The New B2B Influencers: Why LLMs Just Made Trust the Most Valuable Signal

I have done a 180 on Influencer marketing in B2B - LLMs, trust and citation are big drivers besides the wider benefits that credible people can have on flattening sales cycles through credibility

Disclaimer - just weeks ago I was a huge sceptic on influencer + B2B. A deeper dive into what is driving LLM discovery, a greater awareness that the old discovery funnel is collapsing precipitously fast and a reflection that B2C tactics can work for B2B, with the right frameworks and tweaks.

Influencer marketing in B2B has long been a punchline.
We’ve all seen the formula:

• A “LinkedIn Top Voice” pushing viral carousels.

• Sponsored webinars with 12 registrants.

• Whitepaper quotes from people you’ve never heard of.

But here’s the shift no one in B2B is ready for: in the LLM era, influencers matter more than ever.

Why? Because influence isn’t just about persuading humans anymore. It’s about shaping the citation layer that machines learn from.

When your buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity a question like“What’s the best ABM platform?” the answers aren’t being pulled from thin air. They’re stitched together from trusted, repeated, and cited voices across the internet.

And this is where influencer marketing, done properly, becomes a competitive moat.

Part 1: From Reach to Relevance

In B2C, influencers sell lifestyle.
In early B2B influencer attempts, we copied the same playbook: find people with reach, get them to post about your product, measure impressions.

But impressions don’t close eight-figure contracts.

In B2B, the real lever is trust transfer. We’re looking to leverage an influencers career, positioning and credibility to raise the perception of our business.

• A respected engineer showing how they solved a problem using your platform.

• A CISO on a podcast explaining why they trusted Vendor A over Vendor B.

• A product strategist publishing frameworks that analysts cite, and that end up embedded in GPT’s training data.

That’s the game: not reach, but being the source of truth buyers (and algorithms) lean on.

Ask yourself: whose judgment would my ICP actually trust? That’s your influencer.

Part 2: Why LLMs Change the Equation

The rise of LLMs as a discovery channel is a paradigm shift.

Today’s buyers aren’t just Googling. They’re prompting:

• “What’s the difference between Demandbase and 6sense?”

• “What’s the best way to measure ABM campaign ROI?”

• “Which DSPs are strongest for B2B?”

The models answer by pulling from:

• Analyst reports and PDFs.

• Blog posts, LinkedIn articles, Substack newsletters.

• GitHub repos, podcasts, transcripts, and citations.

• A full 10% of the time - Reddit threads, sub-Reddits and posts

In other words: LLMs surface who’s been referenced the most, with the most credibility. It would seem that they are trying to find these subject matter experts whether they may post - hence the importance of indexable posts on Pulse articles, Substacks and Reddit.

That means your influencer strategy is now directly linked to:

• What shows up in GPT outputs.

• How your buyers get educated.

• Which frameworks shape the buying conversation.

Al the while remembering that 89% of B2B procurement now uses LLM.

The New Playbook

This is how influence actually compounds in the LLM era:

1. Signal Amplifiers (blogs, walkthroughs, podcasts, open-source) create the raw surface area.

2. Trust Translators & Analysts (practitioners, Substacks, frameworks) distill those signals into credible narratives.

3. LLM Discovery & Citations (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) pick up on what’s referenced most and embed it into answers.

4. Buyer Discovery & Category Perception is the output: what decision-makers actually see and believe.

On the sides:

• LinkedIn Authority Creative is the spark—authentic influencer content that carries trust.

• FunnelFuel Omnichannel ABM amplifies that content beyond social, pushing it across your entire ABM list.

The playbook is simple: seed influence, amplify trust, and let citations compound into discovery.

Part 3: Case Studies in Influence-as-Signal

Let’s make it real:

1. GitHub Stars as Influence
   In dev tools, influencer marketing doesn’t look like LinkedIn. It looks like an open-source repo with 30,000 stars. That’s influence: developers teaching other developers which tool is worth their time. LLMs notice—because those repos get cited and embedded into responses.

2. Analyst + Practitioner Convergence
   A Gartner report gets picked up. But the blog post from a respected practitioner—debunking or extending the Gartner view—gets linked across Slack groups, podcasts, and forums. LLMs don’t just read the quadrant; they see the discourse around it.

3. The New ABM Playbook
   A mid-level marketer builds a following by showing real ABM campaign breakdowns. Their frameworks spread across LinkedIn, podcasts, and Substack. Months later, when Perplexity answers “best ABM campaign setup”, that framework gets cited back. The marketer has become an influencer—and the vendor they use gets surfaced inside AI answers.

Part 4: Three Roles for B2B Influencer Marketing in 2025

1. Citation Seeders
   People who produce assets that get cited and shared. Benchmarks, frameworks, teardown posts. These shape both human analysts and machine learning models.

2. Trust Translators
   Practitioners who make complex tech understandable. They don’t dumb it down—they contextualize it for business impact.

3. Signal Amplifiers
   Everyday operators who show their work publicly. A RevOps leader posting a walkthrough. An engineer publishing a snippet. These micro-signals compound into a wider perception of credibility.

4. Creative winners

   B2B creative is often… sub-par. At FunnelFuel, LinkedIn creative can be imported via a Linkedin URL and turned into a programmatic ad. This lets the vendor utilise the influencer of a B2B influencer, have a LinkedIn looking creative, and save time and energy on wider asset creation. It harmonises the creative, and leans into the expertise.

5. Content syndication

   Often done woefully badly, I’d be intrigued to see how content syndication could be improved with influencers - both standalone and in conjunction with 4 above

Part 5: Why This Matters for Marketers

If you’re building in B2B, your influencer strategy isn’t about renting an audience.
It’s about embedding your product inside the citation fabric of your category.

That means:

• Prioritising depth over reach. A bit like a very high CTR in programmatic; I’d be wary of too higher reach in influencer marketing - it talks of diluted specialism. Hyper-specialism and the credibility that brings, is what we wanthere. Like a considered high intent click.

• Investing in practitioners who are actually respected in their niche.

• Thinking about how your influencer content will show up in AI answers two years from now.

The winners won’t be the loudest—they’ll be the most referenced.

Part 6: The Questions No One’s Asking (Yet)

• What happens when buyers trust ChatGPT citations more than Gartner quadrants? Believe me it is starting. OpenAi is chasing the consulting layer and getting large enterprises to invest $10m+ to embed their tech deep into the org. This is a direct attack on the consulting industry

• Which influencers will shape how models explain your category?

• How do you track your presence inside AI discovery engines the same way you track SEO rankings?

• How can I leverage influence beyond social walled hardens, and align with my wider marketing mix?

• How do I find the most deeply credible people whose relationship with their audience is based on deep sector specialism and knowledge?

These aren’t “future” questions. They’re already happening.

Part 7: From Influence to Impact — Turning Social Authority into Omnichannel ABM

Here’s the missing link: most B2B influencer marketing stays stuck on social.
A great post goes viral on LinkedIn, but then what? It disappears into the feed. At the behest of a volatile LinkedIn algo, the post that could drive 7/8/9 figure pipe can vanish. What if you can take back control?

The smarter play: treat influencer content as creative fuel for your ABM strategy.

Here’s how it works:

1. Source Authority Creative
   Take the most credible influencer content—the teardown, the framework, the analyst-style post. This is your authority creative. This gives you longer term ability to leverage the influence and critically, control exactly who sees it

2. Activate with ABM
   Instead of hoping the right people see it on LinkedIn, run that creative through for example, FunnelFuel.io ABM pipelines. Push it across your entire ABM list: display, native, CTV, audio, and beyond.

3. Amplify the Trust Signal
   Now you’re not just hoping an algorithm boosts your influencer post—you’re deliberately putting it in front of the buying committee across every channel they touch.

The result:

• Buyers see trusted influencer content —> more likely to engage, better chance to use new metrics like Attention metrics to really measure impact because you are more likely TO have made an impact

• It shows up not only on LinkedIn but across their digital journey.

• Your brand gets wrapped inside both the authority of the influencer and the reach of omnichannel ABM.

This is where influencer marketing stops being fluffy and starts being a pipeline driver.

The Unmatched Take

Influence in B2B isn’t a vanity play. It’s the signal layer that drives both buyer trust and LLM outputs.

If you’re serious about AI-era discovery, you can’t afford to ignore influencer marketing. Not the shallow version—the deep version, rooted in credibility, repeat citation, and trust transfer.

The brands who embed themselves into those trust networks will own the next wave of buyer discovery. Everyone else? They’ll be invisible.

Over to you:
Do you think B2B influencer marketing is undervalued—or already overhyped?
And how long before you trust a ChatGPT citation more than a Gartner Magic Quadrant?