How to Build a Marketing Strategy When Buyers Don’t Follow a Linear Journey Anymore

We’re in the midst of a brand renaissance.

For the past twenty years, we’ve built digital marketing strategies around one fundamental objective: getting consumers to visit our websites.

We’ve invested billions in search, advertising, content marketing, and conversion optimization to attract consumers into carefully designed experiences. We’ve organized marketing around awareness, consideration, and purchase, building elaborate systems to guide customers through each stage.

But what happens when consumers no longer need to visit our websites to make decisions?

Over the last two years, we’ve witnessed one of the most significant transformations in consumer discovery since the emergence of Google. AI has evolved from answering questions to evaluating alternatives, recommending products, and increasingly taking action on behalf of consumers.

We’re entering a world where AI agents can interact with businesses on our behalf, evaluating, deciding, and even transacting.

Your next customer may never visit your website. Their AI agent might.

This isn’t simply another marketing channel. It’s a fundamental change in how consumers make decisions and how brands need to compete for their business.

The Buyer Journey Has Collapsed

The traditional marketing funnel was built around a relatively predictable sequence: awareness, consideration, evaluation, and purchase.

Consumers rarely followed this journey perfectly, but the underlying assumption remained unchanged. They were responsible for researching products, comparing alternatives, and navigating their way toward a decision.

AI is changing that responsibility.

In 2024, consumers largely relied on traditional search engines to find websites and evaluate options. By early 2025, AI-assisted experiences were helping synthesize information. By late 2025, AI systems were increasingly curating recommendations based on individual consumer needs.

Now, in 2026, we’re entering the early stages of agentic commerce, where AI systems can evaluate options, recommend solutions, and facilitate transactions.

What historically required multiple searches, website visits, and interactions can increasingly happen within a single conversation.

AI is becoming the decision layer between consumers and brands.

The consumer still has a need. The consumer still makes choices. But AI is increasingly doing the work of identifying which brands deserve consideration.

For marketers, this changes the fundamental objective. We’ve spent decades optimizing the paths consumers take to our websites. Now we need to influence the systems helping consumers make decisions before they ever get there.

When the Entire Purchase Happens Inside an LLM

Consider a consumer planning a dinner party.

They open ChatGPT and ask:

“I’m hosting eight people this weekend. Create a Mediterranean menu with vegetarian options, keep the groceries under $200, and order everything I need.”

Historically, this would require researching recipes, building a shopping list, comparing products, visiting grocery websites, and completing checkout.

Today, AI can combine much of that work into one experience.

In December 2025, Instacart introduced an integrated shopping experience within ChatGPT, allowing consumers to move from meal planning and product discovery toward cart creation and checkout without navigating traditional grocery websites.

Think about what this means for the brands competing for a place in that shopping cart.

The consumer still authorizes the purchase, but AI increasingly influences which products enter consideration.

For the first time, consumers are taking control of the buyer journey, using AI to replace countless clicks, website visits, and research with a single experience designed around their needs and desired outcomes.

And that creates an enormous challenge for the way marketers measure success.

We’re Living in a Trafficless World

At Previsible, we’ve been studying how AI-powered discovery translates into website traffic.

Our research reveals something surprising.

While AI referral traffic continues to grow, it remains a remarkably small portion of total website traffic.

In August 2026, insurance led the industries in our study, with just 1.26% of website traffic originating from LLM referrals. Finance reached 0.85%, SaaS 0.12%, and ecommerce just 0.06%.

These numbers might suggest that AI isn’t having a meaningful impact on digital marketing.

But I’d argue we’re asking the wrong question.

When consumers research products, compare alternatives, and receive recommendations inside AI assistants, those interactions don’t necessarily generate website visits.

And when AI agents can complete transactions, even the final purchase may happen outside a brand’s website.

The referral data alone cannot tell us how many purchasing decisions AI influences. It does, however, show how little of that activity is visible through traditional website analytics.

Traffic is no longer a sufficient gauge of marketing success.

The buyer journey isn’t disappearing. It’s increasingly becoming invisible to the marketers trying to influence it.

Visibility Is Not the Same as Understanding

AI visibility has become one of the biggest distractions in marketing today. We’re investing heavily in measuring mentions, citations, and share of voice, but these metrics tell us surprisingly little about how AI actually understands and recommends our brands.

At best, visibility provides directional signals. It can help us understand whether our brand is being represented positively or negatively, where we appear in AI-generated responses, and which third-party sources are being cited.

But visibility is not the source of truth for understanding how AI discovers, evaluates, and ultimately recommends a brand.

Being mentioned doesn’t mean we’re understood. Being cited doesn’t mean we’re trusted. And appearing in an AI response certainly doesn’t mean we’re being recommended.

The real opportunity for marketers is to move beyond measuring appearances and start evaluating how AI understands our brand, what evidence shapes that understanding, and whether we’re being selected when consumers express relevant needs.

We need to stop measuring how often we show up and start understanding why we get chosen.

Building a Marketing Strategy for the AI Era

So how do marketers adapt?

I’d start with four priorities.

1. Discoverability: Be present wherever decisions begin.

Traditional search remains important, but consumers increasingly express their needs through AI assistants, marketplaces, and other platforms. Marketers must understand where decisions begin and make their brands accessible across those environments.

2. Comprehension: Understand what AI believes about your brand.

Don’t simply measure whether your company appears in AI responses. Evaluate whether those responses accurately represent your products, capabilities, differentiation, and ideal customers.

3. Confidence: Build the evidence that earns recommendations.

Your website is only one input. Reviews, PR, industry authority, customer experiences, and independent validation can all contribute to how AI systems evaluate your business. Building a credible brand requires coordination across marketing, product, communications, and customer experience.

4. Actionability: Make your brand ready for AI-driven transactions.

As agentic commerce expands, companies need accurate product information, pricing, availability, and integrations that allow intelligent systems to evaluate and transact with their businesses.

These aren’t stages of a traditional funnel. They’re capabilities brands need to develop simultaneously.

At Previsible, we’ve already seen why this requires a different approach. In our work examining how AI systems represent pricing, we identified inconsistencies across different models. Addressing those gaps required more than optimizing a single page. It meant identifying outdated information, coordinating across teams, strengthening supporting evidence, and testing how AI responses changed.

That’s the new responsibility of marketing: managing the system of information, authority, and evidence that helps both people and AI make confident decisions.

Stop Optimizing to Rank. Start Optimizing to Be Chosen.

We’re in the midst of a brand renaissance.

Winning in AI discovery requires more than visibility. It requires understanding how AI interprets your brand and scaling that presence across the channels and sources that influence recommendations.

For search marketers, SEOs, and content teams, this means rethinking where and how we distribute information. From websites and product feeds to earned media, affiliates, and other digital channels, every touchpoint contributes to how our brands are understood across the AI ecosystem.

The opportunity is no longer simply to drive consumers to our brands, but to build a brand presence that reaches them wherever decisions are made.

And that requires a fundamental shift in how we approach organic marketing: Stop optimizing to rank. Start optimizing to be chosen.