Brand Is the No. 1 CMO Priority for 2026. AI Search Is No. 17. Here’s Why That Gap Should Worry You.

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Key Takeaways Buyers are using AI to shortlist vendors before they ever engage with a seller. If your brand isn’t included in the AI’s synthesis, you’ll never see the lost opportunity because the pipeline never existed.

Brand and AI visibility are the same investment. The same assets that build brand equity are the assets that get cited by AI engines.

CEOs should ask CMOs: Where does our brand show up when our ideal buyer asks an AI engine about our category? What percentage of our content investment is structured for AI citation vs. human consumption? What’s our plan to earn third-party citations?

Two data points have crossed my desk in the last 60 days that, read together, should alarm every CEO of a B2B company.

The first is from McKinsey’s 2026 State of Marketing report. For the second year in a row, CMOs rank brand as their top priority. Seventy-two percent plan to increase their marketing budget — reasonable, defensible and aligned with the moment. Generic AI-generated content has flooded every channel, and genuine brand authority is scarcer than it has been in a decade.

The second data point is where it gets uncomfortable. In the same report, AI ranks 17th on the CMO priority list. Ninety-four percent of respondents say they have made no meaningful progress in integrating AI into their marketing operations.

Now, place that next to Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2026: The average B2B purchase now involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, and generative AI has become the most frequently cited tool buyers use to research vendors. Gartner projects that by the end of this year, the majority of B2B buyers will rely on AI tools to research, evaluate and shortlist vendors before they ever engage with a seller.

Your CMO is investing in brand. Your buyers are investing in AI-mediated research. If those two things do not connect, you are building brand equity in a channel your buyers have already left.

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