Your rented new-business pipeline

The figures come from a six-country study of real browsing behaviour, not a survey. It tracked what people actually did after searching, across desktop and mobile, over the first four months of 2026.

Nobody is certain why Britain sits at the top. The researchers say it may relate to European rules that restrict how search engines promote their own services, but they are careful to add that it could equally be cultural, or down to which features launched where first. We are not going to pretend to know. What is not in doubt is the gap itself, and that it is worse here than in France, Italy or Germany.

Consider what happened to organic search. Firms invested for a decade in content and rankings, on the understanding that good work earned visibility. Then the space above the results filled with adverts, and the same visibility had to be bought. Nothing was taken unfairly. The terms were simply changed by the party who set them.

B2B is further along this road than most sectors. In business technology searches, an AI-written answer now appears 82% of the time, up from 36% a year earlier. The question worth asking is not whether this continues. It is what your enquiries look like when it does.

Two things are happening at once. The number of clicks available is falling, because more searches end on the results page. And the number of firms bidding for the ones that remain is rising, because everyone is responding to the same problem in the same way.

An auction with shrinking supply and growing demand has one direction. Any plan that assumes today's cost per enquiry holds next year is assuming the opposite of what the mechanism does.

Automated bidding improves by watching what converts. Volume is what it learns from. A campaign producing a handful of enquiries a month gives it almost nothing, so it keeps guessing, and the cost of each customer stays high.

The practical floor in business markets is around £2,200 to £3,700 per campaign per month. In expensive categories, where a single click can cost £37 or more, it runs to £6,000 to £15,000 before the system has enough to work with. A larger competitor clears that bar comfortably. Their cost per customer falls while yours does not, and the gap widens the longer both of you keep spending.

In fairness, careful targeting and tight management do recover some of this. The honest claim is not that a smaller firm cannot compete at all. It is that below the data floor the disadvantage compounds rather than staying flat - and no amount of skill changes the shape of that curve.

The arithmetic is simple. If a firm reviews a supplier every five years, one fifth of the market is in play in any given year, and about one twentieth in any given quarter. That is the group search advertising can reach.

This is why paid search feels efficient and still leaves a company vulnerable. It is very good at collecting demand that already exists. It cannot create any. Reaching someone before they start looking means contacting them directly, because there is no auction for a person who is not searching.

And the shortlist is close to final on the day it is drawn. Buyers put about four of the five vendors they will evaluate on the list from day one, and the vendor ranked first before they speak to any seller goes on to win the deal more than 80% of the time. Being reachable when a buyer enters the market is worth very little if you were not already on the list - and the only way onto it is to have reached them before they were looking.

This is not an argument against digital marketing, and it is not nostalgia. Paid search still collects demand efficiently and should keep doing so. The argument is about concentration. A pipeline that depends entirely on routes owned by other companies has a single point of failure, and the people who control it have already shown what they do with that control.

Direct access works differently in one specific way that matters. Reach is a function of the list, not of an auction. Nobody can reprice it, push you down it, or absorb your message into a summary. That is the whole difference, and it is why the cost is predictable when the alternative is not.

Corpdata has supplied UK business contact data since 1992. Named decision-makers, picked by role, sector, size and location, for post, telephone and email. Continually verified.