Nobody's asked scientists how they find, trust or use content. We just did.

Most marketing campaigns in life sciences are built for a person who doesn't exist. Not a real scientist, but a composite, stitched together from a fictional persona document, your sales team reporting, whatever performed last quarter, and increasingly, whatever an AI tool says a "target lab scientist" wants to read.

From my recent conversations, I've realised that many companies aren't checking with a real one, and they have limited understanding of what scientists want in terms of content.

 So we're checking. And we need scientists to help us do it properly.

The audience you're writing for is a work of fiction

Ask any marketing team who their content is for and you'll get a confident answer. Group leader, mid-career, reads certain journals, cares about reproducibility. Ask them how they know that, and the answer gets shakier.

Usually it's an ICP document built once, in a meeting, by people who've never worked at a bench (or at least, not in the last 10 years), then never revisited.

It means the content strategy, the tone, the format decisions, the whole campaign, are all built on assumptions pretending to be insight. Somebody guessed on the scientist's behalf and wrote it down with enough confidence that it started to look like fact.

AI has made this worse. It's now trivial to generate a "here's what your audience wants" summary in thirty seconds, and that summary reads well. It's also an average of everything ever written about scientists, which is a very different thing from what the scientist reading your content this week actually thinks, trusts, or wants more of.

The AEO trap

There's a newer version of this same problem showing up right now. A lot of content teams have shifted focus toward AEO (and until recently, SEO), optimising content so AI models and answer engines surface it, and the human reading it becomes an afterthought in that process. That's optimising for the machine in the middle, not the scientist on the other end.

It's an understandable move. AEO is measurable, it's a live conversation in every marketing team right now, and it feels like progress. But a piece of content engineered to get picked up by an answer engine and a piece of content a scientist finds genuinely useful are not automatically the same thing. Chase the first one hard enough and you end up with content that performs well in a dashboard and gets ignored by the actual reader it was written for.

You can't optimise your way around a question you've never asked. 

Does this audience want long-form technical detail, or a fast, credible answer? Do they trust a named expert more, or does that barely register with them? Has LLMs changed their search methods? Are white papers still doing any work, or is that a format everyone keeps producing out of habit? And what about AI content - how does that impact trust and consumption? 

Right now, it seems most marketing teams are guessing at all of it.

Why we're asking directly

We've launched a survey, How Scientists Find, Trust and Use Content in 2026, built to get a straight answer instead of another guess. Where scientists actually go when they need to trust a source. Whether a named author changes how seriously they take a piece. What they think when they spot AI-generated content, and whether they can spot it at all. What they're tired of seeing, and what they'd actually read.

We're a hundred scientists in already, and some of the early patterns run against what most marketing teams currently assume, particularly around trust and around AI. That's the whole point of asking. An answer that only ever confirmed what you already believed wouldn't be worth collecting.

If you're a marketing director and your content strategy hasn't been checked against real scientists recently, that's a major problem. Right now, nobody actually knows whether it holds up.

Scientists, this is where you come in. Three minutes, honest answers, and it goes straight into fixing this properly for the industry that's supposed to be writing for you. We have some prizes up for grabs, so please complete the survey here: https://forms.gle/T5xcqb4PHqmM41mU9