Who wins and who loses among business stakeholders in EU legislative politics? While business interests dominate EU public consultations, what determines whose policy preferences are attained in the final legislative text remains an open question. This paper argues that lobbying success at policy legitimation, the stage at which stakeholders comment on a proposal the Commission has formulated and adopted but the co-legislators have not yet amended, is driven by signalling, so that the relevant property is how widely a stakeholder's preferences are shared across the field, which indicates to policymakers where support for a proposal lies. Using an original dataset of 1,908 business stakeholder–policy observations across 44 EU legislative files from the 2019–2024 legislature, I measure preference attainment at the level of the individual issue a stakeholder engaged, and construct a signed network measure of positional convergence using sentence embeddings and large language model classification. Stakeholders whose demands are widely shared are more successful, whereas the resources an organisation commands and the access it enjoys bear no relation to attainment, nor do the complexity of the file and its salience. The effect is amplified in polarised consultations, where the field divides into mutually opposed groupings, and stakeholders whose positions diverge from the prevailing regulatory orientation attain markedly less. These findings suggest that preference attainment in EU consultations is shaped by where an actor's preferences sit in the aggregate distribution of preferences rather than by organisational endowment.