That said, buyer AI also gives you a peek into the dark funnel that you’ve never had before. Now, hold on. If you’ve been struggling with the effects of the expanding dark funnel, don’t grab a pitchfork and head my way just yet.

First, as stated, it’s a peek: you still can’t see buyer activity outside of your funnel and analytics tracking, but you can see what they’re likely to learn from their research with a much higher degree of confidence. Second, this offers you an opportunity to influence the dark funnel in ways you haven’t been able to historically.

So, let’s shed some light on the dark funnel, shall we? (Fist bump!)

If you’re familiar with the dark funnel, skip to the next section. If the term is new to you or confusing because it’s used in different situations and contexts, here’s a quick rundown.

The dark funnel is best thought of as the side trips in a buyer’s journey (i.e., “the funnel”) that are invisible to the seller. Think: reviews of your social feed, chats with colleagues, testing your site claims against third-party reviews and all the other activity that your analytics and CRM can’t track.

A common assumption, for example, is that most of the direct traffic in your site analytics comes from dark-funnel activity. The dark funnel doesn’t encompass all of that traffic but likely represents a big portion of it. Since it’s invisible, we don’t know. But we can reason that, unless you have a well-known brand, very few people divined that your exact URL was where they’d find the product or service they need. What’s happening is these buyers are deliberately entering your URL in their browsers, often in “incognito mode,” so they can see what you’re about without clicking your ad or entering data in a contact form or liking a social post.

Note: If you thought the dark funnel specifically referred to social media, there’s good reason for that. The concept was first applied to social media and expanded later to encompass all the hidden steps prospects take to shop around without subjecting themselves to vendor sales and marketing motions before they’re ready to talk with a salesperson. And just to keep the delineation clear as mud, the term “dark social” is also used to encompass the entire dark funnel, depending on who you’re talking to. But they all refer to the same dynamic: hidden buyer activity.

AI makes it easy for buyers to gather lots of information and put it into a tidy summary. And it happens fast, compressing hours (or days if the buyer is particularly thorough) of hunting around into a few minutes. This time savings, incidentally, is the single most common driver of adoption among B2B purchasers we surveyed for our subsequent report, “The AI-Powered B2B Buyer Has Arrived.” Sixty-six percent cited time savings as a driver of their adoption of AI in purchasing processes, ahead of all other factors.

And then, over top of all the reasons for buyers using AI assistants as they find and vet vendors, there’s the impact of agentic AI on funnel visibility, which we covered in a recent blog, “What Your CRM Cannot Tell You About Buyer Use of AI.”

Lots of changes are afoot now that AI’s riding sidesaddle with buyers, but you still control the evidence layer and a large swath of the factors they use to evaluate you. Think: website, materials, sales claims, literature, product pages, curated proof points, schema, etc. And you have significant influence over the assets outside of your direct control, such as press, awards, reviews, etc.

The big change is that these inputs need to align to tell a cohesive story now that AI is pulling them all together for the buyer to review. Inconsistencies you used to weather aren’t survivable in the ways they used to be. Human buyers are a little more forgiving, within reason, of fragmented messaging than their AI assistants are. Their own companies have struggled with the same coordination challenges: legacy department and responsibility silos, reliance on indirect channels and advisors instead of brand development, a focus on advertising-based revenue motions, and myriad other real-world obstacles to messaging unity. In other words, you had a little wiggle room.

With AI, that’s no longer the case. It’s expressly looking for inconsistencies, both within your information and, critically, between your claims and public sources. In our survey, 62 percent of buyers said they use AI to fact-check sales claims against public sources. It’s weighing your reputation while it’s at it. What wiggle room you had has been eliminated (or significantly shrunk) because of this cross-examination. Even if your direct buyer wants to cut you some slack, they may be reluctant after having a recommendation challenged by a boss or buying committee member who used their own AI to vet their work. In our survey, more than half (54 percent) of buyers said that’s already happened to them that they know of, and only seven percent think it will never happen.

As daunting as this coordination challenge is, the near-universal adoption of AI by buyers (94 percent, according to both Forrester and 6sense) gives you a uniform surface to study and see what they’re being told.

Querying the AI models gives you considerable insight into the takeaways from hidden buyer research. This is where you gain some power over the dark funnel.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of being methodical and thorough in this endeavor. Our crew has done considerable work in this area at revenue consultancy BuzzTheory, our sister company. Khali Henderson provided tips to get you started in her blog, “What Goes in the RFP? Buyers Are Asking AI.”

Here are a few process additions based on our experience helping companies a) plan and execute effectively and/or b) understand where they went astray and why their efforts weren’t paying off:

And this is the light at the end of the dark funnel. It’s still dark, but you can use this process to develop a baseline view of what the advisor says about you. From there, it’s a prioritization exercise: which proof points, signals and claims will you fix first?