There's a question marketing teams have been answering the same way for years: how do we move the buyer from discovering us to buying from us? The answer always had the same structure. Awareness at the top. Consideration in the middle. Conversion at the bottom. A funnel that starts in your channels and ends at your product.
That model describes poorly what's actually happening today.
The buyer no longer arrives at your channels to form an opinion. They form an opinion before arriving. And the place where that happens isn't your site, isn't your content, isn't your ad. It's a conversation with an AI model the buyer had before you knew they existed.
What changed in the journey
According to Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026, "89% of B2B buyers use generative AI for self-guided research." This serves as the entry point to evaluation, not a supplementary resource. A Gartner survey from August-September 2025 found that "45% already used AI during a recent purchase," with increasingly self-directed and digital experiences.
The awareness and consideration stages, which traditional funnels treated as separate phases with distinct channels, now collapse into a single conversational interaction occurring before any trackable site visit. The model conversation happens before analytics can capture it.
This inverts traditional funnel logic. The challenge shifts from moving buyers through awareness to conversion. Instead, marketers must establish presence at the moment opinions form — before any funnel they recognize begins.
The numbers that describe the change
According to Similarweb 2025, "83% of queries that trigger AI Overviews end without a click to any external site." Google's AI Mode queries show even higher rates: Semrush reported "93%" zero-click outcomes in 2025. Ahrefs measured in February 2026 that "CTR at position one drops 58% when an AI Overview appears."
Pew Research's July 2025 study, based on 68,879 real queries, revealed the most concrete finding: "with an AI Overview present, only 8% of users click on an organic result, versus 15% without one."
| Source | Finding |
|---|---|
| Similarweb | 83% of AI Overview queries end with no click |
| Semrush | 93% zero-click rate in Google AI Mode |
| Ahrefs | -58% CTR at position one when an AI Overview appears |
| Pew Research | 8% organic click rate with an AI Overview present, vs. 15% without |
An important distinction emerges within these aggregate numbers. Zero-click behavior doesn't uniformly impact the entire funnel. Informational queries experienced the most dramatic collapse, while commercial comparison queries saw smaller declines because users still visit sites to purchase. Zero-click primarily affects awareness — precisely the most expensive funnel stage to build through paid media investment.
Where opinion forms now
Buyers now arrive with preliminary shortlists already formed. Some have made preliminary decisions. Research queries are conversational and contextual, including budget constraints and technical specifications. The AI model processes this information and filters the market before vendors contact the buyer.
According to Semrush Sensor Q1 2026, "AI Overviews appear in 30% of all informational queries in the US and Western Europe." Notably, "62% of the sources cited in those AI Overviews don't come from pages in the organic top 3," indicating that traditional rankings and AI citations operate under different logic.
This directly affects marketing budget allocation. If awareness develops in spaces where paid media lacks direct access and owned content matters only when models cite it, the twenty-year budget allocation framework requires revision.
Paid media remains effective, but its relevance shifts further down the funnel. Traditional awareness-building through media now must be generated through AI search presence, constructed via verifiable authority, external mentions from model-trusted sources, and structured content models can cite.
The paradox of the invisible data
Most AI-influenced traffic arrives without clean referral headers. Visits default to direct traffic in GA4. A buyer who encountered your brand cited three times in Claude or Perplexity conversations may get attributed to direct, branded search, or unknown sources.
The impact proves real, but attribution remains invisible across standard dashboards.
According to Ahrefs, visitors from AI search view 50% more pages per session than traditional organic traffic, and convert 23x more.
While volume is lower, purchase intent runs dramatically higher. The channel where buyer opinions form delivers the highest traffic quality yet receives the least accurate measurement.
What this implies for strategy
The funnel hasn't vanished. What disappeared is the assumption that it begins within your controlled spaces.
Awareness now occurs in conversations you can't control, summaries you didn't compose, shortlists forming before any ad impression. Marketer responsibilities no longer commence at site arrival. Instead, they begin by building presence that prompts models to mention you when users discuss your category.
What previously concluded brand work — recognition and recall — now becomes the prerequisite enabling the rest of the funnel. This develops through different mechanisms, applying different logic, measured by different metrics.
Teams grasping this early aren't awaiting buyer arrival. They establish presence where buyers already exist, before decision-making begins.