Why Your Marketing Funnel No Longer Works

Are you wondering why your marketing funnel feels like it’s working harder but delivering less?

Leads still come in.

Your Google rankings are solid.

The landing pages convert.

But something feels off — like there’s a leak somewhere you can’t quite see.

You’re not imagining it.

The funnel that most marketing teams have been running for the past decade — someone searches a keyword, clicks your website, reads a page, fills in a form — still works. But it’s now just one route on an increasingly complex map. And if it’s the only route you’re building for, you’re missing a growing share of buying decisions that are happening somewhere else entirely.

That somewhere else is AI.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — the same tools your team uses internally every day to draft emails and build reports are the same tools your customers are using to research you, compare you to competitors, and build shortlists. Often, before they ever open Google.

In this article, we break down what’s actually changed about the buyer journey, introduce the new marketing funnel stage that most brands are completely missing, and share a real client case study showing how one strategy delivered results across both traditional and AI search — with a 395% return on investment.

Executive Summary

The marketing funnel hasn’t died — but it has grown a new stage at the top that most marketing teams aren’t building for.

We’re calling it Pre-Awareness, and it’s where buyers use AI tools to create personalised shortlists, compare options, and form opinions about your brand before they ever reach a search engine.

The data tells the story. According to SparkToro, 37% of searches now start in an AI tool rather than a traditional search engine. On Google itself, 60% of searches no longer result in a click. In B2B, the average deal takes 272 days and 81% of the buying decision happens before any conversation with sales — up from 70% just twelve months ago.

This creates a blind spot. Brands with strong Google rankings can be completely invisible in AI recommendations, whilst brands with almost no traditional SEO presence are being recommended ahead of them. The businesses closing this gap now — with a unified strategy covering both traditional and AI search — are building a lead that will be very difficult to catch.

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What Has Actually Changed About How People Buy

Here’s the bit that catches most marketing leaders off guard. Every business we speak to is using AI internally. Teams have ChatGPT or Claude open all day, working on automations, drafting content, building workflows. That’s all sensible. But there’s another dimension that’s getting far less attention: how your customers are using the same tools to research you and your competitors.

Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Founder of Exposure Ninja, explains: “All of this is internally focused — how we operate our business and do our jobs more effectively. But there’s another area that’s getting way less attention, and that is how your customers are using AI to research you and your competitors.”

The shift is significant.

Buyers are now using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to find which products and services to buy before they ever reach Google. They’re getting personalised recommendations, complete with pros and cons, tailored to their specific situation. And the scary part for marketing teams? None of this shows up in your analytics.

Consider what happens when a finance director searches ChatGPT for accounting software recommendations. The AI returns a complete shortlist — with tailored suggestions based on what it knows about the user, their industry, and their role. The software companies being recommended might have no idea this conversation happened. There’s no click, no session, no referral source to track. It’s a buying decision being shaped entirely in the dark.

And even when buyers do reach Google, the experience has changed. 60% of Google searches now end without a click, because AI Overviews and enhanced search results increasingly give people the information they need without requiring them to visit a website at all.

What Is the Pre-Awareness Stage and Why Does It Matter

The traditional marketing funnel starts with awareness — someone discovers your brand exists. But there’s now a stage before awareness that didn’t exist three or four years ago. We’re calling it Pre-Awareness, and it’s where personalised shortlists start to be built.

In this stage, buyers aren’t searching for your brand. They’re asking AI tools open-ended questions: “What’s the best project management software for construction firms?” or “Which digital marketing agencies specialise in B2B lead generation?” The AI responds with a curated list of recommendations — and whether your brand appears on that list determines whether you even get the chance to compete.

This matters because it fundamentally changes what “top of funnel” means. Previously, the widest part of the funnel was broad keyword searches on Google, where your SEO and paid search efforts could capture attention. Now, there’s an even wider layer above that — one where AI tools are acting as gatekeepers, deciding which brands make the initial cut.

Tim puts it directly: “The marketing funnel isn’t dead, but there are new stages, particularly at the top of this funnel, that most brands, most marketers aren’t really thinking about. But the ones that do build for this have a massive head start.”

The implication is clear. If you’re not visible in AI recommendations, you’re not even reaching the awareness stage for a growing proportion of your potential customers. They’ll never search for your brand on Google, never land on your website, never see your carefully optimised landing page — because they were filtered out at Pre-Awareness before they knew you existed.

How Does the Modern Buyer Journey Work Stage by Stage

Let’s walk through what the updated funnel actually looks like, using a B2B example. The same principles apply to consumer purchases — the stakeholders just look different.

Pre-Awareness: A finance director at a construction firm opens ChatGPT and asks about accounting software options. The AI returns a personalised shortlist based on what it knows about their business, their role, and their day-to-day frustrations. Your brand either makes that list or it doesn’t. You probably won’t know either way.

Awareness: This stage is now multi-channel and far more varied than it used to be. Once someone has identified brands from their AI-generated shortlist, they head to Google — but they’re not starting cold. They’ve already pre-qualified you. They know how you stack up against competitors. So they might search for your brand name, look for reviews on third-party sites, check Reddit threads, find you on LinkedIn, read AI Overviews about you, or join a Slack community. The awareness stage has spread out across far more touchpoints than a single Google search ever covered.

Consideration: In B2B, this is where the complexity really escalates. Your initial champion — the person who found you — now needs to take the decision to other stakeholders. The CFO needs to approve budget. Procurement benchmarks the pricing. IT checks the integration. And here’s the critical point: each of those stakeholders goes through their own version of the research process. They’re asking their own AI tools their own questions, running their own evaluations. You need to be winning across all of those conversations, not just the first one.

Decision: This is where someone finally navigates to Google, types in your brand name, and is ready to buy. And there’s both good news and bad news here.

The bad news: sales cycles are getting longer. The average B2B deal now takes 272 days, and 81% of the decision-making happens before any conversation with sales. That’s up from 70% just a year ago.

The good news? That 81% is now squarely the responsibility of marketing. Marketing owns more of the purchase funnel than ever before. The decision isn’t being made on the demo, the call, or the free trial. It was made months ago, inside an AI conversation that your CRM knows nothing about.

Where Are Most Marketing Funnels Falling Short

The biggest gap we see is a disconnect between traditional search visibility and AI search visibility. Most marketing teams assume that if they’re ranking well on Google, they’re covered. But when you actually look at the data, the overlap between traditional search performance and AI search performance is far from complete.

Tools like Semrush* now allow you to see which brands are being recommended across different AI platforms — and the results are often surprising. A brand might have excellent visibility for certain topics on Google but be completely absent from AI Overviews, ChatGPT responses, and Gemini recommendations for the same topics. And vice versa: brands with limited traditional SEO presence are sometimes dominating AI recommendations because the signals AI tools use are different from the signals Google’s traditional algorithm prioritises.

Tim explains the risk: “You’ve got software companies that are winning in traditional search but are nowhere to be seen in the AI overview. And you’ve got companies that are doing really well in the AI overviews that are nowhere to be seen in the traditional search. And this is the marketing funnel blind spot.”

This blind spot is particularly dangerous because it’s invisible in standard reporting. Your Google Analytics dashboard looks fine. Your rankings are stable. Your paid search is performing. But underneath all of that, a growing number of buying decisions are being influenced by AI tools where your brand doesn’t exist — and you have no way of knowing unless you specifically look for it.

What Does a Funnel Built for AI Search Look Like in Practice

This is where theory meets reality. The Ordinary — the global skincare brand known for science-backed formulas, minimal packaging, and sharp pricing — came to Exposure Ninja as a strategic partner. They had a strong in-house team and didn’t need someone to do their marketing for them. They wanted to go further.

The campaign started with SEO, content, conversion rate optimisation, and email marketing. But as the team worked alongside The Ordinary, they could see the trends happening in skincare and beauty — the traffic mix was shifting and customer behaviour was changing. So the campaign evolved to include AI Search Optimisation.

Here’s what our AI SEO team did:

• Started with customer surveys — building personas based on actual search behaviour, not assumptions. This is critical. You can’t build content for questions you assume people are asking. You need to know which topics your potential customers are actually grappling with.
• Rebuilt the content section to be customer-facing rather than brand-led — using those personas to ensure the content answered the right questions in the right way, rather than simply telling the brand’s story.
• Built conversion paths directly into content pages — so visitors could buy products from the blog without navigating all the way through to a separate product page. This compressed the conversion cycle and turned content pages into revenue generators.
• Restructured content for AI search — improving visibility in AI Overviews on Google and inside ChatGPT, so the same content worked across both traditional and AI search channels.

The results speak for themselves:

• 395% return on investment
• 555% increase in blog sessions — at a time when organic traffic across the industry was dropping
• 451% increase in blog-driven revenue
• 14% uplift in hero product sales within six months

The key takeaway? This wasn’t two separate campaigns — one for SEO and one for AI search. The same content strategy delivered both. That’s the goal. Build once, win twice.

How Can You Find Your Marketing Funnel Blind Spots

Traditionally, search marketing research has started and ended with keywords. And that’s fine — it covers the Google traditional search layer. But keywords alone no longer give you the full picture.

The modern marketing funnel requires you to think in topics, not just keywords. A topic encompasses all the variations of queries that happen around a subject — across Google, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other platforms. You might have exceptional visibility for a specific keyword on Google, but when you zoom out to look at the topic as a whole and across AI platforms, the picture could look very different.

This is where tools like Semrush One* become essential. The AI Visibility Toolkit lets you see your brand’s visibility across AI search platforms, compare it to competitors, and identify the specific topics where you’re being outperformed. It covers both traditional search and AI search in one place — so you can see exactly where the gaps are between your Google performance and your AI performance.

For example, a construction software company might discover they have strong visibility for topics like time management and budgeting, but are completely absent from AI recommendations about expense management. That gap means any stakeholder researching expense tracking will get a list of competitors — not them. Knowing where those gaps are is the first step to closing them.

What Should You Build First

If you’re looking at your marketing funnel and realising it needs updating, here’s where to focus your energy.

Win the Pre-Awareness stage. This is where most brands need to start paying attention. AI tools cite and recommend brands that they perceive to have genuine authority on a topic — and that authority needs to be visible across multiple sources online. That means clear, well-structured content that takes a position on things. Expert-led pieces that demonstrate real depth. And critically, it means editorial mentions and digital PR — getting featured in industry publications, appearing on “best of” lists, and being referenced on high-authority third-party websites. AI tools often rely on these independent sources to decide who’s worth recommending.

Tim is clear about why this matters: “If you’re not being seen on those third-party websites, sometimes it doesn’t even matter how good the content is on your own website. You’re just not going to be recommended because those recommendations are coming from independent sources.”

Make your messages consistent and platform-agnostic. At the awareness and consideration stages, your content needs to work in a zero-click environment. Simple messages, clearly conveyed, consistent across your own website and every third-party platform where your brand appears — LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, YouTube, review sites. If you want AI tools to associate your brand with a particular value or strength, that message needs to show up everywhere. One large multinational came to Exposure Ninja wanting to be seen as “innovative” in AI search results. The problem was that none of the AI tools described them that way — because neither their own content nor the third-party content about them referenced innovation. The fix required alignment across the entire organisation.

Protect the decision stage. When someone finally types your brand name into Google, ready to buy, you need to make sure that moment isn’t wasted. Branded search is getting more competitive — competitors are increasingly bidding on your brand name to intercept buyers at the point of conversion. Make sure your branded search is dominated, and the landing pages people arrive at are conversion-optimised. In some cases, this will be the first and only time someone visits your website. They’ve already done all their research elsewhere. Don’t drop the ball with a confusing user experience.

Next Steps

This week: Run your brand through an AI search visibility audit. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the questions your customers would ask — the ones that should lead to your brand being recommended. Note where you appear, where you don’t, and which competitors are showing up instead. This takes an hour and will immediately show you the size of the gap.

Next 30 days: Use Semrush One* to map your visibility across both traditional and AI search for your most important topics. Identify the specific areas where competitors are being recommended and you’re not, and prioritise closing those gaps. Start building content that addresses the questions being asked in AI tools — structured, expert-led, and designed to be easily referenced by AI systems.

Next 90 days: Develop a digital PR and editorial strategy that gets your brand mentioned on the third-party websites that AI tools use to inform their recommendations. Audit your messaging for consistency across every platform. And review your branded search and conversion pages to make sure you’re not losing buyers at the final hurdle. If you’d like Exposure Ninja to audit your current marketing funnel and show you where the blind spots are, request a free marketing review here.

In Conclusion

The marketing funnel hasn’t collapsed. The stages you’ve been building for — awareness, interest, desire, action — still matter. But there’s now a stage above all of them that most marketing teams aren’t even thinking about, let alone building for.

Buyers are already forming opinions about your brand in places you can’t see. They’re finding products and services through AI tools that your analytics can’t track. There are hundreds, thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of people searching for a business like yours on these platforms right now, and you probably have no visibility of it.

The businesses that build for this new reality will have a massive head start. The ones that wait will find the gap increasingly difficult to close. The funnel has changed. It’s time your strategy caught up.

*Some links within this article are affiliate links for which Exposure Ninja receives a fee for promoting (these links are not sponsored).

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