Buyers Are Turning to AI for Product Research. Does Your Marketing Put Your Brand in the Right Place?

The industrial manufacturing audience is not known for chasing technology trends. These are engineers and operations managers who make multi-year capital investment decisions based on demonstrated performance. They are, as a group, skeptical by professional necessity. So when AI shows up meaningfully in their research behavior, it's worth paying close attention.

The 2025 Industrial Buying Influence Survey asked about confidence in AI search output. The headline number is this: only 6% of manufacturing buyers trust AI output directly. The far larger groups either verify AI results with other sources (55%), don't use AI for work research at all (31%), or click through to the sources AI cites (9%).

Trends in AI usage from the 2025 Industrial Buying Influence Report

Those numbers suggest an audience that is measured and appropriately cautious. But look at the search behavior data alongside it, and the picture shifts significantly. In 2024, just 8% of buyers selected AI Overview as one of their top two preferred search return types. In 2025, that number is 26%, an 18-point gain in a single year.

The 2026 data will surely show an additional gain in AI usage. But how much?

The Buying Journey Begins With AI

The skepticism about trusting AI and the growing engagement with AI-assisted search are not contradictory, they're sequential. Buyers are using AI Overview to begin their research process, then verifying what they find through other sources. This means AI is increasingly the front door to the industrial research journey, even for buyers who wouldn't describe themselves as AI adopters.

For suppliers, this has a direct, actionable implication. The AI systems that generate these overviews are drawing from the same web of content that search engines have always indexed, but with a premium on content that is authoritative, solutions-focused, well-structured, and associated with credible domains. Application case studies, technical process guides, and product performance data published on well-trafficked trade media sites and supplier websites are precisely the type of content that surfaces well in AI assisted search.

The 2025 IBI also makes an explicit recommendation on search investment: companies investing in SEM should make comparable investments in SEO and brand building to maximize impact. The buyer's preference for organic results is structural, it reflects a distrust of paid placement that no amount of bid optimization will overcome. One more signal worth watching: non-advertised, organic search returns are still preferred by 47% of buyers as their top search result type. Paid search ads are preferred by just 13%. The audience's underlying preference for earned, organic content has not changed. AI is simply a new layer on top of a fundamentally stable dynamic.