Gartner and Forrester in the Age of AI Search: Do Analyst Rankings Still Matter?

For decades, the path to enterprise credibility ran through a small number of analyst firms. Get named a Leader in a Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave, and your sales pipeline, your valuation, and your market perception all moved. Around 90% of enterprise buyers consult analysts before purchasing, which made analyst relations one of the highest-impact functions a B2B company could invest in.

That has not stopped being true. But something is happening alongside it that changes the picture: enterprise buyers increasingly start their research by asking an AI system, not by opening an analyst report. They ask ChatGPT to compare vendors, ask Perplexity which solutions fit their requirements, and get an AI-curated shortlist before they consult a single Magic Quadrant.

So the real question is not whether analyst rankings still matter. They do. The question is how their role is shifting as AI search becomes the first step in the buyer's journey, and what that means for how companies build credibility now.

If you want the full picture of how analyst firms work, how they make money, and how to engage them, I wrote a detailed guide to analyst research firms. This piece is about what is changing on top of that foundation.

Why Analyst Firms Became So Powerful

To understand what is shifting, it helps to remember why analysts gained their influence in the first place.

Enterprise technology buying is high-stakes and complex. A buyer with a large budget choosing between dozens of vendors needs a way to cut through marketing claims and make a defensible decision. Analyst firms filled that role as independent arbiters: they studied markets, evaluated vendors against consistent criteria, and gave buyers a trusted starting point. A Magic Quadrant or Wave was not just research; it was cover. Choosing a named Leader was a decision a buyer could justify to their board.

That combination of genuine research value and decision-justification is why analysts became gatekeepers. Their influence was real because it solved a real problem for buyers: how do I make a confident, defensible choice in a market I cannot fully evaluate myself?

The interesting part is that AI search solves a version of that same problem, which is exactly why it is inserting itself into the journey.

What AI Search Changes

AI systems are now doing some of what buyers used to rely exclusively on analysts for: synthesizing a complex market into a digestible shortlist.

When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to compare vendors in a category, the AI pulls from across the web, synthesizes the landscape, and produces an answer with apparent authority and specificity. It is fast, free, conversational, and available at the very start of the research process, before the buyer has engaged anyone. For the early, exploratory phase of buying, this is genuinely useful, and buyers have adopted it quickly.

This changes the sequence of the buyer's journey in an important way. The first impression of who the credible vendors are is increasingly formed by AI, not by an analyst report. By the time a buyer consults a Magic Quadrant, they may already have a mental shortlist that the AI helped shape. If your company is absent from the AI's answer, you may not even make it to the stage where analyst positioning matters.

But here is the crucial nuance, and it is where a lot of commentary gets this wrong: AI search and analyst influence are not in opposition. They are connected. The sources AI systems pull from to answer vendor-comparison questions frequently include analyst research, analyst-adjacent coverage, and the third-party validation that analysts help create. When an AI tells a buyer who the leaders in a category are, it is often synthesizing signals that analyst firms heavily influence.

So analyst rankings do not become irrelevant. They become an input into the AI layer that now sits in front of them.

The Two Things That Both Now Matter

This is the practical shift for companies building credibility. You used to optimize primarily for analyst relations. Now you have to optimize for two connected things at once.

Analyst relations still matter, for the reasons they always did. Buyers still consult analysts for high-stakes decisions, analyst reports still provide decision-justification, and analyst coverage still feeds the broader web of authority that everything else, including AI, draws on. The detailed playbook for this has not changed, and I cover it fully in my analyst research firms guide.

AI visibility now matters, because it shapes the buyer's first shortlist. If buyers form their initial sense of the market through ChatGPT and Perplexity, you need to be present and credibly represented in those answers. This is the practice of Generative Engine Optimization, and it is becoming as foundational to B2B credibility as SEO was a decade ago.

The connection between them is the strategic insight. Investing in genuine authority, original research, named expert content, credible third-party validation, does double duty. It strengthens your analyst relations, because analysts respect substance, and it strengthens your AI visibility, because AI systems cite substantive, authoritative sources. The companies that will win are not the ones choosing between analyst relations and AI visibility. They are the ones who recognize that the same underlying authority feeds both.

What This Means for How You Build Credibility

If you are building a B2B company and thinking about market credibility in this environment, a few principles follow.

Do not abandon analyst relations. They remain a high-value function for the reasons they always have. The buyers who matter most for large deals still consult analysts, and analyst coverage feeds the authority ecosystem that AI draws on. Treating analyst relations as obsolete because of AI search would be a mistake.

Add AI visibility as a parallel priority. Understand how your company appears when buyers ask AI systems about your category. Given that AI search now front-loads the buyer's journey, being invisible there means losing buyers before analyst positioning ever comes into play. I have written extensively about why this matters and how AI search differs fundamentally from traditional search across my work on AI and the future of AI.

Build authority that compounds across both. The highest-impact investments are the ones that strengthen analyst relations and AI visibility simultaneously: original research, content under named expert bylines, genuine engagement with the frameworks and standards your market cares about, and credible third-party validation. These are exactly what analysts respect and what AI systems cite. Build them once, benefit in both channels.

Watch the sequence, not just the sources. The order of the buyer's journey has changed. AI often comes first, analysts come later, and the early AI impression can constrain which vendors even reach the analyst-evaluation stage. Designing your credibility strategy around that new sequence, rather than the old one where analyst coverage was the starting point, is the adjustment most companies have not yet made.

The Honest Answer

Do analyst rankings still matter? Yes, clearly. The data on buyer reliance on analysts has not collapsed, and the structural reasons analysts became influential, independent evaluation and decision-justification, are still in force.

But the question contains an outdated assumption: that analyst rankings are the starting point of the buyer's journey. Increasingly, they are not. AI search is, and the AI layer shapes the buyer's first impression of who the credible vendors are, drawing partly on the same authority signals that analysts help create.

The companies that understand this are not asking whether to invest in analyst relations or AI visibility. They are building the underlying authority that powers both, and sequencing their credibility strategy around a buyer journey that now begins with a prompt, not a Magic Quadrant. Analyst influence has not been replaced. It has been moved one step down a journey that now starts somewhere new.