Edelman and LinkedIn have published the 2026 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, a 35-page survey of 1,135 business executives in seven countries, and its sharpest number concerns losses rather than wins: 59% of final decision-makers said a vendor's poor or absent thought leadership contributed to that vendor being removed from consideration. The report, the eighth annual collaboration between the communications firm and the Microsoft-owned professional network, was released in November 2026; a commentary by Edelman's Annie Dunleavy introducing it is dated November 9. It argues that AI tools are raising rather than lowering the value of original expert content in business buying, and that much of that content now circulates in private channels that marketing dashboards do not reach.

In Short

Edelman and LinkedIn surveyed 1,135 managers and executives in September 2026 about how free expert content from companies shapes business purchases. The results say buyers lean on AI to summarize and compare vendors, share useful material mostly in private, and drop vendors whose thinking is weak or missing, though LinkedIn sells the ad formats that distribute this content. For B2B marketers, the report's own numbers suggest that public engagement counts miss most sharing, and that suppliers have been slower than buyers to adapt to AI-driven research.

How the survey was built

The study rests on interviews with 1,135 "global business executives," according to the report, collected through a mix of online questionnaires and computer-assisted telephone interviews. Fieldwork ran from September 4 to September 21, 2026. The survey took 20 minutes to complete and covered the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, Australia and Singapore. Interviews were conducted in English except in Germany, where responses were collected in German. The report states a statistical significance level of p<.05.

Managers made up 37% of respondents, directors 29%, vice presidents 7% and C-level executives 25%, with owners, founders and partners at 2%. Company size was split almost evenly: 35% from organizations with 1 to 200 employees, 33% from those with 201 to 1,000, and 32% from those with more than 1,000.

Most charts draw on a base of 1,063 B2B decision-makers, defined as managers or above who consume thought leadership and are involved in choosing professional service providers or products. Narrower groups appear throughout. Final decision-makers, those with the last word on such purchases, number 317. C-suite executives number 310. A fourth group, thought leadership suppliers, covers 495 managers and above who work for organizations that produce free thought leadership. By PPC Land's calculation, final decision-makers account for roughly 30% of the decision-maker base and suppliers for about 44% of the full sample, which means the groups overlap.

Results are presented as seven-country averages. The report does not publish results by country, does not say whether the averages are weighted by market, and gives no margin of error.

Definitions matter here. The report treats thought leadership as content offering "expertise, guidance, or a unique point of view on a topic or in a field," made available for free or in exchange for contact details: articles, social posts, videos, webinars, slides and research reports. It explicitly excludes content "primarily focused on describing an organization's products or services" and anything buyers pay for, such as client deliverables or subscription research.

The sponsors' positions deserve a sentence of their own. Edelman sells content strategy and business marketing services; the commentary that accompanied the report was written by its head of content strategy in the United States. LinkedIn sells advertising placements in its feed, including formats that promote posts by individual executives, and its B2B Institute promotes a marketing framework it calls Buyability. Seven Edelman staff and three LinkedIn staff are credited as authors. The report names LinkedIn in one of its own questions, as the example of a professional social media feed.

The series has run since a combined 2017-2018 edition. Edelman lists editions for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024 and 2025, with no 2023 report among them, which makes the 2026 study the eighth.

The attention economy of the buying group

The report opens with a claim about time. According to the survey, 48% of final B2B decision-makers and 46% of C-suite executives spend four or more hours each week reading or viewing thought leadership. The figure combines three answer bands: four to five hours, six to nine hours, and ten hours or more.

What that attention produces is the core of the first section. Some 89% of decision-makers agreed that high-quality thought leadership makes a company feel like a more viable long-term partner, and 78% said a company's thought leadership had changed their view of it from a vendor to a potential strategic partner. Both figures are top-two-box results on a five-point agreement scale. A harder measure, framed around a specific purchase, produced a lower number: 48% said a vendor's thought leadership influenced "a lot" or "a great deal" whether that vendor made the initial consideration list.

That list matters a great deal in business buying. The report cites a 6sense study, the "2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report," for the statistic that 95% of contracts are won by companies already on a buyer's Day One List. PPC Land's coverage of LinkedIn's three-phase launch framework in May carried a different version of the same idea, citing Bain figures that 86% of B2B buyers begin with a day-one vendor list and 81% ultimately buy from it. The two numbers come from different studies and measure different things, but they point the same way.

Trust comes from understanding, not product claims

Asked which attribute of thought leadership does the most to increase trust in a company, 56% of decision-makers chose content that "demonstrates a clear understanding of the challenges, priorities, and constraints faced by organizations like mine." Only 14% picked content showing the strength of a company's products or services relative to alternatives, and 11% picked content demonstrating market leadership.

The pattern echoes earlier LinkedIn research. In a post covered by PPC Land on November 4, the B2B Institute cited buyer data in which a recommendation from similar companies was chosen by 58%, against 39% for being the market leader. Market leadership, in both data sets, trails relevance.

Elimination as well as selection

The report also tracks how a buying group uses content once evaluation is under way. According to the survey, 76% of decision-makers said thought leadership shared or discussed within the group helped assess whether a vendor understood the organization's needs and priorities, and 52% said it helped the group decide which vendor to select.

Then comes the 59%. Final decision-makers were asked whether, during an evaluation, a vendor's poor thought leadership or lack of it contributed to that vendor being removed from consideration. The answer options were yes, no, and don't know or don't remember. Fifty-nine percent said yes. On a base of 317, that is around 187 people by PPC Land's calculation. The question measures contribution, not sole cause, and it says nothing about how often such removals happen. Still, the report treats it as evidence of what it calls "the tangible risks of publishing low-quality content."

"Thought leadership is most powerful when it helps people see what's possible and gives them the confidence to act," Ginny Cartwright Ziegler, chief marketing officer of Pearson, is quoted as saying in the report.

AI as intermediary

The second section addresses AI directly, and the numbers are large. During vendor evaluation, 84% of decision-makers said they used an AI assistant or AI-powered search tool to summarize thought leadership content, 72% used one to learn about a market or solution category, and 67% used one to compare vendors or approaches. The question listed two more uses, framing a business problem and identifying potential vendors, for which the report shows no figures.

When an AI tool cited, linked to or referenced a company's thought leadership, buyers often went further. According to the report, 78% then researched the company, 70% read or viewed the cited content, and 52% used the information in an internal discussion or business case. The chart describes its base as decision-makers who reported using AI but lists the sample as 1,063, the full decision-maker group, so the share of respondents who used AI at all during evaluation is not stated.

Instead of making expertise redundant, the report argues, AI raises its price. Some 82% of decision-makers said thought leadership is becoming somewhat or much more valuable "as AI becomes a more common way to get answers, ideas, and advice about business challenges." Asked about its most important roles, 57% said providing original research, data or perspectives that cannot be found elsewhere, and 51% said adding context, nuance and human judgment that AI-generated answers may lack.

"In an AI-driven world, information is everywhere. Credible insight grounded in real expertise carries greater weight," Victoria Whitney, vice president of corporate communications and external affairs at Ecolab, is quoted as saying.

Social Media Today, reporting on the study on November 11, made the same point in plainer terms. AI, wrote Andrew Hutchinson, "can't provide real, hands-on experience and insights. It also can't summarize information that doesn't already exist."

Suppliers lag the buyers

The supplier data is where the report finds a gap. Among the 495 suppliers, 84% said distributing thought leadership through professional social feeds such as LinkedIn was incorporated "a lot" or "a great deal" into their approach, and 74% said the same of making it easy to find through traditional search engines. Only 46% said they optimize thought leadership so it can be surfaced in AI-generated answers.

The comparison with buyers is imperfect, since the 84% of buyers who summarize content with AI and the 46% of suppliers who optimize for it answered different questions. But the direction is clear enough for the report's authors, who titled the chart "suppliers of thought leadership have been slower to adapt their content strategies to AI."

That framing lands in a market that has spent 2026 arguing about generative engine optimization. Semrush's March analysis of 89,000 URLs found LinkedIn ranked second among domains cited in AI answers, and in June LinkedIn published its own guidance that posts of roughly 200 to 300 words earn the most AI search citations. LinkedIn's marketing leadership has also argued that AI systems cite point of view rather than formatting. The May launch framework cited a 6sense finding that 94% of buying groups consult large language models during their research, and Demandbase reported in August that ChatGPT referrals to B2B websites grew 303% in a year. A survey co-authored by a platform that benefits when AI tools cite its pages has an obvious interest in this conclusion, and the report does not test whether LinkedIn content is cited more often than material published elsewhere.

The forward nobody counts

Section three is the one with the clearest implications for measurement. According to the survey, 95% of decision-makers said they had shared thought leadership with a colleague at least occasionally in the past 12 months, and 55% of final decision-makers said they had done so often.

How they shared it matters more. Among the 1,051 decision-makers who had shared something, 89% had done so through a private channel such as email, direct message, work chat, a meeting or a private professional community. A smaller 67% had shared through social media or another public online channel, a category the report illustrates with a LinkedIn post, a Facebook post or a public forum. Respondents could select both.

The sharing that marketers can see, in other words, is the smaller share. The private remainder, what practitioners often call dark social, is a form of word of mouth that public analytics panels do not record.

Buyers were also asked what made a piece worth passing on. Useful data, research or evidence led at 73%, followed by practical guidance at 61% and relevance to a decision or discussion already under way at 57%.

"In every case, the idea made someone feel something, and the share is a signal back to the author that it landed," Leslie Taylor, global director of marketing at Gensler, is quoted as saying.

The report then reaches a conclusion that sits awkwardly with how social platforms usually sell themselves. Its third recommendation reads: "Because so much thought leadership is shared outside of public view, engagement metrics such as social sharing and commenting may have limited value." It suggests brand lift studies, qualitative feedback and broader social listening as ways to "capture a fuller picture." That a study co-authored by LinkedIn downgrades likes and comments as a measure is notable. It sits alongside LinkedIn's own B2B measurement guide, which found that 64% of leaders do not trust their own data.

Borrowed credibility

The fourth section turns to outside voices. When asked how much a contributor's involvement would increase the credibility of a company's thought leadership, 78% of decision-makers said "a lot" or "a great deal" for a customer or client with firsthand experience, 74% for an independent B2B content creator with relevant expertise, and 72% for an independent expert, academic or researcher.

The figures are slightly higher for support after publication, meaning sharing, recommending, referencing or building on a piece. Customers scored 79%, independent creators 78% and independent experts 75%. When a trusted outside voice amplifies a company's thinking, 81% said it increases their perception of the company as credible a lot or a great deal, and 66% said it makes them a lot or a great deal more willing to consider the company as a potential vendor.

Independent creators sit almost level with customers in these results. That matters commercially. LinkedIn launched its Creator Marketplace and BrandWorks in June, products designed to pair B2B brands with creators on the platform. The finding also extends a line of LinkedIn research: its 2025 study with Ipsos, "Trust is the New KPI," surveyed 1,500 marketers across six markets on the role of influencers and experts in building buyer confidence. That study asked marketers. This one asks buyers, which is a stronger test, though the questions remain hypothetical: respondents were asked to "suppose" outside contributors were involved, not to report a purchase they had made.

After the contract is signed

The final section argues that thought leadership matters more to customers than to prospects. Seven in ten decision-makers said continued high-quality thought leadership is more important for vendors they already work with than for those trying to win their business for the first time.

Among the 612 decision-makers whose organizations had selected a vendor and begun working with it, 66% said that vendor's thought leadership showed it continued to understand their evolving needs and challenges, and 61% said it reinforced confidence that they had chosen the right vendor. On the following page, 60% said it brought new ideas or perspectives beyond the immediate scope of the relationship, and 36% said it supported expansion of the relationship, such as buying additional products or services or widening the scope of work.

Two details complicate the reading. The second chart lists its base as all 1,063 decision-makers, although it reports answers to the same question about a selected vendor. And the question offered a third option, supporting a decision to renew a contract or keep investing, for which no figure appears.

"Companies that use thought leadership solely to win new business may be underestimating where some of its greatest value lies," the report states.

"The value of thought leadership shouldn't end when a client chooses to work with you. In many ways, that's when it matters most," Kaydee Marcinek, chief marketing officer of FM, is quoted as saying.

What the numbers do not show

Every figure in the report is self-reported, and most measure attitudes rather than transactions. Only a few questions are anchored to a specific evaluation or vendor relationship. The study does not link answers to deal outcomes, spending or win rates, and it publishes no country breakdowns. It does not say how many respondents used AI at all during their research, which makes the AI-citation follow-up figures hard to size.

The authors frame their conclusions accordingly. "The mandate for B2B marketers is clear," the executive summary reads: "create distinctive thinking that's hard to replicate, easy to discover and share, and valuable long after the sale."

Why this matters for marketers

For advertisers who buy on LinkedIn, the report is less a forecast than a description of where B2B budgets are already heading. The B2B Institute has spent the year arguing that purchases depend on the confidence of the whole buying group: its June study with Bain, "The Principles of Buyability," said 40% of deals stall because the group cannot agree, and Mimi Turner, one of the LinkedIn authors credited on this report, argued in June that AI had scrambled the B2B buying formula. The Edelman report slots into that framework explicitly, with a section from the B2B Institute that maps its findings onto three pillars: discoverable, credible and winnable.

Three practical tensions emerge for marketing teams reading it.

The first is measurement. If 89% of sharers pass content along privately and only 67% do so publicly, then a campaign judged on comments and reposts is judged on the narrower of the two channels. The report gives no count of how many shares each channel carries. The report's own suggestion, brand lift and qualitative research, moves the measurement burden from free platform dashboards to paid studies.

The second is AI visibility. The 46% supplier figure suggests most organizations producing thought leadership are not yet working to have it surfaced in AI answers, even as buyers say they use AI to summarize, compare and shortlist. Yet the report offers no guidance on how AI tools choose what to cite, and the companies best positioned to profit from the shift, the platforms whose pages get cited, include its co-author.

The third is quality control. A survey in which 59% of final decision-makers say weak thought leadership helped knock a vendor out of contention reads as a case for quality over volume. In a year when AI tools can produce generic articles at scale, the respondents say they value what such material cannot supply: original data and human judgment.

None of these tensions is resolved by the data. The B2B Institute's December 2025 case for owned prominence over rented ads and the October post on customer stories as an undervalued media channel both ended, as this report does, at a recommendation to invest in content that sits close to LinkedIn's own products. The survey's buyers may well be right about what persuades them. The sponsors' commercial interests sit alongside every one of those answers.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Edelman, the communications firm, and LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned professional network, through its B2B Institute. The survey covered 1,135 managers and executives, including 1,063 B2B decision-makers, 317 final decision-makers, 310 C-suite executives and 495 thought leadership suppliers.

What: The 2026 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, the eighth in the series. It found that 59% of final decision-makers said poor or absent thought leadership contributed to a vendor's removal from consideration, 84% of decision-makers used AI to summarize thought leadership during vendor evaluation, 89% of sharers passed content along privately against 67% publicly, and only 46% of suppliers optimize content for AI-generated answers.

When: Fieldwork ran from September 4 to September 21, 2026. Edelman released the report in November 2026, with an introductory commentary dated November 9; Social Media Today covered it on November 11.

Where: The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, Australia and Singapore, with results reported as seven-country averages.

Why: The sponsors argue that AI tools are raising the value of original expertise in B2B buying, and that much of its influence travels through private channels that public engagement metrics miss. For marketers, the findings bear on how thought leadership is measured, how it is made visible to AI tools, and how much weight to give a study co-authored by a platform that sells the ads distributing such content.