Cold calling in 2026 is not dead, but the math has changed. 2% connect for cold lists, 14% for AI-targeted multichannel sequences. 62% of B2B buyers research vendors with AI engines before any sales contact.
The Tech & B2B SaaS Citation Share Study — 28 vendors, 64 prompts, 5 engines. The canonical study from EPR Research on how AI engines surface and rank enterprise software brands. The headline-finding case file is at /g2-owns-saas-buying-ai.
SaaS marketing is the most mature digital discipline in B2B. SaaS GEO programs are mostly underperforming. Five failure modes — optimizing for branded search, product pages the engines can't resolve, review programs as reputation management, underfunded analyst relations, and thought leadership without methodology.
Customer reviews on Google have moved from nice-to-have to default expectation. The five-move playbook — claim every platform, ask at the moment of satisfaction, respond to every review, fix the underlying problem, monitor drift.
Whoever names the category owns the market. G2, Capterra, Yext, Algolia, Bloomreach — the companies turning structured taxonomies into citation share inside AI engines.