Audience Intel Research

The decision is made before you are contacted. We measure what happens in the room you can’t enter.

Audience Intel publishes original research on how owner-managed professional-services firms are chosen, compared, and dismissed in the moments before a buyer ever makes contact. The library below collects the studies that grounded our methodology — and the new ones we are running now.

Updated May 2026

Essay · 12-minute read

The Zero Moment of Truth, fifteen years on

The decision is already made by the time you take the meeting. A reckoning with how professional-services buyers actually choose — and what frontier AI lets us see for the first time.

Audience Intel · 12 May 2026

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The library

Thirty verified sources. Full citations. Pull-quotes.

The empirical foundation of every Audience Intel report. Organised by domain — from the zero moment of truth through cognitive science to professional-services category data and the new analytical layer.

Browse the library →

Forthcoming studies

Three proprietary studies now being commissioned.

The Fifty-Millisecond Verdict. The £2,000 Decision. The Credibility Ledger. Findings publishing from Q4 2026.

See the studies →

Research drawn from

  • Think with Google
  • Gartner
  • Forrester
  • McKinsey & Company
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Stanford HAI
  • Nielsen Norman Group
  • Edelman
  • Princeton
  • Hinge Research
  • LexisNexis
  • TrustRadius

Audience Intel’s methodology draws on thirty published studies across cognitive science, B2B buying behaviour, and professional-services marketing. See the full library →

Audience Intel reads your website alongside three named competitors through the eyes of the buyers comparing you.

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