The Current | May 16–31, 2026: It Was Never B2B. It's Always Been H2H.
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This issue: AI changed the tools. It didn't change what works. Here's what the brands winning in 2026 have figured out.
The Current | May 16–31, 2026 — Kwedar & Co.
The lead
It was never B2B. It was never B2C. It’s always been H2H.
I’m watching something happen that would have been unthinkable five years ago. My fellow communications professionals — a group long known for perfectionist tendencies and a near-pathological relationship with the Oxford comma — are now deliberately allowing errors into their content. A misplaced apostrophe here, a lowercase letter there. Proof, they hope, that a human wrote this.
It’s both wry and revealing. When the bar for “sounds human” has dropped so low that a typo becomes a trust signal, we have a problem.
And yet the backlash is real. According to WARC’s 2026 Global Consumer Trends report, 85% of consumers say knowing something was made by a human makes it more meaningful, and 78% now demand clear labeling of AI-generated content. Pew Research Centerfinds that half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited.
Here’s the reframe: it was never B2C. It was never B2B. It has always been H2H: human to human. The person reading your proposal, evaluating your capabilities, deciding whether to return your call has always been a human being with fears, pressures, deadlines, and a boss to answer to. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t change. Not even when AI agents are making purchases on their behalf.
Yes, the structure of your content needs to evolve to surface in AI search. Yes, the tools have changed. But the brands that win — in this era and every era — are the ones that solve real problems for real humans, while remaining fluent enough in the new landscape to be found in the first place.
A typo won’t save you, but a genuine point of view will.
What we're seeing
The companies we worry least about right now are the ones who did the hard work of figuring out who they are and what they stand for before the AI wave hit.
They built a narrative. They got specific about their audience. They showed up consistently — in earned media, on their website, in how their people talked about the company at trade shows and over coffee. I’m sure it felt like slow, unglamorous work at the time.
Now it’s paying off in ways that are hard to manufacture retroactively. Their message is coherent enough for AI search to categorize and recommend them. Their content is distinctive enough that readers can tell a human wrote it, and it’s human enough that it actually sticks. And their credibility is deep enough that new prospects arrive already trusting them.
Meanwhile, companies scrambling to figure out their AI content strategy are discovering they have a more fundamental problem: they don’t have a clear story to tell, regardless of the tool they use to tell it.
AI didn’t create that problem, but it sure is making it impossible to cut through the noise.
The cautionary tale
A real life example for you: we worked with a well-run firm that had a genuinely strong website with thoughtful copy, clear design, and a point of view that held up. By every traditional measure, they had done “the work”.
Then someone on their team asked an AI tool to recommend firms like theirs in their market.
They weren’t on the list.
Why? Because AI search doesn’t reward good writing on its own. Instead, it rewards clear, consistent, specific, externally validated signals that come from earned media, from third-party mentions, from language that repeats clearly enough across enough channels that an algorithm can categorize it with confidence.
Their story was compelling to humans, but it just wasn’t findable. (In the year of 2026, it was kind of a “if a tree falls in a forest…” situation. If you’re not findable, no one can enjoy your story.)
The lesson isn’t that good writing doesn’t matter. It’s that good writing is now the floor, not the finish line. In B2B, you can’t sacrifice human readers for bots, or bots for human readers. You now have two parallel audiences, and at the finish line, it’s still human to human.
One thing worth your time
Read your homepage out loud. Ask two questions:
Does this sound like a human being who actually believes what they’re saying?
Is there a clear, specific, repeated signal about who you serve and what makes you different?
If the answer to either is no, start there. The bots and the humans will follow.
And if you want to go a level deeper, copy and paste the below prompt exactly — courtesy of The Neuron newsletter — in ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. (Some context worth knowing: research from The Neuron found that the median time for a newly published page to receive its first AI citation is 6.81 days. 75% of pages are cited within 18.68 days. If you’re past day 37 with no citation, the problem is your setup).
You are an AEO auditor (answer engine optimization for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity).
I’ll paste a URL. For that page, return:
Likelihood of getting cited by ChatGPT or Claude within 7 days (high / medium / low) and why, using web search for the top AEO best practices as of today’s data.
The 3 specific fixes most likely to improve citation speed.
The 5 query patterns this page should win as a citation in.
Be specific. Don’t restate the page’s content; analyze whether it’s structured for retrieval. URL: [paste here]
Run the prompt on your homepage. Then your services page (or another high-priority landing page). What comes back will tell you more in five minutes than most audits tell you in five days.
About The Author
Lauren Kwedar Cockerell is founder and president of Kwedar & Co, a Fort Worth-based PR, messaging, and strategic communications firm serving purpose-driven B2B companies. She is also the firm’s lead PR and marketing strategist, host of our podcast The Impatient Entrepreneur, as well as a frequent podcast guest.
Over the past 20+ years, she has worked with 100s of leaders and organizations to create PR and marketing strategies and tactics that support visions and reach goals.
To connect with Lauren, please send an email above, or book a consultation.