Every marketer thinks they understand funnels. Most don’t.
They know the textbook version – awareness, consideration, conversion. Top, middle, bottom. Simple shapes in PowerPoint that get nodded at during meetings. But ask them how an SEO funnel differs from a marketing funnel and watch them fumble for words.
Here’s why this matters: 60% of searches in 2026 end without a click, SparkToro found. Your traditional marketing funnel – where people visit your site and move through carefully designed stages – operates on less than half the data.
The rest? Happening in AI Overviews, featured snippets, zero-click searches where people grab answers and leave before your analytics register anything.
And you’re wondering why conversions are down.
SEO funnels and marketing funnels aren’t the same. Shouldn’t be. One handles discovery, the other handles everything after. Treating them interchangeably is how you end up with strategies that look brilliant in decks but collapse under reality.
What the marketing funnel actually is
The marketing funnel is old. AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – dates to 1898. Over a century of using this same linear model because it’s intuitive.
Top: awareness. You exist.
Middle: consideration. They’re comparing you to alternatives.
Bottom: conversion. Purchase happens. Or doesn’t.
This worked when customer journeys were simple. See ad, visit store, buy product. Linear.
But 2026? Customer journeys look less like funnels, more like abstract art – touchpoints scattered across channels with no clear sequence. MarTech found 73% of retail shoppers use multiple channels throughout their journey.
They don’t move top to bottom in orderly fashion. They jump. Research on TikTok, compare prices on Google, read Reddit reviews, ask ChatGPT for recommendations, then buy on Amazon. Maybe your site. Maybe nowhere.
The funnel assumes control you don’t actually have.
Yet organizations still structure entire marketing operations around this model. Separate teams for awareness, others for consideration, different ones for conversion – each optimizing their slice while the whole thing falls apart.
That’s problem number one with funnels. They fragment what should be unified.
What is the SEO funnel?
The SEO funnel is different. Not about moving people through intent stages – it’s about meeting them where they already are.
Think of it this way: marketing funnels activate after someone knows you exist. SEO funnels determine if they discover you at all.
Top of SEO funnel: broad informational queries. “How to solve X problem.” People researching, learning, exploring. They don’t know you yet.
Middle: comparison queries. “Best X for Y.” They know their options now, maybe including you, and they’re evaluating.
Bottom: transactional queries. “X pricing.” “Where to buy X.” Ready to purchase, just picking the vendor.
The key difference? SEO funnels operate at search level – before anyone lands on your site. You’re optimizing for discovery, not conversion.
In 2026, with AI Overviews dominating search results, this distinction is everything.
Organic click-through rates for queries with AI Overviews dropped 61% since mid-2024 – from 1.76% to 0.61%, recent studies show. When AI answers questions directly on the SERP, people don’t click through.
Your SEO funnel now includes stages where people never visit your website. They see you cited in an AI Overview. They read your answer in a featured snippet. They get what they need and bounce.
Traditional marketing funnels don’t account for this. SEO funnels must.
Why treating them as the same kills your strategy
Most organizations treat SEO as a channel within the marketing funnel. “SEO drives top-of-funnel awareness” they say, like that’s the complete picture.
It isn’t.
SEO operates across the entire buyer journey, but fundamentally differently than other marketing channels. Conflate the two and you get misaligned strategies.
The measurement problem
Marketing funnels measure conversions. Did someone buy? Fill the form? Request a demo?
SEO funnels in 2026 measure visibility. Are you appearing in AI Overviews? Getting cited? Showing up in featured snippets? Are people seeing your brand even when they don’t click?
Different success metrics entirely.
If you’re only tracking clicks and conversions, you’re missing 60% of your SEO impact. The brand awareness that happens when ChatGPT cites you as a source. The authority you gain when Google features your answer. The downstream branded searches occurring days later because someone saw you referenced in an AI summary.
None of that appears in your marketing funnel metrics. All of it affects revenue.
The content problem
Marketing funnel content moves people between stages. Awareness content educates. Consideration content compares. Conversion content closes.
SEO funnel content answers queries. Any stage, any format. Optimized for how people actually search, not how your org chart is structured.
A single comprehensive guide might rank for broad educational queries, comparison queries, and specific solution queries simultaneously. Try doing that with marketing funnel content and watch your messaging turn to mush.
The timing problem
Marketing funnels assume you control when people move between stages. Hit them with awareness first, nurture through consideration, close at the bottom.
SEO funnels recognize people enter at different stages based on search intent. Someone searching “best CRM for startups” is already considering options. They don’t need your awareness content – they need comparison data now.
Force them through your marketing funnel stages anyway and they’ll bounce to a competitor who answers their actual question.
How AI affects The SEO and Marketing Funnel
Here’s the uncomfortable part: neither funnel works like it used to.
Gartner predicts one in five purchases will be completed by an AI agent in 2026. Think about what that means.
Someone tells their AI assistant: “Find me accounting software under $100 monthly, cloud-based, integrates with QuickBooks, handles multi-currency.”
The AI searches. Compares. Applies filters. Maybe completes the purchase.
The human never sees your marketing. Never visits your website. Never enters your funnel.
If your product isn’t visible to the machine, you don’t exist.
This changes everything.
The AI search funnel
Traditional funnels assumed human decision-making at every stage. Research, evaluate, decide, purchase. All human actions.
AI funnels operate differently. The stages look more like:
Crawlability: Can LLMs see you? Is your content structured so AI can parse it? Schema markup present? Sitemap clean?
Interpretability: Can AI understand what you do? Is your content clear? Semantic HTML used? Can an LLM accurately summarize your value prop?
Citability: Does AI choose to reference you? Are you authoritative enough to be cited over competitors? Is your content genuinely helpful or SEO spam?
Recommendation: Does AI actually suggest you? When someone asks for solutions, does your brand surface? Are you positioned as viable?
This isn’t a funnel in traditional sense. It’s a filter. AI decides what humans even see before they make choices.
And your traditional funnels – both SEO and marketing – don’t account for this gatekeeping layer.
Zero-click searches killed traffic
80% of searches ending without clicks means traffic isn’t the game. Visibility is.
But visibility is hard to measure. Can’t track an impression like you track a session. Can’t attribute zero-click exposure to revenue like you attribute a form fill.
So organizations keep optimizing for clicks and conversions because those metrics are measurable. Even though they’re capturing less than half the picture.
HubSpot reported a 70-80% decline in organic traffic but their revenue still grew. NerdWallet had similar patterns. Why?
Because they built brand presence across channels. When people saw them cited in AI Overviews and featured snippets, they remembered the brand. Later, when ready to buy, they searched for NerdWallet directly or asked their AI for “NerdWallet’s credit card comparison.”
That’s a different funnel. One where awareness happens without clicks, consideration happens in AI summaries, conversion happens through branded search.
Traditional funnels don’t model this. If you’re still building strategies around old funnel models, you’re optimizing for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
What actually works: integrated funnel thinking
Stop treating SEO and marketing as separate funnels.
They’re different views of the same customer journey. In 2026 they need to operate as one system.
Map content to search intent
Create content based on what people actually search for, not what funnel stage they’re supposedly in.
Someone searching “how to reduce customer churn” is top of funnel in traditional thinking – just learning about the problem.
But if your product solves churn, that query is an opportunity to appear in AI Overviews with a clear answer that positions your brand as authority.
Then when they search “customer retention software comparison” two weeks later, you’re already in their consideration set. Not because you forced them through stages, but because you met them where they were.
Optimize for AI visibility
Rankings don’t guarantee visibility anymore. Featured snippets, AI Overviews, People Also Ask boxes dominate SERPs.
Your content needs structure for extraction – clear headings, concise paragraphs, schema markup, FAQ sections that directly answer queries.
Write for comprehension, not keyword density. AI systems reward clarity. They cite sources that make their job easier.
If your content requires ten minutes of reading to understand the answer, AI won’t use it. Someone else’s concise explanation gets cited instead.
Measure visibility
Build dashboards tracking:
- Impressions in Search Console (includes AI Overview views)
- Feature snippet ownership
- AI citations and brand mentions
- Branded search volume
- Direct traffic (often from people who saw you cited elsewhere)
Look for correlation. When impressions spike but clicks don’t, that’s zero-click impact. When direct traffic increases following visibility gains, that’s AI-driven awareness leading to branded searches.
This is your actual funnel in 2026. Not the one in your marketing deck.
Create content AI can’t fully summarize
Here’s the paradox: you need content AI can cite, but also content it can’t fully replace.
Interactive calculators. Custom tools. Original research with datasets. Deep technical documentation. These resist zero-click summarization because they require interaction.
Someone searching “ROI calculator for marketing automation” might see you in an AI Overview. But to actually calculate their ROI, they need your site.
That’s bottom of funnel, but not traditional sense. They’re not buying yet – they’re engaging with your tool. Building the business case internally. Coming back multiple times to refine calculations.
Then when ready to purchase, you’re the trusted authority because you helped them before asking for anything.
That’s funnel thinking that maps to real behavior.
SEO funnel vs marketing funnel: stop choosing
The question isn’t which funnel to use. It’s how to integrate them.
SEO handles discovery – getting found when people search for solutions. Marketing handles conversion – turning awareness into revenue.
But the boundary between them dissolved.
SEO now extends into consideration and conversion with comparison content and transactional queries. Marketing now needs visibility metrics that traditional funnels ignored.
In 2026, organizations that still separate these functions are fighting with one hand tied. Their SEO team optimizes for rankings nobody sees. Their marketing team nurtures leads that never entered the funnel because discovery failed.
Revenue matters and teams that align behind this metric reach there instead of floundering.
That’s the only funnel stage that actually matters. Everything else is just the path to get there.
And in a world where AI agents complete purchases, zero-click searches dominate results, customer journeys resemble chaos more than funnels – the path matters less than the destination.
Build systems that work regardless of how people discover you. Whether they find you through traditional search, AI summaries, social media, or something that doesn’t exist yet. Because the next disruption is already coming. And if you’re still optimizing for 2020 funnels, you’ll miss it entirely.
