The AI-powered marketing funnel: the funnel shrinks to a single prompt

 

What growth marketers can do as AI owns discovery, comparison, and purchase.

Jo McKinney

 

When the journey happens in a sentence

 

Ask ChatGPT a question like “what’s the best running shoe for flat feet under $120” and AI returns a top pick, explains why, checks inventory, and places the order. In 2025, a single prompt can answer, narrow options, and complete payment without opening a browser. The familiar sequence of touchpoints collapses, but at the same time, opportunity expands for brands that focus on content depth, structured data, and instant fulfilment.

Read on for a hands-on roadmap: where to rewrite, what to re-structure, and which metrics help you know if you’re winning when a single prompt can now decide the sale.

 

Awareness – a zero-click reality

 

At the awareness stage, consumers used to find brands via search engines, social media, or ads. Now, generative AI is changing that up. A Bain & Company survey found that 80% of consumers use zero-click AI answers for at least 40% of their searches, meaning they get what they need without visiting a site. That’s led to organic traffic drops in the double digits.

Profound analyzed 30 million AI responses and found ChatGPT cited Wikipedia nearly 50% of the time, while Google AI Overviews leaned on Reddit and YouTube. Perplexity also favored Reddit. Every time a paragraph replaces a link, a visit disappears. WARC reports publishers in Google’s AI Overviews beta lost 18% to 64% of organic clicks. Semrush data on HubSpot’s traffic confirms that by December 2024, blog traffic accounted for just 42% of their organic sessions, down from 77% in January 2024.

 

Still, Google’s May 2025 guidance confirms that valuable, fast-loading, technically sound pages with supporting media continue to surface. When users do click, they stay longer and convert better.

 

 

What to do for awareness: Aim to be the source AI cites in its answer

 

·       Create genuinely helpful top-of-funnel assets that are relevant, comprehensive, and directly answer common user questions:

-        Educational articles

-        Buying guides

-        How-to tutorials

·       Skip tons of keywords and thin content

·       Produce clear, authoritative resources that an AI can lift and summarize (which is what it does)

 

Consideration – from research to recommendation in one chat

 

In the consideration stage, buyers evaluate options (reading reviews, comparing features, seeking recommendations in various forums). Now, users can ask, “Is Brand A or B better for me?” and get a strong answer synthesized from lots of different sources. AI favors pages written like answers, not ads. Pages with schema markup, subheads, and plainspoken language are easier for AIs to extract. If your product pages read like Q&A (What problem does it solve? Who shouldn’t buy it? How does it compare?), the AI can quote you outright.

For brands, this means the traditional mid-funnel touchpoints (comparison pages, customer review platforms, lengthy spec sheets) might get bypassed. A consumer who might have spent an evening reading blog comparisons or watching YouTube reviews could now have their options narrowed down by ChatGPT in seconds. Traffic that used to flow to third-party review sites or your own product comparison pages is diminished. If your product isn’t among AI’s curated picks, you may not even be in the running for consideration.

But being included in AI recommendations builds trust quickly. If a user values sustainability and your skincare brand is eco-friendly, the AI may surface that contextually in its recommendation. This is effectively hyper-personalized, context-aware positioning that would be hard to replicate with a traditionally broad marketing message.

 

What to do for consideration: Hyper-personalized, context-aware positioning

 

·       Make your product data rich and AI-readable.

-        Maintain detailed specs, FAQs, and descriptions (keep them updated)

-        Use clear headers and apply schema markup

·       Leverage public sentiment

-        Encourage strong, authentic reviews

-        Surface review snippets for AI to quote

·       Format product pages as if answering a question (helps people and machines)

-        Comparison tables

-        Real review snippets

-        Problem-solution narratives (I normally hate these but AI likes them)

 

In the messy middle of consideration, depth wins over brand size or clout. Brands offering clear pros and cons, verified reviews, and honest comparisons are cited even when bigger players are not. Yes, fewer users reach your page, but those who do are ready to act because they’ve already done their homework (or their AI has).

 

Conversion – the rise of one-click (or no-click) commerce

 

Perhaps the biggest change is happening at the bottom of the funnel: conversion. AI is not just guiding decisions, it’s beginning to execute them. We are entering the age of conversational commerce, where a customer can go from “I think I’ll buy this” to completing a purchase without ever leaving a chat interface or search results page.

Adobe Analytics reports that generative AI traffic to retail sites grew by over 1200% between mid-2024 and early 2025. Orders initiated through AI chat are converting at significantly higher rates than standard organic sessions.  Fewer steps mean fewer drop-offs. In Shopify’s ChatGPT sales-channel pilot (pilot launched in April), users could say, “Order two more bags of the light roast,” get a confirmation, and complete the purchase, entirely in dialogue. Copilot can build an Instacart cart from a recipe card. The funnel stages blur into one.

This has two major implications. First, web analytics may show fewer checkout visits, not because of lost sales, but because they happen elsewhere. PYMNTS describes this shift as compressing browsing, selection, and checkout into one conversation.

Second, brands may lose visibility into the customer journey. If the AI agent owns the transaction, brands may miss chances to upsell or connect. You may see the order but not know where it came from. That said, smoother checkout raises conversion rates fast. Adobe shows that AI-driven search is rapidly outperforming traditional search in final-stage conversion.

 

What to do for conversion: Ready your e-commerce stack for AI-initiated orders

 

·       Shopify merchants

-        Test the ChatGPT sales-channel beta as soon as it is offered

·       Broaden beyond Shopify

-        Enable chat-commerce in WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger

-        Activate social commerce checkouts on Instagram or TikTok

-        Pilot voice buying through Alexa or Google Assistant

·       Minimize friction, and you’ll see gains.

 

Why fewer clicks can signal a stronger engine

 

By now it’s clear that traffic patterns are shifting. You may experience drops in website visitors at various funnel stages (i.e. fewer people reading your top-of-funnel blog posts, or fewer reading your product pages) and a gut reaction might be to panic. But it’s important to interpret this change properly: some of that traffic wasn’t converting anyway, and some of it is being replaced by better traffic. When discovery, evaluation, and purchase merge into one interaction, there are fewer opportunities for drop-off, and stronger signals of purchase intent. This shift often means less traffic overall, but more meaningful engagement from those who do make it to your site.

 

Building for the agentic era

 

The most effective answer is product-led SEO, or content rooted in genuine user tasks, not keywords. Product-led SEO means creating content that draws in your target customers by solving their problems and integrating your product as part of the solution. It’s a shift from writing generic articles for clicks, to making content that is deeply tied to your product’s value proposition and the user’s needs. Map the real questions, publish complete solutions, structure information so a parser can lift it and surround claims with proof. Google’s own checklist still applies, the difference is that assistants now enforce it ruthlessly.

 

Marketing KPI’s are changing too

 

Measurement must evolve as well. Page views and sessions matter less than three new signals:

1.    Citations inside AI answers

2.    Traffic that originates from those answers and

3.    Sales made without a visible cart page (i.e. ai facilitated checkouts).

Add these to the dashboard or risk misreading performance.

 

Adapt one stage at a time to build a fast funnel

 

When AI guides each step in the consumer journey or marketing funnel, marketing’s job shifts from driving clicks to supplying perfect answers and seamless fulfilment. Brands that master both will own the fastest funnel. Here are a few key takeaways for marketers:

 

·       AI is the new middleman. Prepare for journeys with no traditional clicks.

·       Authority plus depth wins. One great page beats ten shallow ones.

·       Conversational checkout doubles speed. Integrate catalogues with chat-friendly endpoints.

·       Revise dashboards. Add share of AI citations and agent-driven revenue next to classic SEO metrics.

·       Act now. Rewrite one foundational guide so that it deserves an AI citation, turn one comparison page into an answer and activate one chat-based order path. Each small step tightens the link between question and purchase.

 

Getting started with your AI optimized marketing funnel

 

Complete these five moves and you’ll know which answers AI trusts, how answer-style content converts, and how much revenue already flows through AI channels.

 

1. Do an AI visibility audit

Ask ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google AI the ten beginner and comparison questions you care about. Note which brands they cite and where you’re missing.

 

2. Publish three definitive answers

Fill the gaps from the audit with three deep resources (FAQ + schema + visuals). Aim to become the paragraph an assistant quotes.

 

3. Rewrite one product page into “answer format”

Add a pros/cons table, a competitor column and real review snippets (with Review schema) so the page reads like the response an AI would give.

 

4. Make your store assistant-ready (for ecomm brands)

Conversational commerce is here, and Shopify has begun rolling out its ChatGPT integration. While some users now see in-chat “Buy Now” buttons, most purchases still redirect to the merchant’s Shopify checkout page (this will transition over time). Once available, there’s no setup required. Just make sure your product titles, images, pricing, and reviews are clean and complete in your Shopify backend. For broader reach, enable a WhatsApp Shop by uploading your product catalog through the WhatsApp Business App or API.  With new channels active, your storefront becomes shoppable within conversations.

 

5. Add new KPIs to the dashboard

Track share of AI citations, traffic from AI, and AI-driven sales alongside sessions and conversion rate. Seeing these numbers weekly builds momentum.

 

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