Every year, our Thought Leadership in Practice survey asks thought leadership professionals to rank the capabilities that matter most to their work. Original data and research, content strategy, and storytelling consistently claim the top spots. These three make sense, as they are arguably the things practitioners spend most of their time getting right.
That confidence runs out at a certain point, though. Flip it over, and for the second year running there’s a clear bottom of the capabilities list: distribution. Nearly a quarter of practitioners call distribution their organization’s biggest capability gap, and only 6% call it their primary strength.
Frankly, this isn’t a new finding. The challenge of getting thought leadership distribution right kept surfacing in the conversations at Thought Leadership for Tomorrow 2025—showing up in nearly every panel, no matter what the panel was actually about. So, in 2026, we gave it a session of its own, cheekily named “Distribution: Right insight, wrong inbox.”
Planning an integrated distribution strategy takes time and expertise, and it’s important to take into consideration the strengths of all the resources and channels you have to work with. As the Wall Street Journal’s Jim Gardner notes, “we’ve all seen distribution fail because everyone treats content [in the same way].” Indeed, if not properly positioned, the right insight can still miss the right person entirely—buried by an algorithm, delivered in the wrong format, or sent through the wrong channel. The people doing this work are solving for all of it—audience, platform, format, timing—all at once.
Clearly, though, most teams are still finding their footing. And this is what Gardner sat down to discuss with Emily Foley (Global GTM of Strategic Communications, Palo Alto Networks), Ashley Faus (Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Atlassian), and Lucas Rivers (Global Director of Thought Leadership, Project Management Institute) at Thought Leadership for Tomorrow 2026, the only conference dedicated to the art and practice of thought leadership.
Trust lives in people, not publications
“It’s less about getting into a trusted outlet and more about getting to a trusted person,” said Faus, describing how Atlassian pairs curated executive moments with broader content built for whomever comes across it secondhand. For Faus, it’s not really about making a mutually exclusive decision between targeting premium outlets or going for scale; that’s not actually a choice people have to make. What matters is identifying which trusted spaces each specific audience already occupies and meeting them there.
At Palo Alto Networks, Foley is working the same problem, just from a different angle: not the press or the boardroom, but the company’s own 10,000-person sales force. The job of Foley’s team, as she put it, is to equip their reps with specifically built content that allows those reps to carry trust forward. The content is deliberately narrow: a distilled version of the broader research, designed for a sales conversation rather than a full report.
Foley framed it simply: “if we as marketers do the right thing and arm [the sales team] with the right tools, then we’ll be successful.”
And while these are proven distribution tactics, meeting your audience where it already is and arming your sales team with the right content assumes a human on the receiving end of your efforts. Things gets more complicated when an AI algorithm gets there first.
Same game, new players
It’s mid-2026, and AI-generated summaries and zero-click searches are reshaping how people find information. Marketers are now trying to optimize for an algorithm—and unlike a traditional search, there’s no dashboard, no clear signal for why one piece of content gets surfaced (or why it didn’t). Brands are up against a system that gives them very little information to go on.
At PMI, Lucas Rivers’ answer to this dilemma starts by acknowledging that gap. He described working with an agency partner on a “share-of” model that tracks how PMI shows up in LLM outputs relative to competitors, then restructuring content into Q&A formats and ungating it for AI crawlers. And while Rivers was candid about where this process currently stands within PMI (they’re still working on perfecting it), it does give the organization visibility it didn’t have before.
“One thing that’s interesting, with this breathless race to rank in the LLMs or be discovered—everybody forgets that what’s good for the bots is actually really good for the humans,” Faus added. Whatever makes a page easy for an algorithm to parse is the same as what keeps a human reader engaged: clear questions, clear answers, and skimmable content (we won’t call it “snackable,” Ashley, don’t worry!).
Not everyone on the panel agreed on how much of that upstream SEO work still matters, though. Just moments after Faus made her case for its staying power, Foley made arguably one of the boldest claims of the day: “I think SEO is dead,” she said. “You look at all the LLMs that are out there, and it doesn’t look at fluff. It looks at real data and real information—and that, to me, is what we as marketers need to lean into.”
Small pieces, bigger story
Getting content in front of the right algorithm so the right person can read it is one aspect of distribution done well. What format that content takes is another, and according to Faus, most teams get this backward—breaking long-form content into shorter pieces, never building smaller pieces into something larger.
Nobody wants a bucket of only small green Legos, she said, noting that the value of a box of Legos is in having enough pieces to build whatever the moment calls for.
Rivers offered a live example of how this alternative approach could work. Rather than write the whole story and cut it up afterward, PMI recently built a story out of four separate pieces from the start: a carousel, a LinkedIn article, a newsletter, and a workshop. Engage with one alone, and you get part of the picture. Engage with all four, and you cover the same ground a fifty-page report would have. “We just took a lot of those research and insights and put them into different pockets of content that will tell a whole story,” he said.
The bait-and-switch button
One of the panel’s most tactical points of the day focused on how content that’s been found, trusted, and shaped correctly can still be undone instantly if the information offered doesn’t match what’s advertised.
Faus detailed a four-tier framework for thinking about this: trust, buy, use, and help intent. She posited that the “learn more” button is actually where most brands break the trust they have spent so many resources building. A reader clicks into an article expecting to learn something, and is instead faced with a form asking them to book a call. It’s not a move that yields confidence in the brand.
Instead, Faus said, label the call to action for exactly what it does, so the reader knows what they’re agreeing to before they click.
Distribution by design
Across every topic the panel talked through—trust, algorithms, formats, metrics—one fundamental idea underpinned the rest: distribution isn’t something you tack on once the content is finished. It has to be designed from the start, built into the outline alongside the research itself, and not simply handed off once the “real” work is done. As Gardner put it, that kind of precision means “looking at [distribution strategy] holistically across the audience, the platform, the format, and of course, the timing.”
According to Thought Leadership in Practice 2026, however, only a third of thought leadership teams plan distribution before the research begins; the rest sort it out after the project has started, the train has left the station, and fundamental choices about topic, audience, and format have already been made (or either explicitly or tacitly).
A plan of action—and a strong advocate for it—is required. Increasingly, that plan involves accounting for algorithms that can’t be seen, audiences that expect content specifically made for them, and calls to action that do exactly what they promise. Get those three things right, and the insights you’ve worked so hard on are much more likely to reach the inboxes they were meant for.
