As part of our Brand ACT (Awareness, Credibility and Trust) series, we are exploring how you can create awareness among the 95% of customers who aren’t buying right now.
Risk reduction is key for B2B purchases. Buyers don’t consider brands they haven’t heard of, and marketing spend won’t convert to sales in the same quarter, despite what your leadership team believes.
Brand awareness goes beyond visual identity. It’s the result of sustained investment in building presence in the right spaces, so your brand is seen and cited in the channels and conversations that shape buyers’ decisions. In an AI-dominated world, investment in a long-term media relations campaign is becoming ever more vital.
Capturing the 95%
John Dawes’ 95:5 rule states that only 5% of target customers are buying at any one time. If you invest in short-burst marketing activities, you’ll miss 95% of your prospective audience and risk not being considered when they are ready to purchase.
Another Ehrenberg-Bass study found that reducing investment in brand awareness weakens the future pipeline. It can take more than a year of spend to correct a one-year advertising hiatus. While this focuses on consumer advertising, it’s no less relevant for more risk-averse B2B buyers. Last month, we looked at how brand awareness is inherently linked to credibility and trust to shape purchasing decisions over time. In a world dominated by AI, we need to subtly evolve how we approach and invest in awareness.
When a prospective buyer starts the purchase process, how will your organization stack up against competitors in a world where 89% of buyers use AI-generated searches?
How AI is reshaping brand visibility
Where you concentrate marketing activities matters even more in 2026. Traditionally, marketing professionals relied on coverage and measured share of voice to determine if humans were seeing and remembering the brand name. Budget was invested in paid and earned media. Websites, social media and other owned sources were (SEO) optimized for searches. While that hasn’t changed, marketing activities must also be optimized for large language model (LLM)-powered AI assistants and emerging agent-based systems:
• 60% of searches now yield no click-throughs, as AI-generated answers displace top-ranked links, and buyers are satisfied with what appears on the search results page.
• 89% of B2B buyers have named Gen AI as a top source of information in every stage of the purchasing process or Buyer’s Journey (Forrester Buyer’s Journal Survey).
Editorial Coverage still matters, but a subtle shift from paid to earned media can significantly enhance results.
Machines don’t remember campaigns. They reward consistency!
What influences AI citations?
Snowflake, a cloud-based data platform company, grew rapidly by building sustained visibility across analyst, media, and industry channels, while optimizing content for AI engines. Employed alongside SEO, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is critical to increase the likelihood of your company’s soundbites being retrieved and cited in AI-generated responses.
LLM-powered AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude don’t “rank” brands the way traditional Google search does. They are trained on vast amounts of publicly available content that favor reputable, widely cited, authoritative data sources. Companies and products that are consistently cited in trusted third-party media, such as The Wall Street Journal, Tech Crunch, Business Insider or Fierce Telecom, are more likely to surface in AI-generated answers. Fresher content can also influence what’s referenced, particularly in AI engines connected to live data sources.
This makes media and analyst relationships more important. Building a consistent messaging “war chest” around specific topics increases the likelihood that your stories are reused across media and cited by AI. Speed of response also matters: the ability to draw on messages to contribute timely perspectives increases the likelihood of being quoted in op-eds and the industry commentary that AI systems draw from.
Consistency is critical, but so is precision. Short, sporadic bursts of activity don’t translate into lasting visibility. Understanding which media outlets, analysts, and industry channels shape your buyers’ perceptions and AI-generated answers within each of your vertical markets allows you to focus PR activity on the most impactful sources.
Attribution Explained… in a Cocktail!
Marketo cofounder, Jon Miller, likened B2B attribution to making a bacon Old Fashioned cocktail. The bacon infuses flavor overnight through fat washing, but if you only measure when the drink was mixed, the bitters and stirring would get the credit. He says the touches that influence deals happen anonymously before they can be tracked, and attribution should be used to improve marketing, but not prove it.
Outdated Measurement: The Attribution Trap
Because AI Agents and their sources now shape visibility, a gap has emerged between how awareness is built and how marketing performance is measured through attribution systems. Pipeline size and marketing qualified leads (MQLs) can rule in the boardroom. But whitepaper downloads and webinar attendance are no guarantee of a sale. As leaders focus on return on investment (ROI), marketing teams measure clicks, downloads, event attendance, lead sources, and campaign influence.
Mark Stouse, Chairman and CEO of Proof Causal.ai, argues we’ve become overconfident in what those numbers tell us. They don’t measure the impact of earned media that positioned your brand in trusted publications months earlier. They don’t register the impressions formed when your spokespeople comment on industry change. They don’t account for the slow accumulation of proof points that build recognition and familiarity over time.
Brand Awareness: The Sales Pipeline Asset
Brand awareness in the AI era is not a communications metric; it is a sales pipeline asset. Created through PR activity, it reduces buyer anxiety, allows sales teams to start conversations with greater confidence, and improves conversion rates.
When a brand is consistently present in trusted media, analyst commentary, and AI answers, it becomes familiar. As buyers move from the 95% watching the market to the 5% making decisions, your company and product are more likely to be in the running.
At Calysto, we understand how to build Brand Awareness, Credibility and Trust in the AI era and know that all three must be in place to meet your business, marketing, and sales goals. Contact us to find out more.
Traditional marketing metrics used attribution to measure activity. Today, we measure presence using the same AI engines that 89% of B2B buyers use to make their decisions.
Find out more in the next article in our series, which explores Brand Credibility and how to sustain it.