Trust hasn’t disappeared. It’s just harder to find.

Why buyers trust marketing less than ever and what actually earns credibility now

Spend a few minutes talking to marketers right now, and you’ll hear the same concern come up over and over again:

Buyers don’t trust us like they used to.

Sometimes that gets blamed on AI. Sometimes on the sheer volume of content. Sometimes on the fact that buyers are doing more on their own before they ever talk to a company.

All of those things may be true, but they don’t fully explain what’s going on. What’s changed is how buyers decide what to trust.

Buyers aren’t relying on a single source anymore. They’re pulling from AI tools, peer networks, research, events, and their own experience to decide what’s credible.

They’re moving across sources, comparing signals, and trying to make them line up.

You can see the same pattern in LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmark. Buyers aren’t forming trust in one place or at one moment. It builds over time, as different signals reinforce each other across the journey.

Gartner research shows that 75% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free sales experience, which means more of the evaluation is happening outside of direct interaction with a company.

Most marketing teams are set up around campaigns and channels, but buyers don’t experience things that way.

And that disconnect shows up everywhere.

Trust didn’t go away. It moved

Matt Carmichael spends his time looking at how people think and behave at scale. As SVP of Editorial and Content Strategy at Ipsos, he sees trust patterns across industries, not just in marketing.

He pointed out something that sounds obvious, but is easy to overlook.

“We are still very trusting by human nature,” he said. “We trust ourselves. We trust people we know. We trust the sources we choose to go to. And then the farther out we get, the less we trust.”

You can see that dynamic in how buying actually works.

It’s not that buyers suddenly distrust everything. It’s that brands don’t sit as close to the center of that trust as they once did. There are more layers now, more ways to validate what you’re seeing, and more reasons to pause before taking something at face value.

Buyers spend only a small portion of their time interacting with suppliers directly. Most of the process happens elsewhere, often independently, as people try to understand the category and narrow down their options.

AI sped things up and made them harder to read

If Matt is looking at this from a research perspective, others are seeing it play out more directly in how companies show up.

Gail Moody-Byrd, who previously led marketing at LinkedIn Sales Solutions and now advises companies on growth and positioning, spends a lot of time helping CMOs who are trying to keep up with how fast things are moving. What she described is a framework that has become highly efficient, and a little detached at the same time.

Many teams are now running what she called “content engines,” producing large volumes of targeted content, often with AI playing a central role. “There’s lots of truth in the content… but it’s not being written. It’s being generated,” she says. 

That tension shows up on the buyer side, too. People are using AI as part of their own process, often earlier than they used to do any serious research. As Matt pointed out, you should assume that anything you send is being run through an AI tool to be analyzed and compared.

It’s easy to see the appeal – it speeds things up and makes it easier to get oriented quickly.

However, people don’t treat it as the end game, which lines up with what we saw in the Benchmark data. Trust isn’t built through a single interaction or a single format. It builds over time when different signals reinforce each other.

What AI has changed, pretty dramatically, is the feel of the information environment. When it’s this easy to produce something that sounds credible, the bar for what counts as meaningful gets higher.

“Anything can sound credible now,” Matt said. “But it all kind of sounds the same.”

That’s the shift. Credibility used to signal quality, but now it mostly signals competence.

Once everything starts to sound the same, you can bet that people will start looking elsewhere.

Buyers are piecing things together for themselves

That shift shows up in how people actually make decisions. Instead of relying on a single source, they’re working across a mix of inputs, sometimes quickly, sometimes over a longer stretch of time, trying to get to something that feels consistent.

Gail described her own approach in a way that captures that process.

“I read what companies send me,” she said. “But I also look at customer stories, who’s using it, and then I want to see a real person talk about it.”

Then she paused and summed it up more directly: “That’s how I form a picture.” 

AI might help someone get started. A piece of content might explain the category. But what really matters is how those signals add up when you start layering them together.

The aforementioned Benchmark report described this as a system where different elements build on each other across the journey.

There’s also external data that points in the same direction. Buyers are far more likely to trust customer reviews than vendor-created content, which means the most persuasive signals often come from other customers, not the company itself.

That puts marketing in a different position than it’s used to. It’s still part of the process, but it’s no longer the anchor.

Messaging still matters, but it can’t carry everything

That becomes more obvious when you look at how companies are trying to stand out.

Tom Stein, the Chairman and Chief Brand Officer at B2B agency Stein, sees a consistent pattern across the clients he works with. There’s a lot of content being produced, much of it technically sound, but not much of it doing anything memorable.

In that environment, messaging alone doesn’t convince anymore because buyers check it against other signals.

Part of the challenge is structural. As the Benchmark report puts it, the funnel still helps teams organize their work, but it no longer reflects how decisions actually happen.

Buyers don’t move neatly from awareness to consideration to conversion. They move back and forth, picking up signals along the way, and those signals carry more weight when they reinforce each other.

That might be research that introduces something new into the conversation. It might be customer evidence that holds up when buyers start asking around. Or it might be simply being known before the process even begins, so that when buyers start comparing options, you’re already in the mix.

For Tom, that early familiarity is critical.

“If you’re on the shortlist on day one, you’re a lot more likely to win,” he said. “The better known you are across the buying group, the better your chances get.”

So messaging still matters, but it clearly doesn’t do the job on its own anymore.

More content isn’t fixing the problem

In some cases, the push for more content can make the situation worse.

Kate Biehl sees this up close. As CMO of Kooth Digital Health, a platform that provides mental health support, she’s responsible for marketing a service where trust isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the entire point. If people don’t trust the platform, they won’t use it.

From her perspective, the challenge isn’t just volume but also relevance.

When content doesn’t align with what people actually need, it doesn’t just get ignored. It also erodes trust, which carries a different kind of risk.

It means that every touchpoint carries weight, not just the big moments. And it makes coordination across teams more important than it might have been in the past.

People are becoming more important again

As digital channels get more saturated, buyers start to lean more on signals that feel harder to replicate.

In many cases, that leads back to people.

Peer recommendations, conversations within communities, and in-person interactions all start to carry more weight. Even in highly digital categories, there’s a pull toward something that feels more direct and less mediated.

Kate described how her team is investing more in real-world interactions, whether through events or community programs, as a way to make that human layer more visible.

Digital experiences still matter because that’s where most research happens. But they’re only one of many ways buyers engage.

What this requires from marketing

Across all of these conversations, one theme kept coming up.

Many marketing strategies still treat trust as something that can be built through messaging alone, while, in reality, it comes from alignment.

What a company says about itself, what it actually does, how customers experience it, and how others talk about it all need to line up closely enough so that buyers don’t see contradictions.

As Kate says, over time, “consistency matters more than flash.”

That kind of consistency is difficult to maintain, especially across larger organizations, but it’s also what makes something feel credible.

Trust still drives decisions; it just forms differently

If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s that trust still sits at the center of buying decisions.

What has changed is how that trust forms. It takes shape over time, across multiple sources, often before a company has a chance to engage directly.

Research from LinkedIn and Bain suggests that buyers are more likely to choose vendors they were already familiar with at the outset. By the time a formal process begins, a meaningful portion of the decision has already been influenced by earlier signals.

Buyers aren’t waiting to be convinced. They’re building their own understanding as they go, using whatever sources they trust along the way.

Stein put it more simply. “Where trust doesn’t exist, business can’t happen.”