Your rented new-business pipeline

Panel data on observed behaviour, desktop and mobile, first four months of 2026.

A word of caution if you take this into a client meeting. The researchers will not say why the UK sits at the top. They offer European rules on search engines promoting their own services as one possibility, then add it could just as easily be cultural, or about which features launched where. Several write-ups have stated a firmer reason than the study supports. Showing the gap is safe. Explaining it is not - and a client's agency roster may well include someone who checks.

B2B clients are the most exposed. Business buyers mostly search for facts, and facts are what AI answers do well. In business technology, AI Overviews rose from 36% to 82% of searches in a single year.

The clients to look at first: a site heavy with content, an active blog, a good share of enquiries coming from search, and a market where buyers read up before they draw a shortlist. Those accounts are hit first and hardest.

Being cited within an AI answer does help - roughly 35% higher click-through than uncited competitors on the same query. Worth pursuing. Worth also saying out loud that a 35% uplift on a base near 1% is still near 1%, so it belongs in a plan as a visibility measure rather than a pipeline forecast. Clients remember which agency was straight with them about that distinction.

The Bain number is the more useful one in a client meeting. It shows the client is not doing badly - the whole category moved. That reframing protects the relationship when organic numbers get questioned.

This is worth being able to explain. Smaller clients ask a version of it constantly: why does the same channel work so much better for our larger rival? The answer is built into how the auction works, not a reflection on the work you do. That is a far better conversation to have.

Handle with care, though. Many agencies are paid to run precisely this spend, and the argument is not that the service is worthless. Paid search collects existing demand efficiently and should continue. The point is that a client sitting under the data floor needs a second route as well, not instead - and being the one who says so is worth more than being the one who quietly keeps spending.

Be ready for the counter, because a well-informed client will raise it: tight targeting and good management do recover some of the gap. True. The defensible position is that below the floor the disadvantage compounds rather than staying flat.

On a five-year average repurchase cycle, about 20% of a category is in-market annually and around 5% in a given quarter.

This is the most useful idea to bring to a client planning session. It names something they already feel but cannot place. Reports only cover the 5%, because that is the only group the platforms can see. The other 95% never appears on a dashboard, so it never appears as a risk - and the gap stays invisible until a rival is already in the room.

The supporting number is the one worth taking into the meeting. Buyers put about four of the five vendors they will evaluate on the shortlist from day one, and the vendor ranked first before any seller conversation wins more than 80% of the time. It turns the 95:5 rule from an interesting statistic into a deadline - and it is the cleanest justification available for spending on a client's behalf before there is any measurable in-market demand to point at.

It is also a different kind of work. Choosing the targeting, shaping the client conversation and reporting on what came back is judgement rather than media buying, and it shows a client you understand what matters to their business, not just what is happening in their ad account. That advice earns you credibility. The agencies that only take a fee, only take it for a while.

It also does something for the relationship that paid search cannot. An agency that recommends only the channels the client already buys is easy to replace. An agency that brings a route the client had not considered, with the reasoning attached, is in a different conversation entirely.

Corpdata supplies UK business contact data - named decision-makers, picked by role, sector, size and location, for post, telephone and email. Continually verified. We have done this since 1992, and we work with agencies and brokers licensing data for their clients as well as with end users.