The B2B landscape is entering a new phase—one defined not by predictions, but by precision. As AI agents reshape how buyers evaluate solutions, the teams winning are those tightening their data, structuring their content for machines and humans, and recalibrating their GTM engines for an AI-first world. This issue focuses on the levers that truly matter in 2026, informed by what we’re seeing across AI search, ABX programs, and global buyer behavior.

In this issue:

• The APAC Marketer’s 2026 Reset: Four Moves That Matter

• What AI Search Is Really Rewarding (And Why Most Brands Are Getting It Wrong)

• Why 2026 Is About Discipline, Not Disruption, for B2B Marketers in EMEA

The APAC Marketer’s 2026 Reset: Four Moves That Matter

Time is money, they say. That notion is now way past its prime.

Today, time is attention. And the truth is, everyone’s running short on it.

There’s too much coming at us, too many inputs, too many alerts, too many decisions competing for the same narrow stretch of focus. Your audience is carrying that overload too, sifting through information that only gets harder to differentiate.

That challenge is more intense in APAC. Only 36% of APAC B2B marketers are confident in their organization’s ability to reach its target audience, compared to the US (46%), and Europe (47%), according to the 2025 State of B2B Pipeline Growth report.

So before the year gathers steam, here's a quick, practical checklist for marketing leaders like you to strengthen your GTM foundation in the coming year.

1. Clean Your Model Inputs

Multi-market GTM needs clean data, not creative interpretations.

AI, intent tools, ABX, and reporting tools only work when the data is clean. Messy Salesforce fields, outdated MAP lists, or incorrect 6sense segments make everything downstream less reliable.

In APAC, this shows up quickly: 68% of B2B marketers in the region say they struggle to identify the right buying groups, a challenge rooted in fragmented, inconsistent, multi-market data.

Moves That Matter in 2026

• Combine duplicate records across markets to create a single, complete account profile

• Rebuild ICP definitions and segmentation to reflect how APAC buyers actually behave

• Refresh your MAP, CRM, and intent platform rules to remove regional inconsistencies

• Reset suppression lists so automation doesn’t misfire across countries or language groups

Outcome: A cleaner, region-ready data foundation that strengthens every AI, ABX, and GTM decision you make.

2. Refresh Your Website Structure for Agent Ingestion

If your site confuses machines, it’s confusing people too.

AI agents, from Gemini and ChatGPT to Perplexity and Copilot, now read, interpret, and synthesize your website as a source of truth. If your pages aren’t structured for machine learning, your brand won’t show up in AI overviews or agent-led recommendations. Competitors with cleaner structures will appear more authoritative to models.

Moves That Matter in 2026

• Rebuild page hierarchies around the questions AI agents are actually trying to answer. Think contextually relevant, semantic searches aligned to buyer intent, use cases, and decision-stage needs

• Create consistent, canonical product descriptions across all APAC markets so agents don’t receive conflicting signals

• Design modular content blocks (definitions, features, value props, proof points) that agents can lift cleanly into summaries and AI Overviews

• Level up  with tools like ROI·DNA Spark to see how agents interpret your pages, and ROI·DNA Radiate to optimize your web content to increase visibility across AI search engines including ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview

Outcome: A machine-ready website that teaches AI models exactly how to understand your positioning, your products, and your relevance across diverse APAC markets.

3. Rebuild Your Intent Models for 2026

It’s hard to spot real intent when your model is using old assumptions.

Third-party intent plays a significant role, but its value only increases when combined with modeled insights, first-party engagement, and regional context. Cookies are disappearing, and AI-driven discovery is reducing the reliability of traditional behavioural triggers. Yet, APAC marketers rely more on internal sources than other regions, using CRM data (62%) and sales team insights (44%) to identify buyers. In a region where markets differ significantly in digital maturity, language, and research behaviour, intent models built on generic assumptions no longer predict who is actually looking to buy.

Moves That Matter in 2026

• Shift your scoring toward signals buyers actively choose, like the topics they select and the content they engage with

• Gauge real behaviour more accurately, such as return visits, time spent, and pricing-page activity

• Rebuild your ICP using actual APAC buying patterns instead of global assumptions

• Use ROI·DNA Spark to see how AI interprets your brand and category, then update your scoring logic

Outcome: An intent engine grounded in real APAC buyer behaviour, one that recognizes true market signals, and powers precise ABX across the region.

4. Audit Your Share of AI Model Visibility

If AI agents keep recommending your competitors, it’s not bias, it’s your content.

As AI agents become the de-facto starting point for research, evaluation, and shortlisting, your visibility within these models becomes a new competitive metric. It’s no longer enough to win on traditional SEO, you now need to understand how often AI agents mention you, how accurately they describe your offering, and whether you appear in the categories buyers care about.

Moves That Matter in 2026

• Run structured prompts across major AI agents to see how you appear in category, product, and use-case conversations

• Compare your visibility to regional competitors to identify who AI models prioritize

• Use ROI·DNA Spark to see which pages AI agents rely on to understand your brand, then strengthen those sources

• Create or elevate content that defines your category clearly, so AI models adopt the messaging you want buyers to see

Outcome: A clear view of how AI agents perceive your brand, and a roadmap to increase your presence in the moments where APAC buyers make decisions.

When you stack these outcomes together, you see that each reset strengthens the parts of B2B marketing that are most vulnerable, yet most essential to your success. And that foundation becomes even more important when the landscape around you keeps shifting.

While that change plays out, your customers are navigating their own attention overload, engaging only with information they can interpret effortlessly.

In a year shaped by competing demands on everyone’s attention, the brands that invest in these resets early, and reimagine their operating models, will be able to deliver in the moments that matter.

Why 2026 is About Discipline, Not Disruption, for B2B Marketers in EMEA

The conversation around AI, GEO, and LLM-driven search has gotten very loud very quickly. Everyone wants to know how to optimize for models, how discovery is changing, and what tactics matter now.

What’s getting lost in that noise is something much simpler, and more uncomfortable:

AI search is not rewarding new behavior. It’s rewarding strong execution.

When we examine brands that are performing well right now, including Flexential, a leading provider of hybrid IT and data center solutions, the common thread isn’t some secret AI tactic. It’s that the fundamentals were already in place long before AI entered the picture.

The Real Problem: Trying to Future-Proof Without a Foundation

Flexential entered the year with aggressive year-over-year SEO growth goals across traffic and conversions, while navigating the same pressures most brands are facing:

• Shifting user behavior

• Increasing emphasis on GEO and LLM-driven discovery

• Internal questions around how much to invest in “what’s next”

The challenge wasn’t whether AI mattered. It was whether the search strategy was strong enough to support anything new being layered on top of it. Future-proofing search doesn’t mean abandoning what works. It means making sure the core is solid enough to scale.

The Goals: Designed Around Business Impact, Not Optics

Flexential’s goals reflected that mindset:

• +18–20% YoY growth in total organic conversions

• +25–30% YoY growth in high-intent organic conversions

• +10–15% YoY growth in organic traffic

The focus wasn’t on visibility for visibility’s sake. It was on driving qualified actions and sustaining growth, even as the search landscape evolved.

What Actually Drove Performance

There was no silver bullet. Performance came from consistent execution across a few core areas that compound over time. At ROI·DNA, we treat future-proofing as an execution problem, not an innovation problem. If the foundation isn’t structured, fast, and useful, no AI-layer tactic will deliver consistent visibility.

Content Treated as an Operating Lever

What made this work is that content was treated like an operating system, not a campaign. A lot of brands create content sporadically and then wonder why performance is inconsistent. Flexential kept a repeatable rhythm which meant we were always doing two things at once: expanding coverage into new high-intent areas and tightening the pages already closest to conversion.

That consistency matters even more in an AI-influenced landscape. Models are trained to prioritize clarity and relevance. They look for content that is easy to parse, well-organized, and closely aligned to the question being asked. We see this every day in ROI·DNA Spark: AI visibility isn’t a mysterious new algorithm; it’s the natural byproduct of disciplined structure. Brands that invest in extractable, citable content outperform because models can actually understand and trust them.

In other words: content that’s useful and current. That’s exactly what this cadence enables. Flexential maintained a steady content cadence:

• Four pieces per month (two new, two optimized)

• Clear prioritization around high-intent topics

• Continuous iteration rather than one-time publishing

This matters because AI systems favor content that is clear, current, and well-structured, not because it’s “AI-optimized,” but because it’s actually useful. 

Local SEO That Supports Real Demand

Local visibility wasn’t treated as an afterthought:

• Maps and local profiles were actively improved

• Location-based intent was captured and reinforced

• These signals supported both traditional rankings and AI-assisted discovery

On-Page Discipline Still Counts

Metadata optimization, structured formatting, and clear topical signals were part of ongoing execution, not cleanup work.

AI doesn’t bypass these elements. It relies on them to understand context and relevance.

Speed as a Differentiator

Execution speed played a meaningful role. SEO recommendations and development updates were implemented quickly, allowing gains to compound faster over time.

In a changing search environment, speed is leverage.

We see the opposite all the time: teams have the right strategy, but execution lags because content gets stuck in review cycles or dev tickets sit in a queue. That delay has a real cost; opportunities pass, pages go stale, and you lose the compounding effect that makes organic growth accelerate.

Flexential avoided that trap by maintaining a steady production rhythm (two new pieces per month plus two refreshes/revisions) and moving quickly on technical and on-page updates. 

The result is momentum: you’re not just launching initiatives, you’re iterating continuously and building performance month over month.

The Results: Execution Shows Up in the Numbers

That consistency translated directly into performance:

• Total organic conversions reached 245% of goal, delivering more than double the expected monthly lift

• High-intent organic conversions achieved 111% of goal, driving qualified, revenue-relevant actions

• Organic traffic reached 96% of goal and continues to grow, despite shifts in search behavior

These results weren’t driven by chasing trends. They came from doing the work well, week after week. For us, this validated a pattern we’re seeing across categories: the brands outperforming in AI search aren’t early adopters, they’re rigorous executors. AI didn’t create an advantage for Flexential; it amplified the one they were already building.

Where AI Actually Fits Into This

AI and GEO optimizations matter, but only in the right order.

Schema, FAQs, structured formatting, and AI-friendly layouts act as amplifiers, not starting points. Without a strong SEO foundation, there’s nothing for models to learn from, trust, or surface consistently. 

AI didn’t change the rules. It raised the bar for execution.

The Takeaway

The brands that will succeed in AI-driven search aren’t the ones constantly reinventing their strategy. They’re the ones who:

• Execute consistently

• Move quickly

• Treat content and SEO as core business functions

AI is changing the channel, not the fundamentals. It rewards clarity, structure, and follow-through. And that’s been true long before AI entered the conversation. Want to talk SEO and AI Search to get results? Click Here to get started.

Why 2026 is About Discipline, Not Disruption, for B2B Marketers in EMEA

At the risk of unleashing my inner Larry David, one thing that’s always irritated me about January is the slew of prediction-based content that floods LinkedIn. Well-intentioned as these articles are, the majority lack depth and simply push a narrative that everything needs to be ripped up and started again. It’s reactive behaviour and irritating because such an approach is fundamentally exhausting for everyone involved and prevents any prior successes from compounding. True, change is a constant and the best performers are agile in those circumstances, but there’s also a skill in filtering out the fads and adopting a highly selective stance when it comes to new areas of focus. So, in 2026, it’d be pretty, pretty, pretty good for marketers to remember that not every innovation will drive a meaningful outcome and, sometimes, you can’t beat a classic that’s done well.

As ever, before diving in, it’s helpful to get a feel for the lay of the land. If we look across Europe, growth stagnated in 2025 and forecasts suggest only modest recovery during the year ahead. (We’re dealing with global trade tensions, persistent inflation, high financing costs and countless geo-political issues.) Given the circumstances, business trading conditions are challenging, CFOs are concerned by controlling costs, marketing budgets are generally flat, and outcome-orientation is the order of the day. At present, the real purchasing power of marketing spend is declining so, clichéd as it is to say, we’re going to need to continue doing more with less. But humans are resourceful when backed against a wall, and scarcity can be great for sharpening focus.

ABX is the Central Operating System for Revenue

This is where ABX comes in. Tasked with driving pipeline this year, I’d be placing all my chips on an account-based go-to-market strategy, funnelling precious time and resources towards high-propensity, best-fit brands. I’d be building a list of existing customers with the most headroom for cross and upsell, while calibrating net new acquisition towards growth verticals where we have the most compelling proof points. If you’ve already got a track record for driving value for a particular company, then it stands to reason you can do likewise for other firms in their domain.

There’s also an important distinction between ABM and ABX. The former, fair or not, creates a perception of being the preserve of marketing, and can elicit scepticism from other areas of the business, whereas the latter provides the foundation for a proper cross-functional operating system that gets marketing, sales and customer success onto the same page. A famous Lyndon Johnson quote (about J. Edgar Hoover) feels apt here: “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.” True alignment requires commitment from CMOs and CROs to institute a robust ‘one team’ culture, demanding that codified internal engagement processes and a joint success measurement framework are non-negotiables. This’ll also help keep your feet dry.

Brand is More Vital Than Ever – But You Need to Measure it for Internal Credibility 

More broadly, if we think about the anatomy of a sale spanning ‘brand’, ‘demand’ and ‘revenue’ activities, then much greater attention must be given towards meaningfully balancing and connecting these stages. It’s generally accepted that long-term brand activity creates mental availability for buyers, placing your offering top of mind when they explore options to soothe a pain point, thus driving long-term pipeline. The challenge has always been measuring this in a way that your finance overlords find credible. Marketing teams need to build top of funnel measurement muscle to position brand initiatives as value-adding as opposed to cost centres, by running regular brand lift studies, measuring share of voice and correlating brand engagement with things like pipeline velocity and conversion rate.

Powering Through the ‘Messy Middle’

We’re good at delivering MQLs, although are often at odds with sales when it comes to expectations, which can impact conversion to SAL status. We also need to avoid the tendency to wash our hands of contacts at that stage of the game, instead leaning in to align on enablement and air cover that keeps prospects engaged while sales do their thing. The messy middle is where many B2B opportunities go to die, characterised by decision-making inertia at the client end, so maintaining momentum and providing subtle nudges is vital in keeping the purchase journey on the road. Given the ongoing expansion of buying committees, it’s never been more critical to meaningfully adapt a value proposition to ensure resonance with the varied agendas of the different personas - especially the hidden buyers - who can unexpectedly make or break a deal. Making a meaningful impression at this point will also help overcome internal handwringing when it comes to attributed influence over eventual wins.

It’s Not Over Once a Sale is Made

Once a deal is over the line, marketing should also be thinking about post-sale. This relates to questions like, what can we do to help support smooth onboarding, what does a longer term account expansion plan look like, and how can we leverage existing customer advocacy to drive future growth? We often talk about alignment between marketing and sales, but much less about our relationship with the customer success function. Industry estimates suggest that customer acquisition costs for net new logos can be as much as seven times higher than expanding footprint with existing customers. Win rates tend to be considerably higher in this context too, especially since buying committees are generally known, while friction is reduced thanks to legal and compliance issues having already been ironed out. There’s also a lot to be said about establishing a regular dialogue with customer champions and arming them with collateral about how you’re adding value for their business, and getting them to do your bidding within their wider organization. As per Michael LeBoeuf, noted business author: “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” The funny thing is, you might need to spend some time helping them understand why they should be satisfied.

Data is the New Oil and Refining it is More Critical Than Ever

I’m over a thousand words into this piece and have yet to touch on the disruptive and transformative impact of AI. This is probably the most heavily debated topic on the planet today, and a movable feast that’s profoundly reshaping how data capture works in B2B marketing. The ongoing decline in website visits is driving a reduction in direct form fills and gated conversions, along with less behavioral tracking data being available. This is compounded by third-party cookie deprecation, limiting cross-site tracking and retargeting, amplified by privacy-first browsers and GDPR regulations across EMEA. This shift isn’t a bad thing in my mind because it’s forcing the marketing community to get back to basics and abandon several lazy habits we’ve fallen into. For instance, gated content was never actually a direct proxy for intent or buyer readiness. Sometimes, people just want to casually read the content without being instantaneously pounced upon by an excitable sales rep. Many analysts now talk about needing to pivot towards a first-party data strategy, but this has always been the gold standard. We just deprioritized it in favor of cheaper and easier approaches.

“What’s in it for me?”

Moving forward, value-exchange experiences are going to be vital. Sure, you can have my details, but not for a re-hashed PDF. Give me immediate utility through an ROI calculator, maturity assessment, or solution configurator. People also expect friction-free experiences online, so think about progressive profiling, which means asking for an absolute minimum level of information – such as an email address – and then adding fields over time. Community and event engagement are also valuable weapons in a marketer’s arsenal. People in our industry are inquisitive, always on the lookout for valuable information, with a desire to engage with like-minded peers. Owned communities, round tables and events, combined with insightful subject matter experts and trusted influencers will act as a magnet and help establish your brand as authoritative and differentiated.

To Recap…

As we step into 2026, let’s resist the temptation to rip up the playbook and instead double down on what works, while sharpening for what’s next. ABX is the operating system that unites marketing, sales, and customer success around outcomes that matter. Brand still matters, but it needs measurement muscle. Demand needs to evolve beyond vanity metrics and navigate through the messy middle. Post-sale isn’t an afterthought; it’s the growth engine. AI and privacy shifts are rewriting the rules, but that’s not a crisis, it’s a catalyst to abandon lazy habits and get back to fundamentals – earning trust, creating value, and capturing data the right way.

I feel less grumpy now I’ve got all that off my chest. Larry, get back in your box.

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