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G2: 51% of B2B Buyers Now Start Software Research in AI Chatbots

G2's 2026 survey of 1,076 buyers finds 51% start software research in AI chatbots over Google. 69% chose a different vendor based on AI guidance.

6 min readPublished 2026-05-07

What happened

G2, the largest B2B software review marketplace, published "The Answer Economy: How AI Search Is Rewiring B2B Software Buying" in April 2026. The report is based on a March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers and decision-makers across North America, EMEA, and APAC, supplemented by 39 qualitative interviews with software marketers and analyzed using AI reasoning models.

The headline finding: 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% in April 2025. That is a 22-percentage-point shift in under a year. More broadly, 71% of B2B software buyers now rely on AI chatbots for software research, compared to 60% just seven months prior. And 53% report that AI chatbot research is more productive than traditional search, up from 36% over the same period.

The most consequential data point for competitive teams may be this: 69% of buyers said they chose a different software vendor than originally planned based on AI chatbot guidance. One-third purchased from a vendor they had never heard of before. As G2 Chief Innovation Officer Tim Sanders put it, "Buyers have moved from reference to inference" — they now trust AI to synthesize research into answers rather than gathering sources independently.

Why it matters for practitioners

The G2 data quantifies something competitive intelligence teams have been sensing but couldn't prove: AI chatbots are not supplementary research tools for B2B buyers. They are the primary discovery channel, and they are actively reshaping vendor selection outcomes.

1. The competitive battlefield has shifted from search results to AI answers. When 51% of buyers start in ChatGPT rather than Google, the entire SEO-driven competitive content strategy that most B2B vendors have spent a decade building is suddenly insufficient. Competitive positioning must now be structured for AI retrieval — what the industry is calling Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). According to G2's data, 85% of buyers view vendors more favorably when AI includes them in a response. Competitive positioning that doesn't surface in AI-generated answers is effectively invisible to a majority of buyers.

2. AI is compressing the consideration set and accelerating decisions. Eighty percent of buyers reported that AI chatbots accelerated their purchasing decisions, and 83% said they felt more confident in their final choices. This means the evaluation window is shrinking. Buyers are arriving at vendor conversations — if they have them at all — with AI-synthesized shortlists and pre-formed opinions. For CI teams working with sales, this changes the nature of competitive enablement: the goal shifts from influencing a long consideration process to ensuring your company appears in the AI-generated shortlist that precedes it.

3. Review data is the trust signal that powers AI recommendations. G2's survey found that 45% of buyers cite software review site citations as the most confidence-inspiring signal in an AI response. When AI chatbots recommend vendors, buyers trust those recommendations more when they can see that the AI is drawing on real user reviews. This creates a direct competitive loop: vendors with stronger review profiles on platforms like G2 are more likely to be recommended by AI chatbots, which drives more buyer attention, which drives more reviews. CI teams should treat review velocity and sentiment as a critical market signal — not just for brand monitoring, but as a leading indicator of AI-mediated competitive visibility.

4. The accuracy problem creates both risk and opportunity. Despite rising adoption, 64% of buyers encounter inaccurate AI recommendations often or very often. When AI gets it wrong, 24% of buyers turn to peer reviews as their correction mechanism. This means the AI search channel is simultaneously powerful and unreliable — which is precisely why the quality of a vendor's structured data, review presence, and content accuracy matters. Vendors that invest in ensuring AI chatbots have correct, up-to-date information about their products will outcompete those whose AI representations are stale or inaccurate.

Key details

  • Report title: "The Answer Economy: How AI Search Is Rewiring B2B Software Buying"
  • Publisher: G2
  • Survey date: March 2026
  • Sample size: 1,076 B2B software buyers and decision-makers
  • Regions: North America, EMEA, and APAC
  • AI chatbot as starting point: 51% (up from 29% in April 2025)
  • Rely on AI chatbots for research: 71% (up from 60% seven months prior)
  • Find AI more productive than search: 53% (up from 36%)
  • Chose different vendor based on AI guidance: 69%
  • Purchased from previously unknown vendor: 33%
  • View vendors more favorably when AI mentions them: 85%
  • AI accelerated purchasing decisions: 80%
  • Most trusted AI signal: Software review site citations (45%)
  • Encounter inaccurate AI recommendations: 64% (often or very often)
  • Primary AI tool used: ChatGPT (63% of B2B buyers)
  • Power users (daily AI chatbot use): 41%
  • Use Deep Research tools for evaluations: 41%

Market implications

G2's data confirms that the B2B software discovery layer is being rebuilt around AI answer engines, and the competitive implications are structural. The traditional competitive intelligence model — monitor competitor websites, track pricing changes, analyze feature releases, brief sales teams — assumed that buyers would encounter this information through search engines, analyst reports, and vendor conversations. When the majority of buyers now start with an AI chatbot that synthesizes all of those inputs into a single answer, the intermediation layer changes everything.

For competitive positioning specifically, the 69% figure — buyers who chose a different vendor than planned based on AI guidance — represents a massive reallocation of competitive outcomes. If AI chatbots are redirecting nearly seven in ten buyers away from their initial vendor preference, then the vendors whose competitive narratives are best represented in AI training data and retrieval systems gain a disproportionate advantage. This is not a marginal channel optimization. It is a fundamental shift in how competitive wins and losses are determined.

The broader market signal is that AEO is becoming a required competency for B2B go-to-market teams. G2 reported that its AEO software category grew over 2,000% as vendors scramble to optimize their presence in AI-generated answers. For CI practitioners, this creates a new monitoring requirement: tracking not just how competitors position themselves on their websites and in sales conversations, but how they appear in AI chatbot responses to common buyer queries. The companies that treat AI answer engine visibility as a competitive intelligence discipline — systematically monitoring, measuring, and optimizing it — will have a structural advantage in a market where the majority of buyers trust AI to build their shortlists.

Related resources

  • Competitive Intelligence — the foundational discipline for monitoring and analyzing competitor strategies across channels, including AI search
  • Market Signals — how to identify and act on emerging signals like AI chatbot recommendation patterns
  • CI for Sales Teams — adapting competitive enablement for buyers who arrive pre-informed by AI research
  • Competitive Positioning — frameworks for building positioning that surfaces in AI answer engines