Tracking the effectiveness of digital B2B marketing has always been difficult. These aren’t always straightforward customer journeys, since clients may not always purchase directly from you, and vendors and partners might not have systems that can interface with yours—if they share data at all. AI can make it easier to improve this reality, with the ability to connect and analyze data that you do have, and there is a push to create connected data ecosystems that can track everything.

I talked to Nichole Gunn, CEO of Extu, which is working on one of these connected platforms, about how B2B marketers can best track down a more complete set of data to determine ROI and fine-tune campaigns. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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Artificial Intelligence

AI agents are most definitely not people, but in 2026, you need to acknowledge them. New data from BrightEdge Technologies found AI agents, especially from ChatGPT, are becoming extremely active nowadays. And this makes sense: As people are getting more used to asking AI chatbots for recommendations and advice, more AI agents are scouring the internet for that information. In its new data, BrightEdge found 96% of all live AI agent activity comes from OpenAI.

But many companies are stuck in old practices, when increased bot activity on a website came from bad actors trying to slow down a site or steal data—and they got blocked, says BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu. Today, AI agents may be driving the same type of traffic spike that yesterday’s bots did, but they’re also penetrating deeper into your website to answer a potential customer’s question. Letting the agents in can help get customers by surfacing all of the relevant information you have available online in an AI response, he said. Blocking the agents, the same way bots were once blocked, means the information that goes back to that potential customer is greatly limited. When agents are blocked, they aren’t able to access information on your website and will just move on.

“It will still reference things, like if it saw a review. ... They’ll still put mentions and citations and things like that, but it won’t have all the latest information,” Yu told me. “It’s a lost opportunity for you in real time.”

How can brands respect the agents? After revamping bot-blocking strategies with the tech team, Yu recommends redesigning sites with an eye on potential tokens for AI agents to grab. Easy-to-access and straightforward information about products that can be found efficiently will help with AI agents. And while page design should be........

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