In 2013, the Software Advice B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey told a clean story: email and SEO were winning, social was overspent, and trade shows were the only high-cost channel marketers were willing to defend. Thirteen years later, the channels have changed. The underlying truth has not.
The 2013 survey ran on responses from 155 mostly-executive B2B marketers, the majority at sub-100-person technology companies with marketing budgets under $250,000.
The headline finding then: email marketing to a house list was the most-used channel, followed by SEO, organic social, and trade shows. Email and SEO scored highest on lead quality. Social media scored low on quality and quantity — but received the most votes for increased 2013 spend, because everyone else was doing it.
That last finding has not aged. Only the channel name has.
Where B2B demgen actually lives in 2026
The 2013 channels have not disappeared. Email to a house list is still a top-three quality channel. SEO still drives the highest-intent organic traffic. Trade shows are still expensive and still defended by the people who run them.
What has changed is the layer underneath.
B2B buyers no longer start with Google. They start with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews — and they arrive at a vendor shortlist already half-built. By the time a procurement-side researcher hits a vendor website, the consideration set has been filtered by the AI engine.
That filter is doing what the 2013 survey assumed Google was doing — picking the names the buyer sees first. The difference: it is naming two or three vendors instead of returning ten blue links.
The new top of the funnel
Email and SEO are still working — for the brands the engines already name. For everyone else, they are working below their potential because the buyer never reaches the form.
The 2026 B2B demgen stack adds a layer above the 2013 stack:
Citation Share inside category AI answers. Measured weekly across all five engines. Tracked at the brand level, the product level, and the use-case level.
Original research published on the brand's own domain, structured for retrieval. Earned media in outlets the models treat as primary sources. Schema and structured data on product, pricing, and comparison pages.
The Wikipedia entry. The founder bio. The customer case studies. The category-defining content that makes the brand the obvious answer when a buyer asks the chatbox for the top three vendors in the space.
The 2013 takeaway, updated
In 2013, the survey closed on a warning about cost-to-spend ratios — that a low-cost channel filling the database with the wrong contacts is not a bargain.
The 2026 version: a high-converting channel that never gets reached because the brand is not inside the AI answer is not a channel. It is a brochure.
Citation Share is the new top of the funnel. The B2B demand-generation playbook that ignores it is the same 2013 playbook that ignored mobile — surviving on inertia, until it does not.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
