The AI is Eating Your Funnel

The funnel still exists. You're just not at the top of it anymore.

For twenty years, B2B marketing owned the top of the funnel. You bought keywords. You ranked for "[category] software." You built landing pages that intercepted buyers at the moment of intent formation.

That model assumed buyers would come to you to learn. They'd type a keyword, see your ad, click your page, fill your form. Discovery happened on your turf.

But now buyers start their journey somewhere else: in a conversation with an AI assistant.

The New Buyer Journey

Here's what we're seeing with our clients:

"I need to choose a prefab housing manufacturer. What should I consider?"

That's not a keyword. That's a conversation opener. And it's happening in ChatGPT, not Google.

The AI doesn't show ten blue links. It synthesizes an answer. If your content is good enough — structured enough, specific enough — it might cite you. More likely, it synthesizes from multiple sources and the buyer never sees your brand at all.

By the time they click through to your website, they've already:

• Defined their requirements
• Understood the category
• Formed a shortlist (or at least a mental model)

They're not at the top of the funnel. They're in the middle. And they've done all the discovery work in a conversation you never saw.

The Intent Capture Problem

This creates a fundamental problem: you don't know what they asked.

When buyers found you via Google, the keyword told you something. "Best CRM for small business" signaled intent. You could tailor the landing page.

When buyers find you via AI citation, you see a referrer that says "ChatGPT" and nothing else. You have no idea what question they asked. No idea what the AI told them. No idea where they are in their decision process.

So what do you do? You ask them. "What brings you here today?" And they sigh, because they just spent 20 minutes explaining this to an AI and now they have to start over.

The Page is the Question

There's a solution, but it requires rethinking your content architecture.

When an AI recommends your content, it points to a specific page you wrote to answer a specific question. You'll never see the query they typed into ChatGPT. But you'll see which page the AI sent them to.

The page is the question. The click is the answer.

If someone lands on your "What is Intent-Native CX?" page, you know they asked about that concept. If they land on "How to choose a prefab housing manufacturer," you know they're in consideration phase.

This is why we're bullish on Answer Pages — single-question pages that are optimized for AI citation and encode intent in their URL structure.

What to Do About It

1. Build Answer Pages. One question per page. Structured for AI extraction. GEO-optimized.
2. Encode intent in URLs. /what-is-X, /how-to-Y, /X-vs-Y. The URL tells you what they asked.
3. Capture context on landing. Don't interrogate. Confirm. "Looks like you're researching X — is that right?"
4. Connect your touchpoints. The product finder should read what the Answer Page captured. The sales team should see the full journey.

This is what we call Intent-Native CX: customer experience that compounds context from first click to final sale.

The AI ate your funnel. But it didn't destroy it — it just moved the top of it somewhere else. Your job now is to capture what the AI learned and carry it through.