The 25-Point Gap: What You're Leaving On the Table - 2026 Analyst Survey Report

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This article contains a read-out of what 175 industry analysts told us about customer evidence, answer engines, and how analyst relations can be more useful to everyone.

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A Letter to the Reader

John Rockhold, VP, Market Engagement at Spotlight

Over the past four years, analysts say that vendors are increasingly eager to influence them. That number climbed 11 percentage points, from 80% of analysts in 2023 to 91% of analysts in 2026.

Pop quiz: In that same stretch, how much more eager did vendors become to learn from analysts? Would you guess a little? A lot?

The answer is one point. In 2023, 65% of analysts experienced vendors as eager to learn. In 2026, it's 66% of analysts.

The gap between wanting to influence and wanting to learn has widened every year we've asked: 15 points in 2023, then 22, then 24, now 25 points in 2026.

I have three educated guesses about what's driving this.

The first is one of the oldest fears in analyst relations: that admitting a weakness will hurt vendors in an evaluative report. Does it? Not according to the analysts here, who answered anonymously and had no reason to be kind. "If it's all blue sky and roses we tend to be dismissive of it," one analyst said. The fear produces the result it's trying to avoid.

The second is that it takes time to build relationships that earn trust. For most of us, it's not easy to make the third and fourth conversations happen that create the conditions for transparency. When such rapport exists, analysts notice, and it changes how they show up: "It's all about trusting relationships... When I feel like I'm vested in my client's success, I am far more motivated and excited to talk about them."

The third is newer. Vendors are nervous about where their words might go — whether a candid roadmap conversation ends up training an AI model. I have no survey data for this, but I know the worry is real, and I'd bet it's growing.

So … back to that quiz. What was your answer? Don't worry, I'd have failed it, too. I certainly would've guessed more than one percentage point.

That's not the last gap in our 2026 Analyst Survey that surprised me. How many will you find?

— John Rockhold, VP, Market Engagement at Spotlight

Take Action: Three Priorities

1. Analysts Trust Your Customers More Than Your Messaging. Give them unscripted access.
2. Analysts and Answer Engines Look for Customer Evidence in Different Places. Resource both.
3. Analysts Are Publishing More of Their Thinking Outside the Paywall. Read it. Ask better questions.

Remember These Numbers (Share-Worthy Stats)

Generative AI arrived in the analyst-buyer relationship faster than most vendors adjusted to it. This year, 175 industry analysts answered our survey, addressing what's changed, what hasn't, and what they wish analyst relations teams would do differently.

The answers converge on something less dramatic than disruption, but harder to execute. Analysts want firsthand evidence from vendors' customers. And analysts are publishing more of their own thinking outside paywalls, exactly where answer engines look for it.

Methodology

The 2026 Analyst Survey

• Anonymous: Nothing traces back to a respondent — no names, firms, locations, or IP addresses collected. This means we can't segment results. It's a deliberate trade: maximum anonymity for maximum candor.
• 22 Questions: No required questions. 16 quantitative. Six open-ended questions.
• Shared: Aggregated data reveals trends and areas for improvement across the AR community. It also gives analysts a cross-field view of their own profession.

Section 1: Off the Script

Why Analysts Need Vendors' Customers

The Value of Customer Understanding, for Analysts (share of analysts naming each)

Analysts want the whole picture, and they will assemble it with or without your help.

"There's a difference between interviewing customers ourselves and hearing from them from (or with) vendors. The benefit of direct communication is hearing real-life experiences, understanding the surprises and pain points, and seeing how it's sitting over time." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q3 - How important to your coverage is it to understand the experience of the vendors' customers/end-users? Q4 - What are the benefits of hearing from customers/end-users for your research or evaluations of a vendor's products and services?

The Gap Between What Vendors Say and What Customers Share

Where Do Those Gaps Lurk? (share of analysts citing each area)

How Well Do Vendors Know Their Own Customers?

That doubt about customer understanding shows up exactly where the gaps live.

"Without being too general, it [inconsistency] is everywhere. Vendors oversell and under-deliver." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q9 - How often do you encounter inconsistencies between vendor claims and what customers/end-users tell you? Q8 - To what degree do you think vendors have an accurate understanding of their customers/end-users' needs? Q10 - When you observe inconsistencies between vendor claims and customer feedback, where do those gaps lurk?

What Analysts Prefer for Customer Truth

Most-Trusted Sources for Customer & End-User Perspectives (share of analysts, select all that apply)

Direct access leads by 16 percentage points over the next answer. Joint Vendor and Customer Briefings, which puts the vendor in the same conversation as the customer, trails well behind at 37%.

"How much better would vendor engagements be if vendors brought customers to briefings for you?"

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q5 - Which data sources for customer/end-user perspectives do you trust most? Q11 - How much better would vendor engagements be if vendors brought customers to briefings for you?

Unscripted Access Earns Trust

"What's your honest advice to vendors to achieve better customer understanding?"

Ninety-three analysts answered, and the same handful of ideas kept surfacing, unprompted. No question in this survey asked about research methods, yet that's exactly where the advice converged.

Get Someone Else to Ask

"Get a third party to talk to customers on your behalf. They are far more likely to get the truth from them."

"I would prefer to connect with customers WITHOUT the vendor on the call. The overly curated and planned conversations with only SUPREMELY happy customers is not valuable."

Ask Who You'd Rather Avoid

"Make win/loss analysis less sales-focused and more anthropological. Interview lost prospects, churned customers, and internal blockers."

"There's something to learn from dissatisfied customers, lost deals, stalled adopters, and non-customers."

Listen

"Drop the ego. No vendor is perfect, and clients know that. The best vendors are the ones that listen to the tough feedback."

"Just like with the analysts, do more listening than talking. And listen for what they're not telling you, what's missing from the equation."

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. S4 - What's your honest advice to vendors to achieve better customer/end-user understanding?

The Learning Advantage

Most versions of this ecosystem flow in one direction: vendors' customers inform analysts, analysts inform buyers. The analysts in this survey described another flow, from them to vendors.

Analysts will tell vendors what their markets believe, how buyers frame the problem, and which criteria decide a deal. Several analysts offered themselves as a low-risk place to test positioning before it goes public.

The 25-point gap between learning and influencing is the offer most vendors leave on the table.

"Industry analysts are the best way for you to understand your customers and meet their needs. Needs should drive product rather than product driving need." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

"Buyers use analysts during problem definition, not just at the vendor selection stage. Analysts can help you understand evaluation criteria, buyers' mental models, and how enterprise problems are understood. Analysts also provide a lower-risk environment to pressure test early ideas for positioning changes, ecosystem strategy, and what the market believes." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q1 - In general, do you experience vendors as… S2 - Open Ended: What's your honest advice to Analyst Relations leaders about how to find more value from their interactions with you and your firm?

Section 2: One System

Buyers Are Arriving Pre-Decided

"How has generative AI changed the conversations buyers have with you about vendors? (Select all that apply)"

A third of analysts haven't felt this yet. The rest are beginning to see side effects.

Everything above comes from analysts, describing what they've noticed firsthand. The numbers below, from outside research, show the same shift playing out at scale across the wider market.

"It is generating a need for more nuanced debate, emphasis on deeper understanding of their information sources, and decision processes to help them sort through the chaff." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q15 - How has generative AI changed the conversations buyers have with you about vendors? The B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025, 6sense — 2025. How B2B SaaS CMOs Buy Software in 2026, Wynter — 2026. The Answer Economy: How AI Search is Rewiring B2B Software Buying, G2 — March 2026. Beyond The Click: Winning B2B Buyers In The Age Of AI Search And AEO, Forrester — 2026.

How Often Analysts Talk Shortlists with Buyers

Fifty-eight percent of analysts discuss vendor shortlists with buyers daily, weekly, or monthly. Nearly a third say they rarely do. Full anonymity in our data means we cannot tell you whether that split tracks firm size, coverage area, or seniority. What we can tell you is that for most analysts, this is a recurring conversation.

"In general, how often do you discuss vendor shortlists with buyers?"

(Daily + Weekly + Monthly = 58%, the "recurring conversation" headline stat.)

These conversations carry real weight beyond their frequency. When we asked analysts where their understanding of vendors' customers actually shows up in their work, the top answer, at 66%, was exactly this kind of exchange: inquiries and questions from clients.

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q6 - When customer/end-user experience informs your point of view, where does that manifest? Q7 - In general, how often do you discuss vendor shortlists with buyers?

What Analysts Trust Most vs. What Engines Cite Most

We already saw which sources analysts trust most for understanding customers and end users. Set that list against where answer engines actually look, and the picture gets more complicated.

For analysts, Access to Customers at Vendor Events led at 79%. That's a vote for face-to-face, human-to-human contact, even as AI reshapes how buyers research vendors.

Fewer analysts counted review sites, social platforms, and Reddit among their most trusted sources, even though those platforms exist specifically to surface customer voice. And even though those sources didn't make the top of analysts' list, that's not a judgement that analysts consider them wholly unreliable.

For answer engines, on the other hand, third-party research provides a window into where they actually look when they answer a buyer's question.

Gartner shows up at similar rates on Google AI Overviews (7.1%) and Perplexity (7%), though that figure covers the gartner.com domain overall, which is inclusive of proprietary analyst research and Gartner Peer Insights. In raw mention counts, G2 leads at 38,059, with Reddit and Gartner close behind and nearly identical to each other, at roughly 34,000 each.

Analysts count on what they can verify directly: a live customer, their own survey instrument, a partner who sits closer to the deployment than the vendor does. Engines cite whatever is public, abundant, and authentic.

Most AR programs are resourced to influence just one of those. What compounds is a single system that orchestrates influence across both.

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q5 - Which data sources for customer/end-user perspectives do you trust most? Q13B - Where do you publish or promote your ungated content? "LinkedIn is the most-cited domain for professional queries in AI search," Profound — March 2026. "We Analyzed 89K LinkedIn URLs Cited in AI Search: Here's What Drives Visibility," Semrush — March 2026. "The Dark Funnel Paradox: Why Your Best B2B Leads Are Invisible (And How to Find Them Anyway)," Similarweb — March 2026. Buyer Behavior Report 2025, G2 — 2025. "The Hidden B2B Journey: The Unspoken Power of Online Communities," Reddit and SurveyMonkey — 2026.

Section 3: Outside the Paywall

Their Thinking, Out in the Open

Analysts' Output of Ungated Content — share of analysts, 2024–2026

(Increasing and "About the same" percentages were labeled directly on the chart; Decreasing and "Do not publish" figures are derived from bar heights and are approximate.)

Increasing the amount of ungated published content has climbed every year we've asked: 38%, then 41%, now 45%. In this year's data alone, nine analysts are increasing their ungated output for every one decreasing, and three years of that direction means an AR strategy built solely around the paywalled report is chasing an ever-shrinking share of what analysts produce. Almost none are walking away from publishing this material altogether. Also, not every analyst firm gates content in the traditional way. Some publish everything they produce and never had a paywall to begin with, which is part of why "about the same" can mean different starting points from one analyst to the next.

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q13 - Over the past 12 months, how has your output of content that does not require a license to access (such as blog posts, multimedia, LinkedIn posts and articles, etc.) changed?

The Why and Where of Ungated Content

"What motivates you to publish ungated content?"

Getting ingested by answer engines ranks fourth of five motives, behind promoting their own strategic ideas, firm encouragement, and driving traffic to gated work. Feeding the machines isn't why analysts publish, but plenty count it as a benefit.

"Where do you publish or promote your ungated content? (Select all that apply)"

Why LinkedIn Carries the Most Weight

We already saw that 96% of analysts who publish ungated content do it on LinkedIn. Most analysts aren't choosing one channel over another — they're active on LinkedIn and posting to a blog or trade outlet at the same time.

Whether it's part of their plan or not, analysts sharing more via LinkedIn is good for everyone because:

• Profound ranks LinkedIn first among cited domains for B2B queries.
• Semrush's analysis of 325,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity found LinkedIn in 11% of all AI responses — second only to Reddit for professional and business topics.

More analyst thinking sits in public than at any point we have measured. A published point of view gives vendors something specific to ask about. "What are you hearing about us?" is a question anyone can ask. Asking about the argument an analyst published last Tuesday requires vendors to have read it.

"It is how I fight back against AI-generated slop that pervades every nook and cranny of social media networks." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

"All my content is ungated." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

"...The traditional paywall model doesn't work anymore..." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q13 - Over the past 12 months, how has your output of content that does not require a license to access changed? Q13A - What motivates you to publish ungated content? Q13B - Where do you publish or promote your ungated content? "LinkedIn is the most-cited domain for professional queries in AI search," Profound — March 2026. "We Analyzed 89K LinkedIn URLs Cited in AI Search: Here's What Drives Visibility," Semrush — March 2026.

How Influence Compounds, for Better or Worse

Getting ingested by the same systems that might replace you is not a comfortable trade for everyone. One analyst put the fear plainly, for analysts and AR pros alike.

"AI is going to kill the analyst and analyst relations job, and we're handing it the weapons it needs to kill us." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Almost every analyst has already looked. What they found split them down the middle.

"How would you rate the quality of insights and answers from answer engines compared to you/your firm's?"

Sixty-nine percent rate output quality lower than their own firm's work: generic, thinly sourced, short on specificity. Thirty-one percent rate it comparable or better.

Then comes the harder question: do answer engines make your work more influential?

Inside the Split: What Analysts Said

Set against a prevailing story about disintermediation and lost traffic, that nearly half of analysts say the engines amplify them is a surprise. Two responses demonstrate the split.

Responded yes:

"Answer engines make my work more influential when I (or my company) show up in them." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

"We've won projects where our data/information has been referenced in LLM answers and customers have reached out directly to us." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Responded no:

"Answer engines put a huge damper on everyone's influence. Doesn't mean we stop creating content and driving influence — we just get a lot less credit for it." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

An analyst who understands a vendor's product correctly carries that understanding into the same systems buyers query. So does an analyst who has it wrong.

Being misunderstood used to cost vendors a report cycle. Now it compounds across models and buyer journeys.

That pressure isn't just personal. It's structural too.

"[Answer engines] will increasingly challenge research firms whose value proposition is centered on vendor rankings and evaluation reports... I believe this will place increasing pressure on firms that rely heavily on static rankings, while creating greater demand for firms that deliver original research, independent market insights, customer evidence, and expert analysis that answer engines can build upon." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

"I suspect that answer engines have the biggest impact at senior levels, where heavy users adopt the view that others can similarly leverage AI tools, which creates downward budget pressure on expenses for information and insight." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q14 - Have you reviewed what answer engines (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, etc.) say about the technology markets you cover? Q14A - How would you rate the quality of insights and answers from answer engines compared to you/your firm's? Q16 - Do you think answer engines make your work more influential? S6 - Open Ended: Any additional context you'd like to share on answer engines and their impact on your work? S1 - Open Ended: In general, how has your experience with vendors changed over the past 12 months? Q13A - What motivates you to publish ungated content?

Key Takeaways: Better AR, No Budget Increase Required

The full four-year picture behind that pop quiz: how often analysts see vendors as eager to influence, eager to learn, and transparent about their own failures, tracked every year since 2023.

Three measures, four years, one direction. Vendors got louder. They did not get more curious, and they got less forthcoming.

Three actions, no extra budget:

1. Give analysts access to different types of customers instead of curating them.
2. Show up where analysts look for evidence and where answer engines cite it, because those aren't the same sources.
3. Read what analysts publish, and ask about it.

None of this requires a bigger budget. It requires briefing with the lessons learned left in, because that's what turns a briefing into a relationship — and a relationship is what gets vendors a straight answer instead of a managed one.

"You get out what you put in. Too often it feels like they expect us to be 'performing monkeys' but without sharing anything. Very difficult to tailor advice if they won't even brief you." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

"Get clear... how the relationship between analyst relations, product marketing, strategy, competitive analysis and other teams can work to the benefit of all... Too often left hand doesn't know what right hand is doing with analysts, leaving value on the table for both 'sides' of the equation." — Anonymous Survey Respondent

Sources: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026. Q1 - In general, do you experience vendors as… S2 - Open Ended: What's your honest advice to Analyst Relations leaders about how to find more value from their interactions with you and your firm?

Predictions

John Rockhold, VP, Market Engagement at Spotlight

What Happens Next...?

01. The 25-Point Gap Persists

91% of analysts experience AR as eager to influence them. 66% experience AR as eager to learn from them. I think both numbers fall next year — for reasons you might not expect. And the gap will remain.

• Eager to Influence: Dips as AR's attention spreads across analysts, influencers, and communities, and learning is the half that gets cut first.
• Eager to Learn: Dips as AR struggles to find enough time, and as AR becomes increasingly apprehensive about how the information they share with analysts might train research firms' LLMs.

02. Two 45s Becomes Two 50s

Today, 45% of analysts are increasing their output of ungated content, and 45% say answer engines make them more influential.

I think both stats clear half, as analysts and research firms strive to improve their visibility in this new era of influence.

03. More Analysts Spy Inconsistencies

Today, 61% of analysts see gaps between vendor claims and customer reality often or very often.

I think that stat climbs toward 70% in 2027. AI and LLMs (analysts use them, too) make it harder than ever for inconsistencies to hide. Unless, worse yet, your inconsistencies make you invisible.

Are You on the Shortlist?

30% of analysts said B2B buyers are now leaving out vendors they would have expected to make the shortlist, because generative AI shaped that list first. Find out if you're on the shortlist and which sources of influence have the greatest impact.

CTA: AI Influence Assessment

Source for all primary statistics unless otherwise noted: Spotlight Analyst Survey 2026, n=175, fielded June–August 2026, 7th year running.