Stat of the Week. In BCG’s 2026 survey of 300 chief marketing officers (CMOs), 91% of those at business-to-consumer companies, and 76% at business-to-business companies, said AI-moderated no-click discovery is currently reshaping funnels. (BCG, June 2026.)
Usually, when so many people agree, it means the debate is over. That’s not the case here. Marketing leaders agree that discovery now happens inside systems they don’t control, but they’re still guessing about what that really means. Many believe the sales funnel is shrinking, and they see fewer clicks as a sign of less demand. But if you look at how shoppers actually behave, there’s a different story. Since AI became part of the buying process, the journey has gotten longer, with new steps where customers check if recommendations are any good. Brands have lost the chance to be part of the initial impression, but they still own—and now have more influence over—what happens when shoppers come to verify. This means marketing budgets should shift: instead of spending to make introductions you can’t control, invest in the moments you still own.
AI adds, not reduces, steps in the journey
The best proof comes from observing real shopping behavior. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Talk Shoppe watched over 450 AI-assisted shopping sessions and surveyed 600 US consumers aged 18 to 64. Their main finding was about the number of steps shoppers take. Before using AI, the average shopper took 1.6 online steps before buying. After interacting with AI, that number jumped to 3.8 (IAB and Talk Shoppe, October 2025).
Nearly everyone in the study added at least one more step after using AI before making a purchase. In fact, 95% took extra actions, and 89% said they double-check what AI tells them. These extra checks drive more traffic to retailer and marketplace sites. After an AI interaction, visits from serious shoppers almost tripled. Seventy-eight percent visited a retailer’s site, and one in three clicked directly from the AI platform.
So, while 'no-click' might describe the search result, it doesn’t describe the purchase process. Buying now involves more steps than before. Shoppers still arrive and compare options, but they do so at a different stage in their decision-making. This shifts the challenge to positioning your brand effectively.
Understanding how AI views your brand is the first change to make
In an AI-driven discovery world, brands no longer control how visible they are. More and more, consumers make decisions with the help of assistants and recommendation engines that interpret, summarize, and rank brands for them. If these engines don’t show your product, it can become invisible, no matter how strong your brand or how much you spend on media (BCG, June 2026).
Introductions to new products are still happening. In the IAB study, almost 90% of shoppers said AI helped them discover products they wouldn’t have found otherwise, and 64% had a new product suggested during their session. For people who use AI to shop, it’s now the second most influential source, just after search engines and ahead of retailer sites and recommendations from friends and family. So, introductions are still happening at scale, but they’re controlled by something else and in ways that are hard to see from the outside.
An appliance manufacturer spent nearly a year debating the wrong metric. Over nine months, organic visits to its product pages dropped by about 20%. The team assumed this meant demand was falling, so they shifted budget from upper-funnel media to promotions. But nothing changed—sessions kept dropping at the same rate, while conversion rates for the remaining sessions went up. The visitors who did arrive were further along in their decision process. When the team finally asked buyers in a post-purchase survey where they first heard about the product, over a third said it was through an AI assistant. The session count had actually been tracking a filtering step that now happened off the company’s site, so the team spent a year arguing over a number that no longer reflected reality.
Lack of trust is the step you can still win
Each of these extra steps is a chance for brands to make an impact. Only 46% of consumers in the IAB study said they fully trust AI shopping recommendations. When asked what would help build trust, 88% wanted to know where the information came from, and 87% wanted verified customer reviews. Another 75% wanted an explanation of how the answer was created (IAB and Talk Shoppe, October 2025). In other words, your page should give visitors clear sources and reasons to trust what they see.
Most brand websites aren’t set up for this, since they were designed to make introductions. They usually start with a positioning statement and put reviews at the bottom of the page as social proof, far from where someone looking to verify will see them. Shoppers who have already been introduced by AI and are now checking need to see sources and comparisons right at the top.
BCG says the key decision is whether to meet customers inside AI-driven experiences or focus on building direct relationships. Starting with direct relationships is usually cheaper, since you don’t need permission from a platform or have to guess which assistant will win. Some companies are already seeing results from this approach. BCG reports that 31% of consumer CMOs and 20% of business CMOs say their agentic marketing transformation is already delivering significant, measurable revenue impact, though this covers the whole transformation, not just this choice or discovery alone (BCG, June 2026). Getting your brand cited by these systems is a separate challenge, with its own tools and team, and deserves more attention than can fit here.
Rebuild the consumer experience before the next campaign
All of this points to one clear action, and there’s a simple question that shows how urgent it is.
Update your most-visited landing page for visitors who already know about you. Use the trust list as your guide: put the sources for your claims and real customer reviews near the top. Measure success by what these visitors do, since session volume no longer reflects your market. Before debating this, add a question to your post-purchase survey asking where customers first heard about you, listing assistants as options instead of just 'online.' Most teams rely on guesses, like the appliance manufacturer did, but a month of real answers will give you clarity faster than any attribution model.
The teams that succeed won’t be the ones who guess which assistant will win. Instead, they’ll be the ones who realize early that their customers are still coming—just later in the process and with better questions. If most visitors to your homepage already know about you from somewhere else, what purpose does your homepage serve now?
Sources
BCG, “Moving the Agentic Marketing Transformation from Illusion to Reality (BCG CMO Survey 2026),” June 15, 2026 (n=300 CMOs globally across business-to-consumer and business-to-business sectors, supplemented by structured interviews with 50 of them. The report states that “statistics cited in this report come from the survey unless explicitly noted as engagement-based observations,” and every BCG figure used here is survey data; its engagement-based observations are deliberately not cited. Verbatim: “91% of B2C CMOs (and 76% of B2B CMOs) say that AI-moderated, no-click discovery is currently reshaping their already nonlinear funnels.” This page is titled two different ways: the browser title reads “Making the Agentic Marketing Transformation a Reality” while the on-page heading reads “Moving the Agentic Marketing Transformation from Illusion to Reality.” The heading is the one given here.)
IAB and Talk Shoppe, “When AI Guides the Shopping Journey: Opportunities for Marketers in the Age of AI-Driven Commerce,” October 28, 2025 (US; 450+ screen-recorded AI shopping sessions plus a survey of 600 consumers aged 18–64. The step counts describe shoppers in the study who used AI, measured before and after the AI interaction, and are observed rather than recalled. Verbatim: “Prior to AI engagement, the average shopper completed 1.6 steps online before making a purchase. However following AI interaction, that number jumped to 3.8.” The trust and traffic figures are quoted from IAB’s own announcement of the study at https://www.iab.com/news/ai-ranks-among-consumers-most-influential-shopping-sources-according-to-new-iab-study/.)