Is the Marketing Funnel Dead?

There’s always someone on LinkedIn trying to convince you that the marketing funnel that we’ve grown to know and love is a relic of the past. 

“THE MARKETING FUNNEL IS DEAD”, they’ll say, as if it’s some sort of doomsday. 

But is this doomsday coming, or are they just trying to sell you a new framework, one that replaces the funnel with an upside-down pyramid, a loop, a flywheel, an hourglass, or whatever new shape they think up next? 

Now, the funnel will never “die”, per se; businesses will always need to drive leads and garner interest. Instead, what will be different is that the funnel will change shape. 

This is because the “funnel” shape doesn’t really predict how your buyers behave anymore. 

It assumes buyers move through neat stages in order, from awareness at the top to a decision at the bottom, and that you can watch them descend and nudge them along at each step. 

That assumption was reasonable when most of a buyer’s research happened in conversation with your sales team. This isn’t the case anymore; most of a buyer’s decision making happens before anyone at your company knows the buyer exists, in places your analytics will never see.

This means your marketing “funnel” is now more like a marketing “web” – let me explain what this means.

What is the marketing funnel?

The “marketing funnel” is a model that maps the path a buyer takes from first hearing about you to making a purchase. In its classic form, it has three stages: 

• Awareness at the top (learning you exist)
• Consideration in the middle (shopping around)
• Decision at the bottom (pulling the trigger)

You then organise your marketing around those stages, with different content and tactics aimed at each one.

It has stuck around for the best part of a century because it is genuinely useful as a way of thinking. It gives you a shared language for “top of funnel” versus “bottom of funnel”, and a rough logic for what to do when. This is all well and good and (largely) remains useful. 

The problem is that the way people research and buy has changed a great deal, and the funnel, as most businesses apply it, has not kept up.

So, is the marketing funnel dead?

No. But it has stopped doing the one job people rely on it for.

Buyers still move through something that looks roughly like an awareness-to-decision arc, which means it’s still sensible to think in that way.

What’s changed is how buyers move through the stages. It’s not predictable like it used to (and it’s so much harder to observe, measure and manage).  

According to HubSpot’s State of Sales research, 96% of prospects research a company and its products before they ever speak to a sales rep, and 71% say they would rather research independently than talk to a sales rep. So by the time someone fills in a form on your site, you are not opening the conversation; you are joining one that has been running for weeks.

In fact, B2B buyers spend just 17% of the entire buying journey meeting with potential suppliers, and when several suppliers are in the running, each one might get 5-6% of that time. This means that roughly 80% of a buyer’s journey happens with no supplier in the room at all.

In practice, the classic funnel model encourages businesses to invest heavily in the bottom of the funnel (the trackable part), while the top of the funnel (where your prospective customers are spending the majority of their time) goes largely unaddressed. 

How do B2B buyers research today, then?

The modern B2B buyer journey looks less like a funnel and more like a web of overlapping influences. 

Before a prospect contacts you, they will typically have read industry content, watched videos, checked reviews on third-party sites, asked peers for recommendations, used AI search tools such as ChatGPT or Perplexity to compare options, and visited your website multiple times, often without leaving any trace that attribution software can pick up.

Word of mouth and peer recommendation remain among the most influential touchpoints in complex B2B purchases, and they are also the hardest to track. 

A recommendation passed over a Slack message or mentioned at an industry event is significantly more likely to lead to an enquiry than most paid advertising, yet leaves no trace in your analytics – this is called the dark funnel.

What is the dark funnel?

The dark funnel is the name for all the parts of the buying journey that happen outside the channels your analytics can see.

This covers (but isn’t limited to):

• Private Slack and community conversations, where peers swap recommendations
• LinkedIn DMs and comment threads
• Word-of-mouth referrals passed over email or in person
• Podcasts and YouTube
• Research run through AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity

Every one of these can carry real weight in a purchase decision, and none of them leaves anything useful in your CRM. 

A buyer may encounter your brand across six or seven of these channels before they ever surface as a lead, and your attribution model will hand all the credit to the last click. The one click that happened to be trackable gets the medal; the six that did the hard work get nothing.

This is really important for SMEs running on tight budgets, where marketing spend tends to be focused on the measurable and the immediate.

The trouble is that if your marketing only addresses the part of the journey your analytics can see, you are competing for a sliver of the decision while the rest of it gets made without you.

In short, analytics often only tell part of the story. You need a better way of understanding your unique buyer journey. 

Making things harder: AI search has moved the goalposts

The dark funnel was already hard to monitor, and now generative AI has made a big chunk of early research almost entirely invisible (without specific tools).

Buyers are now doing a serious share of their initial research inside AI tools, before they open Google, let alone your website. Gartner’s 2026 buyer survey found that 45% of B2B buyers used AI during a recent purchase, and that 67% now prefer a rep-free buying experience altogether. Google’s own 2025 research puts the share of B2B buyers using AI tools to build or augment their vendor shortlist at 60%.

What this means is that if you’re not ranking in AI tools, you’re practically invisible to almost half of the market. It’s a huge chunk of the funnel that you don’t often have direct control over, unless you have a dedicated generative engine optimisation (GEO) strategy. 

If you’d like to know more about how AI has affected the marketing funnel, we have written a full breakdown of AI search stats and what they mean for your visibility. 

The funnel vs real buyer behaviour

It helps to see the two side by side. The left column is what the classic funnel assumes. The right is what we’re seeing buyers do in actuality. 

So it’s clear that the funnel is outdated, but that begs the question…

What should replace the funnel model?

Whatever it is, it won’t be a neat funnel shape; that’s exactly what got SMEs into trouble in the first place.

The more accurate way to think about what comes next is to see it as an ecosystem rather than a sequence. 

Buyers move between research, peer validation, content and direct contact, circling back as new people join the decision and new questions come up. 

Your job is no longer to guide them through a nice, neat funnel. Instead, your business needs to be present and credible across the entire marketing ecosystem (not just the trackable bits).

This means three things need to happen:

Build visibility where buyers research before they are ready to buy

Focus your content strategy on the platforms your audience uses. This might be a mix of social channels (LinkedIn and Instagram are common winners), but you also need to focus on creating content that balances traditional SEO performance with emerging AI search optimisation. 

You want to create content that engages your audience, providing them with something tangible to pass on to a colleague. Avoid generic content; everyone has AI tools now – you must write in a way that stands out. 

Connect marketing to the whole sales cycle, not just lead volume

A buyer who has seen your content across several channels over months, heard your name from someone they trust, and arrives already familiar with you is a completely different conversation for your sales team than a cold lead. 

You need a comprehensive marketing strategy that covers all angles, ensuring your brand is as visible as possible, no matter where your audience is.

Accept that some things cannot be measured

Some of the most valuable work you do will never show up in a report. A good strategy plans for this, acknowledging that users will have likely seen much of your content before enquiring, but you can’t know what they’ve seen unless you ask them. 

What do you need to do right now?

First thing, don’t panic. Things haven’t changed that much, even though it might feel like they have. 

Take stock of your existing marketing. What’s working, what can you measure, and what’s not delivering results? 

Identify where your leads are coming from (it may be worth asking some of your newer customers what content they saw before they converted). 

You may be closer to a good strategy than you think. If you need a little nudge in the right direction, that’s exactly what we do. At Catalyst, we work with SMEs that have one thing in common: a need for commercially focused, ROI-driven marketing. 

If your marketing feels like it is producing activity without commercial results, get in touch. We’ll take a look and let you know what’s getting in the way of your marketing success. 

Want to read a little more? Here’s some info on how we approach SME marketing strategies.