Your Funnel Isn't Breaking. It's Already Broken.

The traditional sales funnel didn't gradually decline. It collapsed.

Between April 2024 and March 2025, AI chatbots received 55.2 billion visits, an 80.92% year-over-year increase (OneLittleWeb, 2025). During that same period, Google searches per user in the United States dropped nearly 20% (SparkToro, 2026). This isn't a trend. It's a structural shift in how buyers discover, evaluate, and purchase.

Your funnel assumed buyers would visit your website. They don't anymore.

The Click Is Dying

Zero-click searches now account for 58% of all Google queries (Seer Interactive, 2025). When AI Overviews appear, that number jumps to 83% (Similarweb, 2025). More than half of all searches end without anyone visiting a single external website.

Publishers are witnessing this collapse in real time. HubSpot's organic traffic dropped from 13.5 million monthly visits in November 2024 to under 7 million by December 2024 — a nearly 50% decline in a single month (Superprompt, 2025). Business Insider saw organic search traffic fall 55% between April 2022 and April 2025. The Guardian, CNN, and dozens of major publishers report similar patterns.

The median publisher experienced a 10% year-over-year traffic decline in the first half of 2025 (Digital Content Next, 2025). For many, the losses exceeded 40%. DMG Media reported an 89% drop in click-through rates, directly attributing the collapse to AI Overviews (MarTech, 2025).

This affects every sector. Financial queries show zero-click rates approaching 65% (Studio 36 Digital, 2025). For "Google Flights," 96% of searches end without a single external click (Studio 36 Digital, 2025).

Buyers Are There Before You Know They Exist

In B2B, the buying journey compressed from a 70/30 split between research and seller engagement to 60/40 (6sense, 2025). That represents roughly six to seven weeks of lost influence. Buyers now contact sellers earlier in their journey — but here's the critical detail: they're not contacting you because they need help deciding. They're contacting you to validate decisions they've already made.

Ninety-five percent of the time, the winning vendor is already on the Day One shortlist (6sense, 2025). Four out of five deals are won by the "pre-contact favourite." The vendor ranked first at the end of the Selection Phase wins about 80% of the time.

Buyers arrive with AI-assisted research already complete. Sixty-six percent of shoppers who purchase more than once weekly regularly use AI assistants like ChatGPT to inform purchase decisions (Yotpo, 2025). Thirty-four percent specifically turn to ChatGPT for initial product discovery. In B2B, 94% of buyers use large language models during their buying process, and 89% ultimately purchase solutions with AI features (6sense, 2025).

These aren't casual browsers. They're informed decision-makers. The average B2B buyer has been through eight to nine prior purchase journeys for the same type of solution (6sense, 2025). They know what questions to ask AI. They know how to compare products, dissect specifications, evaluate pros and cons, and identify advantageous deals.

The Discovery Model Has Inverted

Sixty-eight percent of the buyer journey is now digital (IDC, 2025). But "digital" no longer means "your website." Application-based searches through YouTube and Reddit now surpass traditional internet search for vendor discovery. Seventy-three percent of decision-makers expect to rely more on AI chatbots in the future; among IT buyers, that number rises to 85% (IDC, 2025).

Conversational queries exploded. "Tell me about" searches jumped 70% year-over-year (TechBuzz, 2025). "How do I" searches hit all-time highs with 25% growth. Users stopped crafting keyword strings. They started asking questions as if talking to a knowledgeable assistant.

ChatGPT processes more than 1 billion queries daily from 800 million weekly active users. It's the sixth most visited website in the world. Nearly 40% of Americans use at least one AI chatbot once per month or more, with 20% qualifying as heavy users (SparkToro, 2025).

The pattern is clear. Buyers discover products through AI. They compare options through AI. They validate decisions through AI. Then, sometimes, they visit your website.

Your Metrics Are Lying to You

Rankings still exist. Traffic still flows. Conversions still happen. But the relationship between these metrics has fractured.

Google Search Console includes AI Overview data but doesn't separate it from traditional search results (DataSlayer, 2025). When AI Overviews appear, organic click-through rates plummet 61%. Paid click-through rates drop 68% (DataSlayer, 2025). Yet Google processes billions more searches daily than in previous years.

The paradox: search volume grows whilst clicks collapse. Users get answers without clicking. Your content still influences them. Your analytics never capture it.

Ninety-two percent of AI Overview citations come from domains ranking in the top 10 (DataSlayer, 2025). But high rankings no longer guarantee visibility. Pages outside the top 10 now have better chances of AI citations than they did for traditional featured snippets.

Attribution has completely broken down. Many AI clicks appear as organic traffic in analytics tools, obscuring the true source (AppsFlyer, 2025). Brand overlap between API outputs and real user sessions runs as low as 24% (Search Engine Land, 2026). Three times out of four, what tracking tools report isn't what users actually see.

Source Diversity Trumps Site Authority

Brand-owned pages often make up only 5–10% of the sources AI uses for answers (IndexLab, 2025). Publishers, affiliates, and user-generated content dominate. McKinsey projects 20–50% of traditional search traffic is at risk as AI-powered search becomes default, with roughly $750 billion in consumer spend moving through AI search by 2028.

Wikipedia is the most cited source in ChatGPT at 7.8%, followed by Reddit at 1.8%, Forbes at 1.1%, and G2 at 1.1% (Profound, 2025). Google pulls from Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit, and Quora for AI Overview responses. Perplexity favours YouTube, Wikipedia, Apple, and Google.

Your owned content competes with Reddit threads, YouTube videos, review sites, forums, and third-party publishers. AI systems synthesise across all of them simultaneously. A buyer asking about your product category might receive an answer combining your own documentation, a competitor comparison from G2, user experiences from Reddit, expert analysis from Forbes, and tutorial content from YouTube. You don't control that synthesis. The question isn't "where do we rank?" It's "are we visible to AI?"

The Sales Cycle Accelerated But Decisions Didn't Improve

Average B2B sales cycle length dropped from 11.3 months in 2024 to 10.1 months in 2025 (6sense, 2025). Nearly half of buyers (49%) say economic conditions shortened their buying cycles, and 62% say those pressures pushed them to engage sellers earlier.

Faster doesn't mean better. Eighty-three percent of buyers mostly or fully define their purchase requirements before speaking with sales (6sense, 2025). They arrive confident. Whether they should be is another question entirely.

The gap between buyer confidence and decision quality is widening. AI recommendations are highly inconsistent. There's less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI, if asked 100 times, will give you the same list of brands in any two responses (SparkToro, 2026). The systems are probabilistic, not deterministic. Buyers don't realise this.

Traditional Sales Triggers Have Evaporated

The moment when a buyer visits your website used to be a signal. It meant awareness. Intent. The beginning of a relationship you could nurture. That signal has weakened dramatically.

By the time buyers visit your site, they've often already decided. They're there to confirm, not to discover. The decision happened elsewhere — in conversations with ChatGPT, in AI-synthesised comparisons, in Reddit threads surfaced by Perplexity.

Form fills, content downloads, email subscriptions — these conversion points still exist. But they occur later in a journey you never witnessed. You're measuring the end of a process, not the beginning.

Publishers expect search traffic to drop 43% by 2029, with a fifth of respondents expecting losses above 75% (Search Engine Land, 2025). When asked to identify their biggest challenge for 2026, the SEO community overwhelmingly pointed to education and attribution, not technical optimisation (SEOFOMO, 2026). The challenge isn't making your content better. It's understanding when your content influenced someone you'll never track.

What Actually Changed

Not the funnel's shape. Its visibility.

Buyers still move from awareness to consideration to decision. They just do it in environments you don't control, using tools you can't track, having conversations you can't join. The awareness stage happens in ChatGPT. The consideration stage happens through AI-powered comparisons synthesising dozens of sources. The decision stage happens before first contact.

Thirty-one percent of ChatGPT prompts trigger a web search (Position Digital, 2025). Prompts with local intent trigger searches 59% of the time. Commerce queries trigger searches 41% of the time. AI doesn't replace the web. It filters it. Synthesises it. Delivers it in forms that rarely require a click.

The buying journey still exists. You're just not in it the way you think you are. You're a data source. One of many. Your content informs AI responses. Those responses inform buyers. Buyers make decisions. Sometimes they tell you about it.

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