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.
https://tinyurl.com/2x4mwekj
