Ask a marketer to describe an engineer researching a component, and you get a story with a clear beginning. A project starts. A requirement appears. The engineer goes looking. Somewhere in there, a form gets filled in.
The 2026 Buyer Journey Study asked 750 engineers how long they research before recommending a product. The single most interesting answer wasn’t a length of time at all. Twenty-seven percent chose "ongoing research as projects evolve."
No trigger. No timeline. No form. Just a running, updating, private list of vendors they would consider — being built right now, months before anything you would recognise as a buying signal.
That is not a lead. It is something better. It is a head start.
When engineers were asked where they first discover or digitally engage with new components, tools or vendors, no single channel came close to owning the answer. Vendor websites led at 54.27%. Engineering websites and publications took 47.73%. Search engines and LLMs came in at 45.47%. Distributor websites reached 39.87%.
Four channels, fourteen points apart. There is no dominant channel to win and no single channel to lose. Every one of those four is a real door, and a vendor-website-only strategy is answering roughly half of them.
Then there are the two channels that don’t behave like channels at all. Peer recommendations account for 22.67% of first discovery. Forums and communities account for 13.33%. Social media accounts for 3.33%.
Read those last two together, because the ratio is the story: four times as many engineers first discover a vendor in a community thread as on a social feed. Four times. And peer recommendation shows up again later in the study as a switching trigger for 17.30% of engineers — it doesn’t just start conversations, it moves decisions.
An engineer with a live project and a few days to decide wants a datasheet, a stock figure and a sample. That engineer is a sprint. Serve them fast and you can win in an afternoon.
The 27% in ongoing mode are a different job entirely. They are not looking for a part today. They are absorbing information and quietly ranking suppliers for a project that doesn’t exist yet. Nothing you publish for them converts this quarter. Everything you publish for them compounds.
This is exactly where technical authority pays. It is also why engineering publications sitting at 47.73% — within three points of search and LLMs — is such a cheerful number for anyone who publishes. Being the vendor whose application note actually answered the question is a durable advantage. It does not expire when the campaign ends.
SparkWire’s communities exist because engineers wanted somewhere to ask real questions and get answers from people who had already solved the problem. PLCtalk covers industrial automation and controls, and its newsletter reaches more than 220,000 registered members. Electronics-Lab covers electronic design and embedded systems, with a newsletter reaching more than 180,000.
These are not audiences that were assembled to be advertised to. They are engineers who showed up on purpose, at eleven at night, because a motor drive wasn’t behaving and a thread from 2019 had the answer.
That is what makes community discovery worth four times social discovery. Nobody scrolls a forum for entertainment. They arrive with an intent already formed, and the vendor who turns up as part of the answer inherits some of that intent.
Every vendor in your category is fighting over engineers with an active requirement, because those engineers are visible and countable. Meanwhile a quarter of the market is calmly deciding who gets a look next year, in publications and community threads, with nobody competing for their attention.
That is an open goal. Take the shot.
The full 2026 Buyer Journey Study is free to download — how 750 engineers discover, evaluate and select components, including every discovery-channel figure behind this post. Get the study →
This research was conducted by EETech in partnership with SparkWire. The 2026 Buyer Journey Study surveyed 750 qualified professional engineers worldwide in May 2026. Margin of error ±3.6% at a 95% confidence level.
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