Half of B2B software homepages now say AI. Did it pay off?

Half of B2B software companies now put AI on their homepage. In September 2026, 49.0% of B2B software homepages mentioned AI, up from 11.7% in 2019. For 25.8%, AI was the main claim, up from 4.6%.

It did not come with faster growth. Companies that made AI their main homepage claim grew headcount no faster over the next two years than matched companies that didn't, and if anything trailed them: after eight quarters the gap was -8.2% (95% interval -16.9% to 1.3%). This is a link, not proof of cause.

What we measured

We drew a random sample of 10,000 B2B software companies from Ken internal data, with headquarters in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland or New Zealand and 11 to 5,000 employees. Then we read each company's homepage once a year in Ken's web archive, from 2019 to 2026. Each year we could read between 3,704 and 4,847 of them.

A homepage mentions AI if it uses AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, LLMs, generative AI, GPT or AI agents anywhere on the page. AI is the main claim when it appears in the page title, the description or the main headline, or three or more times near the top. A language model double-checked the unclear cases. On a random sample of 300 homepages it agreed with the word rules 98.0% of the time on mentions and 96.3% on main claims.

Flat for four years, then a sharp bend

For four years the share barely moved: 11.7% in 2019, 15.8% in 2022. Then ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022 and the line bent. The share reached 19.3% in 2023, 26.3% in 2024, 33.0% in 2025 and 49.0% in September 2026. AI as the main claim followed the same path, from 5.3% in 2022 to 15.2% in 2025 and 25.8% in 2026.

This is not just new companies joining the sample. Among the 878 companies whose homepage we could read in all eight years, the share that mentioned AI went from 13.4% to 52.2%.

We predicted that by 2026 more than half of homepages would mention AI and about a quarter would make it the main claim. The main claim landed on a quarter. Mentions ended just under half, and part of the last jump is timing: the 2026 reading comes from a September crawl, about 15 months after the June 2025 one.

Did it pay off in growth?

Growing companies tend to change their websites, so comparing AI adopters with everyone else would flatter AI. Instead we compared each company that first put AI on its homepage with up to three similar companies that did not: same industry group, same founding period, same size, and the same headcount growth over the two years before.

Before the change the two groups grew alike. For the main-claim group, the largest gap in the eight quarters before was 0.9%, and a joint test found no difference (p = 0.597).

After the change, the 140 companies that made AI their main claim and could be followed for eight quarters had a headcount gap of -8.2% against their matches. The interval runs from -16.9% to 1.3%, so this is not a clear decline, but it leaves little room for a growth payoff. Medians are milder, a gap of -2.6 points, because companies that shut down count as zero headcount and pull the average down. The 340 companies that only mentioned AI had a gap of -3.4% (95% interval -8.7% to 1.7%).

Funding looked the same. 9.3% of main-claim adopters raised money in the 24 months from the start of the change year, against 8.4% of matched companies, a gap of 0.8 points (95% interval -5.4 to 6.4).

One outcome leaned the other way. On the broad definition, 10.9% of adopters had no readable homepage in the 2025 or 2026 crawls, against 16.4% of matched companies. That interval also includes zero (-11.1 to 0.6 points).

We also expected adopters to have been growing faster before they changed their homepage. They weren't: before matching, their prior growth equaled that of the median non-adopter in the same year. Hot companies were not the ones reaching for AI.

What this data cannot show

• Correlation, not cause. The matched comparison rules out that adopters were already growing faster, but not that something else changed at the same time, such as a pivot or a struggling business reaching for a new story.
• Mostly the recent wave. Most matched adopters changed in 2024 and 2025. The result describes the generative AI rush, and a payoff that takes longer than two years would not show yet.
• Headcount, not revenue. Headcount is rebuilt from work histories of people in six English-speaking countries, and the latest quarters undercount for everyone. Both groups are measured the same way.
• Words, not products. A homepage can say AI without the product using it. The two definitions bracket this.
• Survivors and coverage. The sample comes from today's company records, so companies that disappeared before 2026 are missing. The archive reads about half of these homepages in any one crawl, and industry labels do not fully separate B2B from consumer software.

What this means for B2B teams

• AI on the homepage is the default, not a differentiator. About half of B2B software homepages say it. Saying it too won't set you apart.
• Don't expect the claim to move growth. Companies that made AI their headline grew no faster over two years than matched peers, and raised money about as often.
• Back the claim with the product. If AI does real work in your product, show what it does for the buyer. A vague mention puts you in a crowd of 49.0%.
• Read prospects' homepages with this in mind. An AI headline no longer tells you much about a company's product, budget or momentum.