What counts as original research?
Original research is data you collected and analyzed yourself, published with your method. In marketing it often takes one of these forms:
- A survey of your market, such as 300 finance leads on how they buy software.
- A data study of public sources, with your own method, such as prices from 200 vendor pricing pages.
- An analysis of your own anonymized product data.
- A hands-on test: you try ten tools on the same task and record the results.
Rewriting other people's statistics is not original research. The word also has an academic meaning: primary research published in a journal. This entry is about the marketing meaning.
What does Google say about original research?
Google's helpful content checklist asks: "Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?" It also asks whether content that draws on other sources avoids "simply copying or rewriting those sources" and adds "substantial additional value and originality" (Google Search Central, last updated 5 October 2026, read 1 November 2026).
Google also describes "original content systems" that aim to show "original content prominently in search results, including original reporting, ahead of those who merely cite it" (Google ranking systems guide, last updated 10 December 2025). For reviews, Google asks writers to "Share quantitative measurements" (Google Search Central).
Why does original research matter for B2B SaaS?
B2B buyers want numbers to back a decision: what a tool costs, how long setup takes, what peers use. Most SaaS blogs repeat the same few public statistics. A company with its own data has something others can only quote. That is also first-hand experience, one part of E-E-A-T.
Does original research get cited by AI assistants?
When an assistant needs a number, it has to cite a page that has the number. A clear finding with a date and a method is easy to quote. That is a reason to publish data, not a promise: we found no study that measures how much more often AI tools cite original research, and Google and the assistants decide what they cite.
Here is an example of the effect in practice. When Prefer checked 188 answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude in July 2026, 40% of the sources cited for buyer questions were independent lists. Vendors' own sites got 34%, review sites 3%. That finding comes from one company's own study, and this site quotes it with a link. Each link is a possible AI citation path back to Prefer.
How do you do original research?
- Pick a question your buyers ask that has no good public answer.
- Choose a method you can explain in three sentences.
- Collect the data. Record the sample size, the dates and what you left out.
- Put the main finding in one plain sentence near the top of the page.
- Publish the method, a data table and the limits.
- Say "correlation" when it is one. Don't claim causes you did not test.
- Date it and repeat it on a schedule, so the numbers stay current. See content freshness.
Our own listicle placement price index follows this pattern: prices sellers publish on their own pages, each one opened, linked and dated.
What does original research look like? (hypothetical example)
This example is hypothetical. A company that sells onboarding software reads the public pricing pages of 60 onboarding tools in one week. It records the cheapest paid plan, whether a free plan exists and whether prices are public. It publishes: "Of 60 onboarding tools checked in October, 41 publish prices." The page shows the full table, the date of each check and a note on tools it could not read.
Original research vs E-E-A-T vs content freshness
- Original research is new data you created.
- E-E-A-T is Google's quality concept; original research is one way to show experience and expertise.
- Content freshness is how current a page is; repeating a study keeps its numbers fresh.
For where original data fits in a plan to show up in AI answers, see LLM SEO.