How AI is breaking the marketing funnel
With thanks to Chris Whitely for the idea of this post.
I love the brand funnel. It’s clean, logical, and beautifully optimistic. It gives structure to the chaos of marketing and promises a path if you can just nudge people from one stage to the next. It’s the IKEA instruction manual of growth strategy.
We start with Awareness. You show up in someone’s feed, interrupt their podcast, or plaster your logo on a taxi. You’re not solving a problem yet, you’re just getting on the radar. Think reach campaigns, outdoor media, and sponsorships. You measure it with aided recall or CPMs and hope someone remembers your name later. Most don’t.
Now you’ve earned their Interest. Maybe they click. Maybe they linger. Product detail pages, explainer videos, TikToks with unusually long watch times. This is where curiosity starts to crack through. Metrics? Time on site, scroll depth, click-through rate. The goal isn’t to convert. It’s to intrigue.
The shortlist moment. They’re not just aware, you’re under consideration. Your retargeting kicks in, your comparison charts, your user testimonials. Maybe a lead magnet lands in their inbox. You track engagement, bounce rates, and email opens. You start to matter.
Next, the intent is getting serious. They’re hunting for pricing. They’ve added to the cart. They’re on your “Book a demo” page. Your CRM is watching, and your conversion pixels are twitching. You fire promos, urgency copy, one-on-one chats. Attribution models light up. It’s close.
Purchase! The glorious transaction. The Stripe webhook sings the thank-you page loads, and a new row hits your sales dashboard. This is where performance marketing claims victory, but only because the other stages did their job. Measured by revenue, ROAS, and caffeine highs.
Advocacy is often forgotten, but powerful. The customer becomes the channel. Referrals, reviews, unprompted TikTok praise. This is where NPS lives, and so does lifetime value. If awareness is the start of the funnel, advocacy is where it loops back, turning one buyer into your next campaign.
The funnel was never just a diagram. It’s a system of attention and trust. And for a long time, it worked.
But what happens when the buyer isn’t a person anymore?
How the Funnel Breaks Down in the Age of Agents
Let’s walk through a near-future (or if you’re like me, a present-day) purchasing journey. I need a new set of noise-cancelling headphones. Instead of hopping between websites or wading through sponsored posts, I write a short brief to my AI assistant:
“Find the best over-ear noise-cancelling headphones under $300. Prioritize comfort, battery life, and sound quality. I’ll use them mostly for work and travel.”
The AI does the rest. It scans product specs, review sites, Reddit threads, and maybe even YouTube transcripts. It summarizes trade-offs, flags user complaints, and ranks the top three options with citations.
This isn’t speculative. I already use ChatGPT this way for B2B research: evaluating vendors, exploring frameworks, and even drafting RFPs. The leap from enterprise to high-consideration consumer decisions (think phones, TVs, vacations) is minimal.
Now step back and look at what just happened.
The AI did almost the entire funnel.
Awareness? Not needed—it’s crawling the universe of options anyway.
Interest? Sorted—products are grouped and scored based on my use case.
Consideration? It’s in full swing—features, reviews, and trade-offs synthesized.
Intent? It presents a shortlist.
Action? I click one.
Except here’s the thing: I still make the final decision. And that’s where the funnel, or what’s left of it, collapses.
In the Moment of Truth, Awareness Resurfaces
Because now I’m scanning the AI’s top picks. And my reaction?
“Oh, I’ve heard of Bose. I trust Bose.”
Click.
The funnel didn’t matter. The years of programmatic optimizations didn’t help. The display ads I ignored weren’t even in the room.
What tipped the decision?
Brand awareness. Familiarity. Trust. Recognition.
If I’ve heard of the brand, and the AI hasn’t flagged any red flags, I’ll go with it. If I haven’t? I pause. I Google. I try to figure out if this unknown brand is real, reputable, or just a hallucination. Suddenly, awareness isn’t just a soft metric—it’s the decisive edge.
AI Will Kill the Funnel. And Resurrect the Top.
AI agents won’t need convincing. They need inputs. But I still need trust. And I trust what I’ve already heard of.
This means awareness moves from optional to existential. In a world where agents compress or automate most of the funnel, awareness becomes the only piece left for the human to feel good about the final call.
Years of funnel optimization narrowed everything toward performance. But AI is going to swing the pendulum back. The question now isn’t how to retarget the buyer—but how to make sure you’re already in the room when their AI agent draws up the shortlist.
How do we drive awareness in that new room, where the agent is the gatekeeper, researcher, and recommender? That’s a post for another day. But the message is clear: the brand is coming back.
And this time, it’s algorithmically essential.
