The New Funnel Has No Top: How Buyers Actually Discover Brands in 2026

For decades, marketing strategy revolved around the idea of a funnel: awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, and conversion at the bottom. This model assumed linear buyer journeys, predictable entry points, and brand-controlled touchpoints. While imperfect, it persisted because it provided structure, shared language, and a sense of control for marketing organizations. Increasingly, however, it no longer reflects how buyers actually discover, evaluate, or trust brands.

Today’s discovery process is fragmented, non-linear, and shaped by systems marketers do not control. Buyers surface answers through AI-generated summaries, peer discussions on platforms like Reddit, third-party reviews, search results, and media coverage—often without ever encountering a brand’s traditional “top-of-funnel” assets. In this environment, discovery does not begin with awareness campaigns; it begins with questions. Brands do not guide buyers into funnels. They appear—or fail to appear—at moments of intent shaped by external validation and algorithmic synthesis.

This post argues that the funnel has not simply changed—it has collapsed at the top. In its place is a discovery ecosystem where visibility, authority, and trust signals determine whether a brand surfaces at all. By examining how buyers actually encounter brands in 2026, this paper reveals why traditional funnel metrics obscure reality and how AI and social proof reshape the discovery process, providing a new framework for understanding modern buyer behavior. The conclusion is clear: the most effective brands are no longer those that generate awareness, but those that are present wherever answers form.

Why the Funnel Once Worked

For decades, the marketing funnel provided the dominant framework for understanding buyer behavior, as it effectively solved real-world problems. It provided marketing teams with a shared language, a standardized campaign organization method, and a means to measure progress.

In the media environment that existed when the concept took hold, the funnel reflected a relatively accurate model of how buyers moved from initial awareness to final purchase.

The model rested on two fundamental assumptions: that buyers followed linear journeys from awareness to purchase, and that brands controlled the primary entry points where discovery occurred. During periods when channels were limited and attention was concentrated, these assumptions largely held.

Discovery was predictable. It occurred through advertising, direct mail, trade shows, and sales outreach. Customers learned about brands and products through billboards, TV commercials, and print publications.

These brand-controlled entry points sat at the top of the funnel, and marketers could trace a buyer’s progression downward, through consideration and intent, and finally into conversion.

The journey felt linear because the available paths were finite.

The funnel structure also aligned with how organizations functioned. Awareness was marketing’s domain, while conversion fell under the sales department’s purview. Handoff points were built into the funnel, allowing each area to optimize its function independently.

Budget allocation followed similar logic: Invest at the top, nurture in the middle, and close at the bottom. Impressions, leads, and conversion rates measured performance.

This approach worked well enough for the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Even if the buyer's journey wasn’t perfectly linear, they did move through recognizable stages.

CMOs used the funnel as the foundation for planning, reporting, and justifying spend. Funnel language, like “top-of-funnel,” “mid-funnel,” and “bottom-of-funnel,” became so universal in CMO thinking that no one questioned it.

Using the terminology, they felt, demonstrated their marketing credibility and sophistication.

Now, in the digital age, the conditions that made the funnel effective have undergone seismic shifts. The assumptions it relied on, such as linear journeys, brand-controlled entry points, and predictable touchpoints, no longer hold water.

Although funnel language lingers in modern boardrooms and marketing plans, the reality beneath it has drastically changed.

The Cracks in the Funnel Model

Over time, the funnel began to fracture. Not because marketers abandoned it, but because buyer behavior changed the foundation beneath it.

The first cracks developed as channels multiplied, and buyer attention scattered across platforms, devices, and formats. A predictable set of touchpoints quickly morphed into an overwhelming realm of possibilities.

Buyers no longer followed a linear journey through a handful of brand-controlled touchpoints; instead, they were constantly bombarded by hundreds of micro-interactions via search engines, social platforms, review sites, forums, podcasts, and peer networks.

With fragmentation like this, awareness-first strategies fell apart.

Traditional top-of-funnel tactics like display ads, sponsored content, and broad reach campaigns struggled to gain a foothold. Somehow, impressions increased while engagement declined.

Buyers were scrolling past branded messages, skipping pre-roll videos, and deploying ad blockers in record numbers. The assumption that awareness organically led to consideration began to collapse under the weight of buyer apathy.

Worse, buyers started bypassing top-of-funnel assets entirely.

B2B buyers were evaluating vendors before ever touching that vendor’s marketing materials.

Skipping traditional marketing materials, they instead read third-party reviews, consulted peer networks, sought case studies on independent sites, and gleaned information from sources brands didn’t control or even monitor.

By the time a buyer reached a brand’s website or responded to outreach, their minds were nearly made up.

There was no funnel language for this behavior. If buyers never entered at the top, where did they enter? If awareness campaigns didn’t drive consideration, what did? Was there even a funnel at all?

Marketing teams found themselves optimizing campaigns for journeys that few buyers were even taking, and measuring success in metrics that hardly correlated to pipeline or revenue, like impressions or reach.

The problem was not that the funnel was becoming outdated. Its foundational assumptions had become irreparably misaligned with reality.

These were not surface-level cracks needing repair or optimization; they were structural fault lines that undermined the model itself.

Discovery Without Entry Points

The funnel’s collapse created a vacuum that something radically different quickly filled: a discovery process that begins with questions instead of brand messaging.

Today’s buyers don’t start their journeys by seeking specific vendors or absorbing awareness campaigns; they start by seeking answers. They want to understand their problem, assess potential solutions, and determine what a good outcome looks like, and they often do all three before even knowing which brands exist in the category.

When a buyer types a question into a search engine, they receive AI-generated summaries that curate information from across the internet. These summaries provide instant answers, usually without requiring a single click.

If the buyer does click through to any of the results, they’re just as likely to land on Reddit threads or Quora posts as they are to find official brand content.

Peer validation and experience now occupy the same spaces in search engine results as polished marketing messages. Brand websites now provide confirmation, not discovery.

Social media platforms have become discovery engines.

A single Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky, or Instagram post from a trusted peer can introduce their followers to a brand, and their opinion can establish its credibility or eliminate it from consideration altogether. These discovery moments happen outside brand channels (and usually outside the brand’s knowledge).

Third-party review sites and comparison platforms have also exploded in popularity. Buyers now look for real user experiences on sites like G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Consumer Reports, and CNET. They read Amazon user reviews before making a purchase.

They want to read case studies or testimonials published by other users, not vendors. They’d prefer watching a demo or a customer-recorded unboxing video to old-fashioned marketing videos.

In other words, discovery now occurs outside the structures brands built to facilitate it. There is no top of the funnel because there is no single entry point that brands control.

Instead, buyers encounter brands where authentic answers surface: in AI summaries, search results, forum discussions, peer recommendations, and independent reviews.

Pulling buyers into a funnel is no longer the task. When buyers seek answers, the objective is simpler and harder at the same time: to be present among the answers they trust.

The Rise of the Answer Surface

Discovery no longer occurs through brand-controlled entry points. Instead, it happens via “answer surfaces,” where buyers seeking solutions find instant, contextual information, validation, and recommendations.

Brands don’t own these surfaces, nor are they stages in a funnel. Answer surfaces are the distributed ecosystem of digital venues, from AI overviews and chatbots to niche community forums, where AI synthesizes fragmented information about a brand into a single, direct response for the buyer.

Some examples of answer surfaces include:

• Review platforms like G2 and Trustpilot, where real customers document their experiences
• Reddit threads where users debate the merits of competing products
• LinkedIn posts from industry practitioners
• YouTube videos from independent creators
• Podcast episodes featuring subject-matter experts
• Slack or Discord communities where professionals share recommendations

These, not brand websites, are the places modern buyers go to learn, compare, and decide.

Answer surfaces differ from traditional marketing channels in many ways, the key difference being that brands can’t own or control them; they must earn a spot within them.

A brand can’t buy its way into a Reddit thread or force an AI summary to mention its product; it can only create the conditions that make its inclusion more likely.

Those conditions include customer advocacy, earned media coverage, consistent third-party validation, demonstrated expertise, and a significant presence in the broader conversation around a category or problem.

The mechanisms that determine how a brand can appear on answer surfaces are frustratingly inscrutable. Some search engine algorithms prioritize certain sources over others.

AI models synthesize information based on training data and relevance signals. Review platforms rank results by volume, recency, and user engagement. Social platforms push content due to engagement metrics and network effects.

In all cases, the decision about which brands appear and in what context comes from systems and communities — not marketing teams.

The playbook has changed. Brands no longer compete for top-of-funnel attention; they compete for relevance and authority in the heterogeneous ecosystem of answer surfaces.

It’s no longer about which brand has the largest awareness budget, but rather those that have built — and earned — credibility, trust, and visibility in the places where buyers search for answers.

Authority Over Awareness

In the funnel model, discovery’s primary goal was awareness: getting the brand in front of as many potential buyers as possible. Reach, impressions, and share of voice were essential metrics. The assumption was that visibility alone would lead to consideration, and consideration would lead to conversion.

In the answer surface model, awareness is necessary but insufficient.

Far more important now is authority: whether buyers recognize a brand as credible, trustworthy, and relevant within the spaces where they seek answers.

A brand can have high awareness but still be excluded from consideration if it lacks the signals that answer surfaces look for. On the other hand, a brand with modest reach can dominate discovery if it has built enduring authority in the right places.

Across different surfaces, authority manifests in different ways:

• On review platforms, it shows up in the volume and quality of customer testimonials.
• In AI-generated summaries, it appears as consistent mentions from various reliable sources.
• In peer communities, it emerges through trusted member recommendations.
• In media coverage, it takes the form of expert commentary and thought leadership.

Authority is composite. Brands create it from multiple forms of validation.

This moves the focus from distributing messages to recognizing signals. Brands can’t broadcast their way into answer surfaces. They must earn their presence by creating the conditions under which external validators, such as customers, analysts, media, and peers, reference them positively and often.

This requires investing not just in advertising spend, but also in product quality, customer success, public relations, thought leadership, community engagement, and strategic partnerships.

Brands can raise awareness through a budget. They must build authority through performance and credibility.

In an environment where systems control discovery by prioritizing relevance and validation over paid placement, a brand’s visibility relies on its authority. Now, being known matters far less than being discussed, recommended, and trusted.

Why Funnel Metrics No Longer Explain Growth

Funnel thinking hasn’t gone away because funnel metrics haven’t, either.

Marketing companies still report on impressions, reach, click-through rates, and awareness lift as if these measurements accurately reflect what fuels revenue. They optimize campaigns based on cost per lead, conversion rates at each funnel stage, and multi-touch attribution models that trace linear buyer journeys.

These metrics are familiar and easy to track, but they’re also disconnected from how today’s buyers discover and evaluate brands.

Impressions and reach measure exposure, not influence.

A brand can generate millions of impressions without ever appearing in important answer surfaces. High reach in paid channels doesn’t translate to inclusion in AI summaries, peer discussions, or customer reviews.

Funnel metrics imply visibility, but they don’t capture whether a brand has the authority and validation signals to appear when buyers search for solutions.

Attribution models are even more problematic. Most attribution systems assume marketers can track touchpoints throughout a buyer’s journey and credit the channels that contributed to conversion.

Unfortunately, attribution captures only a fraction of the actual influence in an answer ecosystem where discovery occurs through untracked conversations and AI-generated responses.

If a customer reads a Reddit thread, watches a YouTube review, sees a brand mentioned in an AI summary, and discusses options with their peers — all before ever clicking a paid ad or visiting the brand website — attribution models don’t see this. Instead, they credit the ad or the website, ignoring the milieu of signals the customer used to make their decision.

There’s a chasm between reported performance and actual influence.

Marketing teams create campaigns around metrics that show flattering numbers, while the broader and now more important question of whether the brand appears in answer surfaces goes unexamined.

They’re celebrating wins in brand-controlled channels that no longer influence buyers while losing ground in areas where modern buyers make their decisions.

Funnel metrics were designed for and relevant in a world where brands controlled the buyer journey. Now that discovery is distributed, non-linear, and mediated by external systems, those metrics no longer provide insight into why some brands grow and others stagnate.

Continuing to optimize around outdated measurements risks wasting investment in channels with little real-world impact.

A New Framework for Discovery

The funnel no longer describes how buyers discover brands. The solution isn’t another linear model, but a fresh perspective. Instead of aiming to move buyers through stages, marketing must focus on earning their presence within discovery ecosystems.

In this environment, buyers enter from countless directions, encounter information randomly, and synthesize inputs from sources brands don’t control.

That’s why marketing is no longer about guiding buyers through a predetermined journey. Now, it’s about ensuring the brand appears wherever buyers are asking and answering questions about the category.

The three elements that determine whether a brand surfaces effectively within discovery ecosystems are:

• Trust signals: The external validation that answer surfaces look for, such as customer reviews, third-party endorsements, case studies, and peer recommendations
• Authority: Thought leadership, media presence, expert commentary, and demonstrated expertise
• Consistency: Alignment among the brand’s positioning, messaging, and reputation across every touchpoint

Some brands nail one or two elements and wonder why discovery still fails them, but all three are essential.

Campaigns alone can’t manufacture these elements. Brands form them over time through product quality, customer success, strategic partnerships, earned media, community engagement, and ongoing contributions to industry conversations. This changes the role of marketing from controlling the journey to creating the conditions necessary for the brand to earn visibility and credibility in the eyes of external systems.

This new discovery-first framework forces marketers to rethink what success looks like.

Instead of measuring funnel progression, companies must measure ecosystem presence: Are we mentioned in third-party reviews? Do we appear in AI-generated summaries? Are customers advocating for us in peer communities? Is our thought leadership being referenced by the media and analysts?

These are the factors that determine discovery in a non-linear environment.

The brands that flourish are the ones that stop trying to control the journey and start earning their place in the conversation.

Organizational Implications for CMOs

The traditional division of labor in marketing departments reflects funnel thinking: Demand generation owns top-of-funnel, content focuses on mid-funnel nurture, and sales takes over at the bottom.

This worked when buyer journeys were linear and brands controlled touchpoints. It broke down when discovery began happening across independent channels, and buyers bypassed the funnel entirely.

Now, it’s time to rethink ownership.

Public relations, search engine optimization, content marketing, community engagement, and customer advocacy can’t operate in silos anymore. Brands must coordinate across every function that influences external signals if they hope to build a presence in a discovery ecosystem.

These functions must work together at once, not consecutively:

• PR: Shapes media coverage and analyst relationships
• SEO: Determines visibility in search and AI summaries
• Content: Creates the substance that earns citations and shares
• Community engagement: Earns peer validation
• Customer success: Generates the reviews and testimonials that surface in answer platforms

It’s also time to reallocate the budget.

In a funnel model, the largest spend typically goes to activities intended to fill the top of the funnel, like paid media and demand generation. Under an ecosystem framework, budgets must support programs that assemble authority and trust over time.

This means investing in:

• Customer success programs that drive advocacy
• PR efforts that secure earned media
• Content strategies that establish thought leadership
• Community platforms that encourage peer-to-peer validation

These are longer-term plays with less immediate attribution, which makes them harder to justify under traditional ROI frameworks.

New definitions of success are necessary to get teams on board with discovery outcomes rather than funnel metrics. Instead of measuring marketing qualified leads or cost per acquisition on their own, CMOs must assess whether the brand is gaining visibility in the places modern buyers look for answers.

This might mean tracking:

• Share of voice in third-party reviews
• Presence in AI-generated summaries
• Mentions in peer communities
• Citation frequency in industry media

These metrics are less precise than funnel KPIs, but they align more closely with how discovery now works.

The organizational challenge is as much cultural as it is structural.

Marketing teams accustomed to controlling campaigns and optimizing brand channels must learn to influence ecosystems they don’t own, which takes patience, cross-functional collaboration, and comfort with indirect influence.

For CMOs, it means advocating for strategies that build long-term brand credibility rather than a short-term pipeline, and making the case that presence in answer surfaces is what propels growth.

The Risk of Funnel Thinking in 2026

The danger of clinging to funnel-based models isn’t that they’re entirely wrong; it’s that they create systematic blind spots.

Companies that insist on structuring their marketing around funnels will measure the wrong metrics, invest in the wrong channels, and miss the signals that determine whether buyers consider their brand at all.

The cost isn’t immediate failure but slow erosion: declining effectiveness, weakening differentiation, and diminishing relevance in the larger conversation.

Funnel thinking encourages marketers to center campaigns on journeys that buyers no longer take. Marketers dump resources into awareness campaigns designed to draw buyers to the top of the funnel.

In contrast, those buyers have already formed opinions from sources the marketing team never touched, and they’re already deep into consideration.

Marketing departments waste budgets on owned channels and paid media. Meanwhile, the ecosystems that now shape buyer perception, such as review sites, peer communities, and AI summaries, remain under-resourced or completely overlooked.

All of this generates a false sense of progress. Sure, campaigns hit their KPIs, dashboards show green, and lead volumes meet targets; at the same time, though, pipeline stalls, conversion rates decline, and revenue growth slows.

The disconnect between marketing activity and business outcomes widens, with no explanation found in the metrics. Launching more campaigns and increasing spending on the same channels only brings diminishing returns.

Funnel thinking prevents organizations from seeing the importance of customer advocacy, the value of earned media, the impact of thought leadership, and the role of peer validation.

Because these activities don’t fit neatly into a funnel framework, they’re deprioritized or treated as secondary. Meanwhile, competitors who have already transformed their strategies into ecosystem thinking are building authority, trust, and presence in answer surfaces.

By the time the revenue gap becomes apparent, it can be challenging to bridge.

Companies can execute perfectly within a funnel framework and still lose ground because that framework no longer reflects how buyers make decisions. In 2026, the successful brands will be those who recognized the change early, restructured their strategies around discovery ecosystems, and invested in formulating the authority and trust that now determine visibility.

From Funnels to Presence

The marketing funnel served its purpose well for decades. It provided structure and shared language when buyer journeys were more predictable and brands controlled discovery entry points.

Now, though, that world no longer exists.

Discovery is ambient, distributed, and ongoing. Buyers don’t enter funnels; they surface answers from ecosystems that brands don’t own and can’t fully control.

This about-face necessitates a new perspective altogether on the purpose of marketing.

Now that marketers no longer aim to guide buyers through stages or fill the top of a funnel with volume, their objective is to be present, credible, visible, and referenced wherever buyers seek solutions. Brands earn authority through third-party reviews, AI-generated summaries, peer community recommendations, and meaningful contributions to the broader industry conversation. They must now focus on developing trust signals that answer surfaces recognize and prioritize.

Success in this environment comes less from campaign execution and more from sustained investment in the factors that create credibility over time:

• Product quality that generates advocacy
• Customer success that fuels reviews
• Thought leadership that earns media coverage
• Community engagement that cultivates peer validation

These aren’t quick wins by any means. They require patience, cross-functional coordination, and investment in outcomes that are challenging to measure but better align with how today’s buyers make decisions.

In 2026 and beyond, prospering brands won’t be those with the largest awareness budgets or the most sophisticated attribution models, as was the case in the past; they’ll be those that recognized the funnel’s collapse early on, restructured their marketing strategies around discovery ecosystems, and committed to attaining presence where buyers look for solutions.

The most successful brands will understand they must relinquish control of the buyer journey and instead concentrate on gaining relevance in an ecosystem where discovery happens anywhere and everywhere buyers ask questions.

The top of the funnel is gone. What’s left is a bigger challenge: being credible and present everywhere buyers look for solutions. Brands that stick to outdated models risk irrelevance, but those willing to embrace the new reality will find endless opportunity.