Awareness Wins: Why Brand Is the #1 Growth Lever for AI Companies

Your demand gen problem is an awareness problem.

If you’re running an AI company and your pipeline is sluggish, the instinct is to throw more resources at the bottom of the funnel. More SDRs. More ads. Another gated whitepaper. The data points to a different problem, and it’s one that no amount of lead capture can fix.

The buyer already has a shortlist. You’re not on it.

The Shortlist Is Set Before You Even Know There’s a Deal

6sense surveyed nearly 4,000 global buyers across three consecutive years.

Buyers evaluate an average of five vendors. They have prior experience with four of those five. They fill four spots on their shortlist on Day One of their buying journey, before they’ve spoken to a single salesperson. And they purchase from that Day One shortlist 95% of the time. That’s up from 85% the year prior. Shortlists are getting more locked, not less.

Now, 6sense sells intent data and ABM software, so you could argue they have a commercial interest in overstating how locked-in buyers are. Fair. But Forrester’s independently conducted 2024 Buyers’ Journey Survey of 11,352 global purchase influencers arrived at the same conclusion: 92% of B2B buyers start their journey with at least one vendor already in mind, and 41% have a single preferred vendor selected before any formal evaluation begins. Forrester’s own framing is blunt: “B2B buying today is a process of confirmation, not selection.” Gartner’s 2025 software buying research, based on 3,500 buyers, found that the purchasing journey starts with an initial shortlist of 4.4 vendors and that buyers usually purchase from that list, with 53% citing vendor reputation as a key factor in making the initial cut.

Three independent research firms with different methodologies and different sample sizes all found the same thing: the shortlist is set early and the winner comes from it.

94% of buying groups rank their shortlist in order of preference before they initiate contact with sales. The vendor ranked first wins about 80% of the time. Buyers initiate that contact close to 80% of the time, and they overwhelmingly reach out first to the vendor they intend to buy from. By the time your SDR gets an InMail response, the decision is largely made. The SDR didn’t lose the deal. The deal was never really available.

TrustRadius’s 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect report tells the same story from a different angle: 86% of enterprise buyers had shortlisted at least one product they already knew before starting detailed research. The shortlists themselves are shrinking too, down to just two or three products on average, with 71% of buyers ultimately purchasing their top choice.

Separate research from The Insight Collective found that over 85% of B2B decision-makers are inclined to shortlist vendors they recognize and trust.

Brand recognition isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the qualifying criterion. If you’re not already known to the buyer, you’re not competing. You’re invisible.

One important nuance: Gartner’s 2025 research found that 83% of buyers do alter their initial vendor lineup during the buying process, with roughly one vendor dropped at each stage. So the shortlist isn’t completely immovable — there is a window to get in or get knocked out. But that reinforces the awareness argument. You need to be on the initial list to have a chance, and then you need enough brand credibility to survive the culling. Getting on the list requires awareness. Staying on it requires reputation.

What We Mean by Brand Awareness

I should define the term before going further, because “brand awareness” is vague enough to mean anything from a Super Bowl ad to a LinkedIn post.

In the context of B2B tech, brand awareness is whether your target buyer has heard of you, has a rough understanding of what you do, and has some basis for trusting you — before they start a formal buying process. It’s the difference between being a name the buyer recognizes and a name they’ve never encountered.

That awareness gets built through a combination of things: earned media coverage that puts your name in front of the right audiences on a third-party reputable site, executive visibility that makes your founders recognizable voices in their space, thought leadership content that demonstrates expertise, presence on review sites and in analyst conversations for validation and social proof, word-of-mouth from peers and communities, and increasingly, visibility in AI-generated search results and recommendations.

None of those things work in isolation. A single press hit doesn’t build awareness. A single blog post doesn’t either. It’s the accumulation of touchpoints over time that creates the familiarity the research describes. The buyer doesn’t remember where they first heard of you. They just know your name when it matters.

AI Has Made This Problem Worse. Much Worse.

I work with a lot of AI companies. And when I say AI companies, I don’t just mean the frontier model developers. I mean the much larger universe of companies building products on top of LLMs, embedding AI into existing software, testing and evaluating models, or applying machine learning to specific industry problems. If AI is part of your product proposition, this applies to you.

The pattern I see over and over is a founding team that pours everything into product and lead gen, treating brand awareness as something they’ll get to later. They want demos booked and MQLs scored. That’s understandable. But the research says those MQLs are worthless if the buyer has already decided on someone else before your SDR ever makes contact.

According to 6sense’s 2025 report, 94% of B2B buyers are now using large language models during their purchase journey. Nearly two-thirds use generative AI as much as or more than traditional search when evaluating vendors. For tech buyers specifically, that figure hits 80%.

Think about what that means in practice. Buyers are asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to draft vendor shortlists, compare solutions, and summarize product capabilities. All before your sales team knows the deal exists. Google’s 2025 research found that 60% of B2B buyers use AI tools to augment their vendor lists. And because LLMs pull from publicly available content, vendors with authoritative, well-structured, widely-cited content are far more likely to show up on AI-generated shortlists than vendors with a thin web presence.

This is what the industry is starting to call Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. It changes the awareness equation. It’s no longer just humans scanning your content and forming impressions. AI systems are now deciding whether you’re credible enough to recommend. If your brand isn’t well-represented in the training data, review sites, and structured content that LLMs draw from, you won’t make the cut. Not because a human evaluated you. Because the machine never surfaced you at all.

A fair caveat: the 6sense data suggests LLM usage peaks in the middle of the buying journey (comparing options, modeling costs, drafting RFP language) rather than at the very beginning. So LLMs are not yet the primary way buyers discover new vendors from scratch. But they are increasingly the way buyers validate, compare, and rank the vendors on their shortlist. If your competitors show up credibly in those comparisons and you don’t, you’ll get dropped from a list you were already on. That’s a different problem from not being discovered, but it’s no less fatal to the deal.

For AI companies, there’s a bit of irony here –  you’re building AI products, but AI is the thing making you invisible to buyers.

The Crowding Problem

The competitive landscape makes all of this harder. There are now over 67,000 companies operating in the generative AI space alone, up from around 50,000 at the end of 2023. And that figure only counts pure-play AI companies – it doesn’t include the thousands of established software vendors now embedding AI into their existing products. New AI startup formations have been growing at 20-25% year over year. In 2024, AI companies received over a third of all global venture capital, with startups raising more than $100 billion.

All that money hasn’t bought much clarity. Thousands of companies making near-identical claims, using similar language, targeting overlapping buyer personas. The technical differentiators that founders obsess over — whether that’s model architecture for a foundation model company or proprietary training data for an AI-native SaaS platform — are often invisible or incomprehensible to the buying committee making the actual decision. 63% of tech startups fail within their first three years according to Failory, with some estimates for AI startups nearing 90%. Commoditization is the default trajectory.

The companies that win in this environment are not necessarily the ones with the best technology. They’re the ones the buyer has heard of before the buying journey begins. Product advantages in AI erode in months. Brand compounds over years. 

You might point to OpenAI or Anthropic and argue that they built their brands through product breakthroughs, not marketing programs. True. But those are frontier model companies that attracted global media attention organically. The vast majority of AI companies aren’t building foundation models. They’re building applications, platforms, and tools on top of them. An AI-powered contract analysis tool or an LLM-based customer support platform doesn’t generate that kind of organic coverage. You need to build the brand deliberately, because the market won’t build it for you.

There’s also the product-led growth argument. Companies like Hugging Face and LangChain built massive brand awareness through open-source communities and developer adoption, not through PR or content marketing. That’s a legitimate form of brand building.

But PLG has limits in the context we’re talking about. It works when your end user is also your buyer such as a developer who discovers a tool, adopts it, and then champions it internally. The awareness builds bottom-up through usage. For a lot of AI-native companies, though, the buyer isn’t the user. The decision to purchase an AI-powered procurement platform or an LLM-based compliance tool is made by a VP or a C-suite exec evaluating vendors against a shortlist. Those buyers aren’t discovering products by using them. They’re discovering them through the channels the research describes: peer networks, review sites, analyst and media coverage, content they’ve consumed, and increasingly LLM-generated recommendations.

PLG and brand awareness aren’t opposing strategies. Plenty of companies need both. But if your go-to-market relies on a top-down sale to a senior buyer, PLG alone won’t get you on the shortlist. You need to be visible in the places where that buyer does their research before they ever touch your product.

One more objection worth addressing: some AI companies aren’t competing in an established category at all. They’re creating a new one. If you’re selling “AI-powered revenue intelligence” and the buyer doesn’t know that category exists, the problem isn’t making the shortlist, it’s getting the buyer to recognize there’s a list at all. That’s a different challenge, but it’s still a brand awareness problem. It’s just that the awareness you need to build is for the category, not just the company. And that takes even more sustained investment in content, thought leadership, and education — not less.

Awareness Fuels Demand Gen. It Doesn’t Replace It.

I am not saying demand generation and lead generation don’t matter. I’m saying demand generation without brand awareness is pouring water into a bucket with no bottom. I see this constantly with our clients. They come to us saying “we need more pipeline” and what they actually need is for their target market to know they exist.

LinkedIn’s B2B Institute established a principle that you’ve probably heard: at any given time, only 5% of your total addressable market is actively looking to buy. The other 95% are not. Traditional demand gen (lead capture, MQL scoring, SDR sequences) focuses almost exclusively on that 5%, creating intense competition and inflated acquisition costs for a thin slice of the market.

Brand awareness works the other side. It builds familiarity and preference with the 95%, equipping them with useful information about their industry and staying relevant through memorable storytelling, so that when they do enter a buying cycle, your company is already on their mental shortlist – staying top of mind. Given what the 6sense data tells us about the Day One shortlist winning 95% of the time, this isn’t soft marketing. It’s the single highest-leverage activity you can invest in.

Forrester’s research makes the same connection from a measurement angle: only 30% of B2B companies believe they can effectively measure how brand impacts demand or sales. That gap is why brand budgets get cut first during downturns and why demand gen teams end up chasing increasingly expensive, increasingly low-quality leads. They’re treating the symptom (not enough pipeline) while ignoring the cause (nobody knows who we are).

Pipeline360 found that 42% of B2B marketers now cite revenue generated as their top performance indicator. Good. But awareness builds the familiarity and trust that demand generation converts into pipeline. They are sequential, not competing. One is the fuel, the other is the engine. Without fuel, the engine doesn’t run.

For AI companies with finite marketing budgets, the correct allocation isn’t 100% demand capture. It’s a deliberate split that invests in making the market aware of who you are and what you stand for, so that when the demand gen programs fire, conversion rates are higher and sales cycles are shorter. Insight Partners’ 2025 B2B Pipeline Generation survey found that 76% of leaders say strong competitive brand awareness positively impacts pipeline, ranking just behind AI usage as a top growth factor. We’ve seen this play out with our own clients. The ones who invest in sustained brand building close faster, at higher ACVs, with shorter sales cycles. The ones who skip it and go straight to demand capture wonder why every deal is a grind.

I’ll also address the obvious objection: if you’re a seed-stage AI company burning through runway, being told to invest in something with a 12-18 month payback sounds like advice from someone who doesn’t understand your urgency. Fair. But the research doesn’t say you need a massive brand budget. It says you need to be known by the people who will eventually buy from you. For an early-stage company with a focused ICP, that’s a smaller, more achievable target. A founder with a clear point of view, active on LinkedIn, speaking at the right events, getting quoted in the right publications, contributing to the communities where buyers congregate (Wynter’s 2024 research found that 58% of marketing executives build their shortlists from their professional networks) – that’s brand building. It doesn’t require a Super Bowl ad. It requires consistency and a willingness to be visible before you feel ready.

The Compounding Effect

Peer recommendations are the top motivator for over half of B2B decision-makers when taking meetings with vendors. Wynter’s 2024 research found that 73% of B2B marketing executives rank word-of-mouth as the most influential factor in deciding which vendors to consider.

You can’t generate word-of-mouth without brand awareness. Nobody recommends a company they’ve never heard of. (This seems obvious when you say it out loud. And yet.)

BlueWhale Research’s buyer behavior analysis cited brand familiarity alongside persuasive content as a key factor for decision-makers early in the buying cycle. And 90% of buyers in the Insight Collective research said they are more likely to engage with content from brands they recognize and trust.

All of these data points feed the same loop. Awareness creates recognition, which builds trust, which generates recommendations, which fill shortlists, which convert to pipeline, which closes to revenue. Demand gen accelerates the later stages of that sequence. But without awareness priming the earlier ones, there’s nothing to accelerate.

What This Means for AI Companies Right Now

If you’re leading marketing at an AI company, the uncomfortable truth is this: your demand gen results are probably a lagging indicator of your brand awareness investment from 12-18 months ago. If that investment was minimal (as it is for most early-stage AI companies) then your pipeline challenges are entirely predictable.

The fix isn’t more SDRs or another ABM platform. It’s a sustained program of brand building. Earned media that gets your name in front of the right audiences. Executive visibility that positions your founders as credible voices. Content that AI systems will surface when buyers ask for recommendations. A GEO strategy that ensures you’re visible in the new AI-mediated discovery layer, and paid amplifies all of these for greater reach and impact.

The research is consistent across 6sense, Forrester, and Gartner: the winner almost always comes from the early shortlist. If you’re not building brand awareness, you’re not on that list.

So stop blaming your SDRs. Stop swapping out your ABM vendor. Start investing in being known. The pipeline will follow, and it’ll move faster than anything your demand gen team has seen, because the buyers will already know your name when they pick up the phone.

That’s why awareness wins.