The Tech Influence Graph

Influence by who gets cited and where, not by crowd size

Audience size is the wrong way to measure influence in B2B tech, where followers don’t buy infrastructure and the committees that do take months to decide. A CIO weighing a platform migration isn’t moved by reach, but by referral — a name they trust, raised by someone else they trust, in a newsletter or podcast they actually read.

So we set out to quantify that trusted influence, measuring citations instead of follower counts. Over a full quarter we read 1,612 articles, newsletters and podcast episodes from 92 publications, and extracted every instance of one expert citing another by name: 10,138 citations in total. What came out is a map of the voices B2B tech marketers should be following and working with: the experts whose authority travels across independent outlets, the rare few who bridge AI, security and developer communities, and the ones who stay cited quarter after quarter instead of for a single news cycle. These are the relationships worth building, and most of them don’t appear on any “top influencers” list.

Read the report here, and get in touch if you’d like access to the full analysis, or a call with the team that put it together.