Your Customers May Find You Before They Ever Visit Your Website

For years, the digital customer journey has been relatively easy to visualise.

Someone has a need. They search Google. They find an article or product page. They explore a website. They compare their options. Eventually, they make an enquiry or purchase.

It’s the familiar digital marketing funnel, and it still matters.

But it’s no longer the whole story.

Today, a potential customer could have researched their problem, understood the available options, compared several brands and even formed an opinion about your business before they have visited your website once.

AI is creating new entrances, shortcuts and loops within the customer journey — and that is changing what it means for a business to be discoverable online.

The funnel hasn’t disappeared. The journey through it has changed.

The traditional marketing funnel remains useful because the fundamental stages are much the same.

People become aware of a need. They research it. They consider their options. They make a decision.

What has changed is where those stages happen.

For years, search engines frequently acted as the gateway. Our job as marketers was to understand what people searched for, create the right content around those searches and build a website capable of turning that traffic into customers.

That journey hasn’t gone away.

Google says Search queries have reached an all-time high at the same time as its AI-powered search experiences have grown. AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users, while AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users.1

Rather than search disappearing, something more interesting is happening.

The new customer journey is much less tidy

Imagine someone looking for a new winter coat.

Traditionally, they might search Google for “best waterproof men’s coat for winter”. They could visit several retailers, read a buying guide, compare products, look at reviews and eventually make a purchase.

Now imagine that same customer asks an AI assistant:

“I need a smart men’s coat for commuting in the UK. I want something waterproof, warm enough for winter, but not overly technical or outdoorsy. What should I look for?”

That is a very different starting point.

The AI could help them understand which materials and features matter, explain the difference between waterproof and water-resistant fabrics, introduce styles or terminology they hadn’t considered, and help narrow the options based on budget, intended use or personal preferences.

Depending on the question and the information available to it, it could also surface particular products, brands or sources worth investigating.

By the time that customer reaches Google — or your website — they may no longer be at the beginning of their journey.

They may already be halfway through it.

AI can influence almost every stage

It’s tempting to think of AI as simply another top-of-funnel traffic source.

That misses the bigger change.

AI can appear almost anywhere in the customer journey.

Someone who has only just identified a need might ask an AI assistant what type of product they should be looking for. Someone researching options might use Google’s AI-powered search features to understand the differences between materials or products. A shopper who has narrowed their choice to two coats could ask an AI assistant to compare them.

And after purchasing, that same customer could use AI to ask how to care for, style or use the product.

So rather than asking “How do we rank in ChatGPT?”, the more useful question is:

That is a much bigger marketing challenge — and it reflects what we are already seeing in consumer behaviour.

Adobe reported that traffic from generative AI platforms to UK retail websites rose 329% year-on-year during the 2025 holiday period. Adobe’s analysis says shoppers are using these tools to research products, compare options and look for deals before reaching retail sites.2

At the same time, Gartner’s consumer research points to a more nuanced picture: GenAI is currently complementing rather than simply replacing traditional search. In its survey, consumers were moving across several research environments and often continuing beyond AI summaries.3

Your website may actually become more important

There’s an obvious question that follows all of this.

If people are getting more information from AI, does your website become less important?

We’d argue the opposite.

Its role is changing.

Your website isn’t only somewhere customers land after a Google search. It is increasingly part of the evidence layer that helps search engines, AI systems and prospective customers understand your organisation.

For a fashion brand, that might mean making it incredibly clear what you sell, who your products are designed for, which materials you use, how products fit, where they are made, how customers should care for them and what makes the brand different.

If that information is vague, shallow or scattered, it doesn’t only make life harder for people visiting your website. It can make your business harder for machines to understand too.

Strong product information, useful buying guides, clear category pages, brand stories, FAQs, reviews, sizing advice, material information and technically accessible content therefore become part of a much bigger picture.

Your website remains the digital home of your business. But increasingly, other platforms may be interpreting what’s inside it on your behalf.

For ecommerce brands, that makes the relationship between eCommerce design and development, content, search visibility and conversion increasingly difficult to separate.

Good content matters — but perhaps not in the way it used to

For years, businesses have been told to “create content for SEO”.

That has resulted in an enormous amount of content created primarily because somebody found a keyword with sufficient search volume.

Some of it is useful.

Quite a lot of it isn’t.

An AI-assisted customer journey makes genuinely useful content more important, not less.

Think about the questions someone might actually ask while deciding which coat to buy:

What is the difference between these two materials?

Which coat is best for wet but relatively mild weather?

How should this style fit?

Is it suitable for everyday commuting?

How do I care for this fabric?

What should I look for when comparing different brands?

Those questions don’t always fit neatly into traditional keyword research. But they represent real customer intent.

Good content therefore has to do more than attract a click. It needs to demonstrate knowledge, answer questions properly and provide useful information that both people and machines can understand.

Being discoverable is becoming bigger than SEO

None of this means SEO is dead. Far from it.

Many of the fundamentals of good SEO and search optimisation overlap heavily with what businesses need in an AI-assisted discovery environment: clear website architecture, strong and useful content, technical accessibility, authority, expertise, consistent business information and relevant third-party references.

Traditional search traffic also remains considerably larger than identifiable referral traffic from AI assistants.

Ahrefs’ May 2026 analysis of more than 74,000 websites reported that AI chatbots accounted for around 0.28% of total web traffic in March 2026, compared with 28.12% from Google.4

So this isn’t about abandoning SEO to chase the latest acronym.

Your digital footprint now extends well beyond your website

A business doesn’t exist online solely through the information it publishes itself.

Customers — and increasingly the systems helping them research — can encounter a brand through customer reviews, retail partners, editorial coverage, social platforms, YouTube, industry publications, forums and online communities, directories, influencers, comparison websites and marketplaces.

All of those sources contribute to the wider digital picture surrounding a business.

That means brand consistency matters. Product information matters. Reputation matters. PR matters. Reviews matter. Third-party mentions matter.

Your own website remains central, but the information published elsewhere about your business is becoming part of the discovery ecosystem too.

Marketing attribution is about to get even messier

There’s another challenge this creates.

Measurement.

Some AI referral traffic can be identified when customers click directly through from platforms such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. But many AI-influenced journeys won’t leave such a clean trail.

Someone might discover a business through an AI response and then Google the brand. They might remember the name and visit later. They could see a recommendation, leave the platform entirely and return days later through another channel.

The channel that receives the conversion therefore won’t necessarily be the channel that originally generated the demand.

So what should businesses actually do?

We don’t think the answer is to rip up your digital strategy and replace everything with an “AI strategy”.

The businesses best placed to adapt are likely to be those that get the fundamentals right.