Forrester’s 2026 Buyer Insights report finds AI search is now used by 94% of B2B buyers, and Gartner says more than 95% of links surfaced in AI-generated answers come from nonpaid sources. The two numbers describe the same buyer behavior shift: AI answer engines, not Google’s link list, are the channel that reaches a B2B vendor’s buyer first.
A partnership announced on June 15, 2026, by Plat4orm and Edge Marketing is built to package the work those numbers describe. The two strategic communications firms launched a joint framework called the Trusted Answer Growth System, designed to help organizations in regulated industries stay visible in AI-powered discovery environments, with the press cycle and analyst relations at the center of the work.
The Buyers Have Already Moved
Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2025 found that the share of B2B buyers using AI grew five percentage points in a year, to 94%, and that twice as many of those buyers now rank generative AI or conversational search as a more meaningful source of information than any other channel, including vendor websites, product experts, and sales reps.
The two findings sit on top of each other, and they describe a buyer base that has already moved. The first measures how many buyers are using AI; the second measures how many of those buyers rank AI as the most meaningful source of information in the purchase process. The twice-as-many figure is the one that has moved the chatbot ahead of vendor websites, product experts, and sales reps in the buyer’s own ranking, and the analysis behind the 94% buyer AI usage figure documents the shift.
Forrester’s separate data set, the January 2026 findings on B2B buying groups, reports the size of the buying group and the role procurement now plays. The typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, and procurement acts as a decision-maker in 53% of cycles from the start. Buying groups of six or more report clear benefits in 94% of cases, the same report found, including broader perspectives, shared effort in validating solutions, and greater likelihood of approval. The same report also notes that buyers compensate for AI’s incomplete information by seeking validation from trusted sources, and the larger the group, the more stakeholders that validation has to pass through.
A third finding from the same research: more than 60% of business buyers now run a trial before signing, and 78% do for purchases of $10 million or more. Forrester’s January 2026 press release calls trials a critical risk-reduction strategy, especially for larger purchases, and the same release notes that AI search tools often deliver incomplete or unreliable information, which is why buyers seek validation from trusted human sources.
Why Paid Discovery Stops Working
The data behind the discovery shift is harsh on paid acquisition. Gartner, cited in the Plat4orm and Edge Marketing partnership announcement, reports that more than 95% of links surfaced in AI-generated answers come from nonpaid sources. The same press release adds an independent analysis of more than one million citations from top AI models, which put the share of news articles, expert interviews, and trusted third-party coverage at 89% of all sources.
A buyer asking a chatbot is not seeing a paid search result, and the chatbot’s citation graph is dominated by the press cycle, analyst notes, and third-party content. Muck Rack’s own research, summarized in coverage of the forecast that PR budgets will double by 2027, puts the share of nonpaid AI citations at roughly 94%, with half of all AI citations drawing from content published in the last 11 months. An ad buy cannot recreate that recency premium, and an ad buy cannot recreate the trust signal either. The Google I/O 2026 AI Mode and its traffic impact on publishers is the parallel dynamic playing out in media.
Two PR Firms Step Into the Gap
The June 15 announcement makes Plat4orm and Edge Marketing the most prominent bidders for the work those numbers create. Plat4orm is a strategic communications and advisory firm that specializes in legal technology, cybersecurity, AI, and regulated industries. Edge Marketing, founded in 1997, plays the same role for legal, accounting, technology, and other regulated fields, and the two firms are pitching the new framework as a joint service for regulated-industry CMOs.
The framework, called the Trusted Answer Growth System, pulls strategic communications, earned media, content strategy, answer engine optimization, and demand generation into a single market visibility offering. The system starts with a diagnostic, the Trust Signal Review, an evaluation of how an organization currently appears across search, media coverage, digital channels, and AI-assisted discovery environments, and the firms then build coordinated strategies around four capabilities they already run as separate services:
- Strengthening visibility across AI-driven and traditional discovery environments
- Building third-party credibility and authority signals that influence buyer trust
- Improving consistency across communications, content, media visibility, and positioning
- Better aligning market visibility efforts with evolving buyer research behaviors
The novelty is in the bundling, the diagnostic, and the answer engine optimization vocabulary. The underlying services (press relations, analyst relations, content strategy, and positioning) are the work the two firms have been doing all along, and the framework is a way for clients to buy them as one coordinated offering rather than four separate retainers. Plat4orm and Edge Marketing also say the framework will track how AI-mediated discovery continues to shift enterprise buying behavior across professional services, technology, and regulated industries.
The Human Channel Has Not Disappeared
Forrester’s January 2026 findings argue that human interactions remain essential, even as genAI reshapes the buying process. AI search tools, also known as answer engines, “offer speed and efficiency, but they often deliver incomplete or unreliable information, creating mistrust,” Forrester’s State of Business Buying press release states. Buyers compensate by validating what the chatbot told them against trusted human sources, and that is where the PR, analyst, and reference work stays in the loop at the validation stage.
A related wrinkle: 61% of business buyers report using private AI tools provided by their organization, per the Forrester blog on the 94% finding. When a buyer runs a model behind their own firewall, the citation graph that a public chatbot would draw on is partially replaced by the buyer’s own internal documents and approved vendor lists. Vendors that have made it onto those lists (through analyst relations, peer references, conference presence, and earned coverage) have an inside lane. Vendors that have not are invisible to the model the buyer is actually using, and the chatbot cannot introduce them after the fact.
The combined picture is a discovery and decision process in which AI does the early shortlisting, the buying group runs its own private AI over the shortlist, and humans still make the final call. PR and earned media sit at the front of that funnel for the first time in a decade, and Forrester’s January 2026 data gives the firms that do this work a clear seat at the table.
The framing matters most for regulated-industry vendors, where the buying group is large, the trust threshold is high, and the press cycle is one of the few external signals a buyer can rely on. Validating a chatbot’s answer against an external trusted source is the kind of work that PR, analyst relations, and conference presence are designed to enable. The press cycle feeds the public chatbot’s citation graph, and analyst reports feed the private AI model that the buyer’s own organization is using.
Forrester’s separate finding on trials reinforces the same logic. More than 60% of business buyers run a trial before signing, and 78% do for purchases of $10 million or more. A trial is the buyer’s chance to test what the chatbot told them, and Forrester’s January 2026 findings argue that human sources remain essential because AI search tools often deliver incomplete or unreliable information. The trial is the human-source check on the AI-source shortlist, and vendors that come into the trial with a third-party footprint already validated have a different starting line than vendors that do not.
The SEO Playbook Retires
Forrester’s framing of the marketing model change, in the blog post on the 94% finding, is that the model that has worked for years (driving traffic to a vendor site to retarget and nurture prospects) “will be much less effective.” Buyers spend more of their process inside AI answer engines, Forrester says, and less time engaging directly with vendors. The replacement vocabulary is answer engine optimization, and the optimization is for tools beyond Google.
Gartner, per coverage of its 2027 forecast, predicts that earned media budgets will double by 2027 on the same logic. The same analyst houses that pushed B2B vendors into martech and paid search are now telling them to invest in press, analyst relations, and third-party content. Firms that spent a decade cutting PR to fund performance marketing are reversing the order. The publisher impact study on AI Overviews tracks the same dynamic on the supply side of the content chain.
For the Plat4orm and Edge Marketing partnership, the timing is the pitch. Edge Marketing has been doing this work since 1997. Plat4orm has built its practice on it. The June 15 announcement sells a coordinated way to do the work, plus a diagnostic that tells a regulated-industry CMO where the firm is missing from the citation graph a buyer is reading, and the firms’ argument is that earned media is the channel that brings a B2B vendor into the AI-shortlist.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Trusted Answer Growth System?
It is a joint framework launched on June 15, 2026, by the PR firms Plat4orm and Edge Marketing. The system packages strategic communications, earned media, content strategy, answer engine optimization, and demand generation into a single market visibility service for organizations in regulated industries, and it starts with a Trust Signal Review that maps how the client currently shows up across search, media coverage, digital channels, and AI-assisted discovery environments.
Why is earned media more important than paid media for AI search?
Gartner, cited in the Plat4orm and Edge Marketing partnership announcement, reports that more than 95% of links surfaced in AI-generated answers come from nonpaid sources. A separate analysis of more than one million AI model citations, also cited in the announcement, puts the share of news articles, expert interviews, and trusted third-party coverage at 89% of all sources. AI answer engines cite the third-party content they were trained on, and paid placements are a small share of that corpus.
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization, sometimes called generative engine optimization, is the practice of structuring a brand’s earned, owned, and third-party content so that AI-powered search and discovery tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and others) cite it when answering buyer questions. Forrester, in the blog post on the 94% finding, describes the shift as moving from driving traffic through search engine optimization to driving visibility through answer engine optimization, and from optimizing for Google to optimizing for tools beyond it.
How much of B2B buying now happens through AI?
Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2025 found that 94% of B2B buyers used AI in their purchase process, and twice as many of those buyers ranked generative AI or conversational search as a more meaningful research source than any other channel, including vendor websites, product experts, and sales reps. Forrester’s separate January 2026 report on The State of Business Buying notes that 61% of business buyers also use private AI tools provided by their own organization.
Do human interactions still matter when AI does the research?
Yes. Forrester’s January 2026 findings argue that human interactions remain essential because AI search tools often deliver incomplete or unreliable information, which creates mistrust that buyers try to resolve by validating chatbot answers against trusted human sources, including analyst notes, peer references, and direct sales contact. The model Forrester describes is AI for early shortlisting, private AI for internal validation, and humans for the final decision.
