94% of B2B buyers fact-check AI research outputs, and vendors are underestimating how far trust has fallen

TrustRadius released its 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report on July 15, drawing on responses from 1,862 technology buyers and 444 vendors in a global survey conducted in January 2026. The headline number is stark: 94% of buyers who used AI during their purchase journey said they fact-check its outputs at least some of the time, according to PR Newswire's coverage of the release. That is not a fringe behavior. It is the dominant posture of the modern B2B buyer.

The report, produced by TrustRadius, now an HG Insights company following its June 2025 acquisition, documents a growing fracture between how buyers actually evaluate software and how vendors assume they do. AI adoption in the buying process is rising fast. Trust is not keeping pace. And the operational gap that results has direct consequences for every team that owns pipeline, procurement, or vendor evaluation.

Trust is falling faster than most vendors realize

A year ago, 39% of buyers said they trusted online resources less than before. That figure rose to 47% in 2026, according to HG Insights's analysis of the report. The middle is collapsing: the share of buyers who felt neutral about online resources shrank eight points in a single year, from 50% to 42%. Those neutral buyers did not become more trusting. They became skeptical.

The resources taking the biggest hits are the ones buyers associate with vendor control. Vendor marketing collateral ranked last among resources buyers actually consult. Analyst reports, once a staple of enterprise software evaluation, were used by only 13% of buyers to inform purchase decisions, a 63% decrease since 2022, per the TrustRadius report. What buyers are turning to instead is each other: 53% spoke to a peer during their buying process, and every one of them found it at least somewhat helpful. Review-site usage climbed from 58% in 2025 to 63% in 2026, and 74% of buyers consulted customer reviews during their journey.

Transparent pricing has been buyers' top wish-list item for vendors for four consecutive years, every year since TrustRadius began tracking the question in 2023, according to the PR Newswire announcement. That consistency signals a structural expectation, not a passing preference.

AI accelerated research without earning trust

Fifty-four percent of buyers say AI made their research easier, up from 40% in 2025, according to HG Insights's breakdown of the data. Adoption is real and accelerating: 63% of buyers used AI tools during their purchase journey, making AI one of the fastest-growing research resources in the study. But that adoption has not translated into confidence. Sixty percent of buyers trust AI outputs only sometimes, 20% trust them very often, and just 2% trust them always.

The verification behavior is intensifying alongside adoption. The share of buyers who always or very often fact-check AI-generated information jumped from 58% to 72% in a single year, per the TrustRadius report. Ninety-four percent verify at least occasionally. Rajat Bhatnagar, SVP of Growth at HG Insights, described the dynamic in the PR Newswire release as buyers wanting speed alongside confidence: AI provides the synthesis, but verified sources still have to back it up.

The practical implication for vendor teams is significant. TrustRadius notes in its report that AI-generated recommendations are heavily shaped by trusted third-party content, including customer reviews, independent publications, and peer accounts. Showing up in an AI answer is not sufficient. If the underlying citation traces back to vendor-controlled content, a fact-checking buyer will discount it. The report identifies this shift as a driver of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the emerging practice of ensuring brand credibility is built into the third-party sources that large language models draw from.

Decisions form before the first form fill

One of the sharper findings in the 2026 report concerns when buying decisions actually crystallize. Seventy-nine percent of buyers had already heard of the product before they began formal research, according to HG Insights's analysis. Eighty-three percent shortlisted three or fewer products, with an average shortlist of 2.7. Sixty-seven percent ended up buying the product they had favored at the start.

That sequence, awareness before research, short shortlist, first choice wins, means the typical demand-gen motion is arriving late. For most buyers, the research phase is not discovery. It is confirmation. They are looking for evidence to justify a direction they have already leaned toward. Sixty-six percent purchased an established market-leading product, and 87% bought either a market leader or a niche-specific tool. Familiarity is a purchasing criterion, not just a marketing metric.

The demo is regaining weight in that confirmation phase. The share of buyers citing a compelling demo as a deciding factor rose from 13% to 18% year over year, per TrustRadius. Product trials, prior experience, and user reviews all ranked among the most influential late-stage resources. The implication: brand presence built before the buying process begins is doing more conversion work than most attribution models will show.

The martech gap compounds the trust problem

The buyer-side trust deficit is landing at a moment when vendor-side marketing infrastructure is itself under strain. According to the 2026 eClerx Marketing Data Report, published and discussed in a June 2026 Demand Gen Report Q&A with eClerx's Scott Houchin, 78% of organizations say their martech stacks do not support their business goals despite heavy investment. The culprit, Houchin told Demand Gen Report, is not missing tools. It is what eClerx calls the activation gap: the distance between having data and being able to act on it consistently at scale.

Stacks were assembled tool by tool, each solving a point problem, and the result is platforms that perform individually but were never connected to work as a system. Insights stay siloed, analytics never get embedded into daily workflows, and the investment fails to change outcomes. Houchin told Demand Gen Report that the fully data-driven 25% of organizations share a design philosophy: they build stacks for action rather than reporting, with workflows connected end to end and performance measured continuously.

The ROI accountability gap in the TrustRadius data maps directly onto that problem. Fifty-nine percent of purchases covered in the 2026 report involved AI tools or tools with AI features, and 65% of companies are prioritizing AI investments in 2026, rising to 76% at the enterprise level, according to HG Insights's analysis. Yet 16% of buyers are not tracking AI ROI at all. Vendors estimate that number at only 3%, a five-to-one mismatch. Tools without documented ROI are the first to be cut when budgets tighten, regardless of perceived utility, and the measurement infrastructure to defend them is not yet in place at most organizations.

Seventy-five percent of buyers who purchased an AI tool say it has lived up to expectations, per the TrustRadius press release, which suggests satisfaction is real. The risk is that satisfaction without measurement does not survive a budget review. Procurement and operations leaders evaluating AI tooling now face a specific, near-term task: build the ROI tracking before the next planning cycle, not after it.

What this means for your team

• Audit your third-party content footprint now. AI-assisted buyers are verifying citations, and those citations resolve to customer reviews, independent publications, and peer accounts, not vendor collateral. If your review volume is thin or your independent coverage is sparse, GEO will work against you.
• Move brand investment earlier in the funnel. Seventy-nine percent of buyers already knew the product before they started researching. Demand-gen motions that focus entirely on in-market buyers are missing the window where shortlist position is actually set.
• Build AI ROI tracking into every AI tool deployment, not as an afterthought. The vendor-buyer gap on ROI measurement is five to one, and tools that cannot demonstrate value in the next budget cycle are at risk regardless of user satisfaction scores.
• Evaluate your martech stack for activation maturity, not platform count. If insights from your analytics tools are not reaching sales, service, and product teams fast enough to change decisions in flight, the stack is underperforming by eClerx's definition, even if every individual platform scores well.