AI Moves Middle of Sales Funnel, Leaving Marketers Behind

Alex Osmichenko, CEO at IT Monks.

The middle of the funnel—the stage where buyers research options, compare vendors and quietly build a shortlist—has moved into AI conversations.

Not the top: Awareness still happens in feeds, search results and boardroom referrals. Not the bottom: Contracts are still signed by a human.

The middle is what moved.

Fewer visitors now reach company websites, yet the buyers who do arrive close at higher rates, a reversal Adobe Analytics has quantified. Meanwhile, the comparison work that once left a visible trail across vendor websites and review pages happens inside a chat window no company controls, and it raises questions marketing teams have not been asked before.

Customers Changing Where They Decide

Customers changed where they decide, and the decision now forms inside the AI answer itself. When Google shows an AI-generated summary, users click through to a traditional result in just 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no summary appears, and links within the summary are clicked 1% of the time, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of 68,879 real searches from March 2025.

Google has disputed the methodology; the numbers are Pew’s. Influence data points in the same direction. Boston Consulting Group’s survey of more than 9,000 consumers across nine countries found that generative AI assistants are now the second most influential touchpoint in a purchase decision, and for people who use them daily, the first.

Among U.S. shoppers who already use AI tools, half have completed a purchase after AI-assisted research, per a Semrush survey of 1,030 shoppers. The consideration happens, a verdict forms and most of that verdict never touches a company website.

Fewer Visitors And Better Buyers

Fewer visitors, better buyers—the trade now comes with exact numbers. Shoppers referred by generative AI initially converted 9% worse than the average visitor; by Adobe’s 2026 quarterly data, they converted 42% better. And there are far more of them.

Adobe Analytics, drawing on more than a trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, measured a 693.4% year-over-year jump in AI-referred traffic during the 2025 holiday season, roughly sevenfold, while noting, in Adobe’s own caveat, that the growth comes off a small base.

ChatGPT alone now sends about three times as many visitors to the open web as a year earlier, per Semrush’s U.S. clickstream data. These buyers arrive pre-sold.

Adobe’s separate survey of more than 5,000 U.S. consumers explains why: 39% had already “used generative AI for online shopping” by March 2025, 53% planned to do so that year and 87% said they were “more likely to use AI for larger or more complex purchases,” precisely the deals with the longest, most contested middle.

The AI conversation already did the middle-of-funnel work comparing vendors, narrowing options and building the shortlist before the click ever happened.

The Comparison You Can’t See

The comparison you can’t see is the strategic problem because the moment a buyer weighs a company against its rivals now happens when no marketing report is watching. Between 65% and 85% of ChatGPT prompts match no traditional search keywords, according to Semrush’s U.S. clickstream data, which means most of these conversations are invisible to the keyword-tracking marketing teams have depended on for two decades. Search position offers no protection either.

ChatGPT cites pages ranking in Google positions 21 and beyond “almost 90% of the time,” per Semrush’s study of AI search traffic. Being first on Google is no guarantee that AI assistants mention the brand at all.

A business can hold every ranking it fought for, watch its reports hold steady and still be losing the middle of its funnel in conversations no analytics platform records by default.

The Questions To Ask Your Marketing Team

Three questions now belong on the marketing team’s agenda, and each is answerable with today’s measurement practices rather than next year’s tools.

How often does AI mention us, and in which buying conversations? Do the customers it sends actually buy, and at what rate compared with other channels? Is our expertise published in a form AI systems can find and quote?

None of these demands a platform bet or a reorganization; they demand that someone starts counting. The timing argues against waiting. Semrush projects AI search will deliver more visitors than traditional search by early 2028, an explicit extrapolation drawn from digital-marketing topics, but directional.

BCG’s consumer data adds urgency: Shopping-related generative AI use grew 35% in nine months, and “more than 60% of consumers express high trust” in what these assistants tell them.

The middle of the funnel has already moved. The open question is whether a company’s measurement and its published expertise move with it.

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