In 1985, buying a mattress took an entire Saturday. You drove to the store, stretched out on a few beds with your shoes still on and trusted the salesperson who pointed to the best one.
By 2030, mattress shopping could take less than a minute. You tell your AI agent you need a mattress. It already knows your budget and how you sleep, so it comes back with two options. You say “yes” or “no.”
Somewhere between the showroom and the chatbot, a middleman moved into the marketing funnel. AI already reads your website and answers your customers’ questions before they ever reach you. Soon, it will build its shortlist, too, and the brands that plan for it this year are the ones most likely to make the list. At our recent Marketing Disrupted events, Kaysha Hanock, Head of Digital, and Amanda Schomaker, Head of Growth, walked business owners through how AI is reshaping the funnel and what to do about it.
The Funnel Has Seen This Before
In 1898, ad man E. St. Elmo Lewis laid out how an ad should win attention, hold interest and build desire before it asks for action. When the funnel took its familiar shape in the 1920s, the seller decided what a buyer saw and in what order. That control has been slipping ever since. The web put a number on every stage, and search moved the research ahead of the store shelf. By 2020, Google’s own research admitted buyers loop through exploring and evaluating until something tips them into a purchase.
Each shift changed how buyers moved from awareness to purchase, yet the four stages remained the same — awareness, consideration, decision, purchase. What’s changed in 2026 is who moves through them, and the newest arrival isn’t a person at all.
Meet the Visitor Who Never Clicks
It’s a bot, and it brought friends. Automated traffic made up 53% of all web traffic in 2025, according to Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report. By June, Cloudflare reported bots were behind 57.5% of web page requests. Humans are now the minority of web page requests.
They also take far more than they give back. In early 2026, ChatGPT’s crawlers read about 1,300 pages for every visit they sent to a website, and Claude’s ratio runs past 11,000. Google sent a visit for roughly every five.
Many of those bots work for AI tools. They read your site so Google or ChatGPT can answer a question without sending anyone your way. SparkToro found 68% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026. For many searches, the page stacks an ad, an AI Overview, a map and a list of related questions above the first organic link. You can rank No. 1 and still go unseen, because visibility now depends on whether AI cites you.
The harder part is what you can’t measure. When AI recommends your brand in a chat, no report shows it. ChatGPT’s ad platform hit a $1 billion annual run rate in under 200 days, yet it reports only impressions, clicks, spend and conversions, with no view of the conversation behind the click. Google’s AI-run campaigns, like Performance Max, show the same trend. The platforms keep the data and hand advertisers the totals.
Reading your website was just the bot’s first job.
The Middleman Goes Shopping
The second job is the shopping itself, and a few companies are already showing how it works.
Walmart’s Sparky. In March, Walmart put its AI assistant inside ChatGPT. Shoppers browse and compare in the chat, then check out on Walmart’s side. Walmart says ChatGPT brings in new customers at twice the rate of search engines.
Meta’s Muse. Launched Sept. 8, 2026, this personal AI agent browses the web on its own. It can book travel, negotiate bills and make purchases with a one-time card number, and it asks for approval before it spends a dime. Muse hit No. 1 among free U.S. apps within 10 days, and Amazon blocked it from buying on its site just as fast.
ChatGPT’s sponsored agents. Since Sept. 16, OpenAI has been piloting ads that open a labeled chat with a brand’s AI agent, built from that brand’s product feeds and site content. Wayfair is among the first testers, and the conversation starts inside ChatGPT instead of on the brand’s website.
This is the middleman from the 2030 mattress story, already at work. A few hurdles still stand in its way. Agents need live inventory data, a secure way to pay and, hardest of all, a shopper willing to let software hit “buy.” About 65% of consumers use AI to research products before they buy, yet only 4% would let it complete the purchase. Until that gap closes, your website is becoming less of a destination and more of a data source, where an agent reads your pricing and inventory long before they notice your tagline.
What the Middleman Can’t Do
For all of this, the customer at the end of the funnel is still a person. The more AI fills the internet with instant answers, the more people will value what it can’t copy. AI can’t calm an upset client or shake a hand at an event. We expect a comeback for print and direct mail, the kind of marketing you can hold.
“The brands that win are the ones who know exactly where to draw the line between what to automate and what to protect,” said Kaysha Hanock, Head of Digital at 1905 New Media.
Five Moves to Make This Week
Drawing the line starts with knowing where you stand today. The pair sent the room home with a to-do list, and every item on it can start tomorrow.
- Ask “How did you hear about us?” Add it to your forms and checkout, and list AI tools as options.
- Quiz the chatbots. Put your top five customer questions into every major AI tool and track who gets recommended.
- Give AI its own lane in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Group referrals from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude into one channel so you can see them.
- Make your facts match. Keep your business name, address, phone, hours and pricing identical across your website and every social profile. When they conflict, AI picks one, and it may be the wrong one.
- Read your own reviews. Check what Google reviews, Reddit threads and YouTube say about you. AI weighs what reviewers say as well as how many reviews you have.
None of this means chasing a new algorithm. AI tools want what search always has, which is to serve people well, so strong content, schema and a complete Google Business Profile still do the heavy lifting.
Will the Middleman Mention You?
The funnel is turning into a filter. The mattress shopper of 2030 will hear two options, and the work you do this year helps decide if your brand is one of them.
If you want a hand getting ready, reach out to the 1905 New Media team.
P.S. We recently walked St. Louis and Chicago business owners through these ideas at our Marketing Disrupted events, and you can catch more conversations at the next one. Make sure you sign up for our newsletter to stay connected!
