VML Study Finds B2B Buyers Now Start Supplier Research in Generative AI More Often Than Google

More business buyers now start looking for suppliers in a generative AI tool than in Google. That’s the headline from The Future Buyer 2026, a study from WPP agency VML released on November 10. Among 750 enterprise buyers, 55% said they begin supplier research with generative AI, ahead of the 45% who still start with a search engine.

VML surveyed buyers across eight markets (the US, UK, Germany, France, Brazil, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand) and seven industries, in late July and early August 2026.

Two audiences, two jobs

VML’s framing is that B2B marketing now has to win over a machine first and a person second. The AI tool decides which suppliers make the first list. People decide which one survives.

What the machine needs is plain: structured, consistent, authoritative information it can find and read. A supplier whose website buries specs in PDFs, or whose claims don’t match across its own pages and third-party listings, is easy for an AI to skip.

What the people need is different. Buyers want a choice they can explain and defend to their colleagues. B2B purchases carry career risk, and nobody wants to be the one who picked the vendor that failed.

Thought leadership still works

One finding should cheer content teams: 59% of buyers say they’ve moved a supplier they hadn’t heard of onto their shortlist because of its thought leadership. Good material still gets an unknown name into the room.

The study also tracks how long buyers spend after choosing. On average, organizations take 5.35 weeks to get internal approval once they’ve picked a supplier. That’s where VML says marketers should spend more effort: arming the internal champion with answers for finance, IT, procurement, risk and the C-suite.

How much weight to give it

The study is solid on scope, but it’s a single agency survey of 750 people across many markets, which means small numbers per country. Other research points the same way with caveats. TrustRadius found most technology buyers use AI while buying, and nearly all of them check the answers at least some of the time.

Google still matters for B2B. For a lot of buyers, though, an AI layer now sits in front of it, and that layer rewards suppliers who make their facts easy to find. For the website side of that shift, see Which Websites Survive AI Search and Which Ones Don’t.