Marketbridge buys Channel99 as data shows smaller B2B brands rising in AI answers

Marketbridge has acquired Channel99, combining Channel99's measurement technology with its own strategy and execution work. The two are launching AI Visibility, a service designed to show brands where they stand in AI answers, what needs fixing and what effect it has on pipeline.

Early findings from Channel99 suggest that smaller B2B companies with innovative products can appear well above established brands when AI models compare products.

B2B marketers are under pressure to understand how large language models treat them. According to Forrester's 2026 Buyers' Journey Survey, which questioned almost 18,000 business buyers, 94% now use AI during the purchase process, compared with 89% a year before.

How the tracking works

Each week Channel99 puts the same set of buyer-style questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. It records how often a brand is mentioned, whether it is recommended, how it stacks up against rivals and how it is described.

“The goal isn’t to predict exactly what every buyer will see but to provide a reliable benchmark of how a brand’s visibility and competitive position change over time,” said Chris Golec, founder of Channel99.

Big companies generally perform well in overall brand rankings, the payoff for years spent on content and building a reputation. Product comparisons tell a different story. “What surprises people are the smaller companies that are really innovative, with a cool new product, appearing much higher in some of the product comparisons,” Golec said. “That usually catches the big brands by surprise.”

His favourite example is Blue Yonder, a supply chain software business that competes with Oracle and other large firms but is among the top scorers Channel99 has tracked. Golec attributes this to investment in what LLMs currently reward: content and technology on its own website, its standing with G2, Gartner and Forrester, coverage in trade titles covering supply chains and a strong LinkedIn presence.

Golec has seen a similar gap before. Two decades ago, when he set up Demandbase, digital marketing technology was designed for consumer brands and B2B marketers had to make do. He says most AI search tools today are likewise built around shopping baskets rather than segments, buying groups and pipeline. “I don’t care how I rank for everybody,” he said. “I care how I rank for this ICP, or this audience, or the healthcare segment.”

Clarity over cleverness

Golec's view of what the models favour may not please advocates of elaborate brand language. “They like very clear descriptions rather than fancy language. They like comparisons. And they really like third-party references, sites like G2 or Forrester or LinkedIn, where thought leaders are talking about your brand or products.”

He added that Reddit is among the sources the models cite most often, and more of his customers are shifting advertising budget there.

Bob Ray, chief executive of Marketbridge, who began his career on the creative side, pointed to the power of a single simple idea, such as IBM's Smarter Planet. “Great ideas travel,” he said. “You come up with a thousand ways to tell the story because it’s simple enough and clear enough, and it has the emotional impact for people to engage with it.”

Most companies, Ray argues, spend too little time linking a memorable idea to the point at which a buyer draws up a shortlist, and AI “does not solve that.”

Linking brand to demand

Golec recalled the CMO of AlphaSense explaining at a New York Demandbase event that she had been doubtful about awareness campaigns until she ran one last year and saw leads from AEO and LLM search rise steeply. “Because we can now measure this across channels,” he said, “you can tie brand to demand much more cleanly.”

He is cautious about overstating the case. Many buyers first encounter a brand through AI and come back later via a different channel, something Channel99 has yet to fully master tracking. “Honest attribution means distinguishing directly measurable activity from inferred influence,” he said.

Channel99's scoring does not try to measure creativity, but Golec believes personality helps indirectly. LinkedIn users followed by over 10,000 people get cited more frequently, and building that kind of audience means “you probably have something more interesting to say.” His advice to would-be B2B creators is two words: “Be unique.”

Ray believes brands are fixated on the platforms AI draws on, when the real influence lies with the people using them. “It’s the influencers in it that matter more than LinkedIn itself,” he said. For B2B, the CFO and the technology buyer will each need their own voices.

Not the whole game

Neither man sees LLMs as the only thing that matters. Ray cautions against treating AI as the sole place decisions are made, comparing the moment to the early internet, when advertisers piled online and overlooked other channels that remained as important or more so. Golec considers the claim that AI will wipe out marketing jobs to be the most overblown forecast, and thinks it will instead release people to do more strategic and creative work.

Ray believes the agencies that succeed will use technology to reverse the balance of effort. “Instead of 80% of your time pulling information together and 20% creating, it’s 20% pulling the right information together and 80% actually having ideas.”

His advice for a CMO wanting to act straight away is to be curious. “Whether you use Channel99 or Profound or any of the other technology out there, CMOs should understand where they rank by topic and how that’s affecting their overall marketing performance. If they don’t, they have their head in the sand. Once they understand that, the curiosity becomes, what do I do about it?”