The Most Common Phrases in B2B Marketing: the state of B2B buzzwords 2026
We collected 7,658 pieces of marketing copy from all 496 B2B companies in the 2026 Fortune 1000 and counted the phrases they share. Three in four say they lead. Almost as many sell solutions. Here is the evidence, company by company.
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87 pages, written for B2B marketing leaders and the teams who write their company’s copy.
The 496 companies, the ten kinds of copy and how we counted every phrase by company.
Four views of the data, from 496 companies on one page to the periodic table of B2B.
Leadership claims, the swap test, solutions, innovation, AI, the buzzword graveyard, customer stories, opening lines and boilerplate length.
Real copy from the sample, names removed, next to a rewrite for each finding.
Every kind of copy, the top phrase families, eight industry deep dives and every company, named.
See the pages, and why we built them that way.
Real pages from the report, each with a short note on what it shows, why we designed it that way and what you take away from it.
Click to enlargeWe counted the phrases B2B companies share so you can choose where to stand out.
The report opens with a note from our CEO on why we did it. Every B2B marketer has written “We are a leading global provider of innovative solutions,” so we went to the source: all 496 B2B companies in the 2026 Fortune 1000 and 7,658 pieces of their copy. The report takes no side. Many common phrases became common for good reasons, and the data is a map of what everyone else sounds like.
Click to enlargeB2B’s favorite words are ordinary ones, not jargon.
This chart plots each of the 38 phrase families two ways: how many companies use it, and how common the word is in everyday English. Leading, solutions, global and customers sit in the top right, each used by more than 60% of companies. The jargon everyone mocks, from synergy to holistic, sits in the bottom left, used by fewer than one company in twenty.
Click to enlargeSome phrases travel together, and the night sky shows which ones.
Each star is a phrase family, its brightness set by how many companies use it. Lines join the families that most often appear in the same company’s copy. The brightest constellation is the boilerplate itself: leading, global, solutions, innovative and deliver. AI rarely travels alone; its closest companions are intelligent, scale, digital and transform.
Click to enlargeEvery industry gets a full page of numbers against all 496 companies.
Eight industry deep dives each come with a table like this one. Technology companies use AI language at 72.9%, nearly three times the 25.2% average, and smarter or intelligent at 43%, against 20% overall. The bottom of the page lists all 107 technology companies by how many of the 38 phrase families they use, from Ciena at 21 to Roper Technologies at 3.
Click to enlargeEvery company is named, in Fortune rank order.
Fifteen directory pages list all 496 companies with their sector, how many of the 38 phrase families they use and their homepage headline as captured in November 2026. Four dots show at a glance whether each company uses leader, solutions, innovation and AI. The median company uses 8 of the 38 families.
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