ve built sites that actually look built for the buyer’s problem are winning that first impression before a call ever happens.
A polished, modern-looking site can still fail this test if the content underneath could belong to any company in any industry. Specificity is what separates the two, and a site that looks interchangeable with every competitor’s isn’t giving buyers anything to evaluate.
Self-Directed Research Is Outpacing Vendor Contact
Gartner’s research on B2B time allocation found buyers now spend roughly 27% of their total purchasing time on independent research, and only 5–6% of that time meeting with any single vendor. That’s a 5:1 ratio of self-directed research to direct vendor contact. Separately, Gartner reports 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, up from 61% the year before. By the time a buyer raises their hand, they’ve often already narrowed the field to two or three vendors based on what the site showed them.
That reframes what a website actually needs to do. It’s not enough to describe capabilities anymore. The site has to support the evaluation itself, well before a sales conversation starts. Vendors who gate everything behind a call are increasingly filtered out of the shortlist before they even know a deal existed; the buyer just moves to the competitor whose site let them self-serve.
Buying Committees Have Grown, and So Has Friction
Buying groups have grown from roughly 5 to 16 decision-makers in recent years, and internal misalignment during the process is now common. Most committees report some friction working through it together. The engineer evaluating tolerances, the procurement lead comparing cost and lead time, and the finance stakeholder assessing ROI are often looking at the exact same page, and a site built for one of them rarely works for all three.
That growth is reshaping what a competitive site has to account for. A single generic page trying to serve every stakeholder increasingly reads as a page built for none of them, and the vendors adapting to that reality are the ones showing up favorably across the whole committee, not just to whoever picks up the phone first.
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