How AI Quietly Took Over the Buyer Journey
A Tale of Two Signals
At the beginning of Q2 2025, the growth team at Tally, a fast-scaling no-code form builder, noticed a sharp uptick in user signups.
There were no new campaigns, social media, or spikes in paid traffic. Yet, nearly 25% of their new users were arriving from sources they couldn’t track.
After some digging, they discovered the cause: people were asking ChatGPT questions like:
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What’s the best free form builder for Notion?
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What’s a good alternative to Typeform?
And ChatGPT was recommending Tally—unsponsored, unprompted, and repeatedly.
Tally didn’t engineer this outcome, but its product and messaging were structured to be discoverable, interpretable, and trustworthy to machines.
While optimized for people, they were also readable AI. In 2025, that meant customers were finding them.
Meanwhile, a different story was unfolding at Chegg.
Long a staple in the student support market, Chegg was quietly slipping. By the end of Q1 2025, the situation was clear:
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31% drop in subscribers
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30% drop in revenue
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22% of the workforce was laid off
The product hadn’t changed. Students still needed help. But they were no longer going to Chegg. They were going to AI: ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. And Chegg wasn’t showing up.
AI surfaced Tally. Chegg was silently filtered out.
Two companies. Same time frame. Different fates.
And not because of better marketing, but because machines saw only one of them.
This Isn’t Just a Tech Story
In construction, firms like Butti and Marti Tunnel AG are now using Scalera.ai, an AI-powered assistant that streamlines procurement and bidding, compressing weeks of manual effort into hours.
From manufacturing to healthcare to professional services, AI is already influencing who gets found, who gets compared, and who gets chosen.
This shift is not about using AI tools internally. It’s about understanding that machines now sit between you and your customers.
The Machines Are Now in the Middle
Three data points show how quickly this landscape is changing:
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ChatGPT is now the third most-used search engine, growing more than 80% year-over-year
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Google AI overviews reduce click-through-rates by up to 56%
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72% of people use AI overviews when shown
Buyers haven’t disappeared—but their behaviour has transformed.
They’re not clicking through websites. They’re prompting a machine—and trusting the response. And if your business isn’t part of that response, you may never be considered at all.
Two Metrics Every CEO Should Watch Now
If you’re unsure whether this shift is already affecting your business, watch for two early indicators:
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Unattributed direct traffic: If more users are showing up without a referral source, AI tools may be surfacing your brand—without traditional tracking signals.
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Branded search conversion decline: If people are still searching for your name, but fewer are clicking through or converting, AI may be resolving their questions before they reach you.
These aren’t marketing problems. They’re visibility problems.
The Canary Has Gone Silent
In coal mines, canaries were the early warning system. When the air became toxic, the bird would go quiet. That silence meant it was time to act—or risk everything.
Today, your top-of-funnel metrics are the canary. If you’re seeing:
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Flat or declining SEO traffic
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Rising ad spend but falling ROAS
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Stagnant branded search performance
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A surge in direct traffic you can’t explain
Then the machine layer may already be working against you.
You’re not being rejected. You’re being overlooked.
What This Book Is—and Isn’t
This is not a book about AI tools or automation tactics.
It’s a strategic reset for CEOs and business leaders who want to:
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Anticipate how the buyer journey is changing
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Engage their teams with the right questions
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And shape their company’s future—before it’s shaped for them
Four Parts. One Strategic Reset.
This book is organized into four parts—to help you understand the shift, lead through it, and position your company to win in the new market reality.
Part 1: The Market — How Bots Became the Buyer’s First Contact
We begin with how the buyer journey has changed: funnels are collapsing, decisions are being compressed, and AI sits between you and the customer.
Preference engineering is the new social media marketing—actionable, impactful, and essential.
Part 2: Mindset — What I Had to Unlearn as a Founder
Like many leaders, I believed that success came from setting the vision, scaling a team, and moving fast. But when AI became the first touchpoint in the buyer journey, I had to let go of certainty, control, and instinct. I had to stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a chatbot.
I had to change the way I think to change the way I lead.
Part 3: Marketing — Rebuilding the Team That Makes You Visible
You don’t need a new team. You need a new model.
This section outlines how to build a dual-track marketing system:
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One track for human engagement—anchored in storytelling, trust, and personalization
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One for machine comprehension—structured data, semantic clarity, and AI-readable signals
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And how to build your marketing team’s capability and capacity to do both, without adding headcount, cost, or burning out your team
Part 4: Market-Making — Creating What Comes Next
This shift doesn’t just threaten what you’ve built. It creates the chance to build something new.
You’ll learn the forces that will reshape demand, how to anticipate when markets will pivot, and how to identify opportunities in emerging categories shaped by AI-first buying behaviour.
I'll show you how to create blue oceans—while others are still optimizing red ones.
For CEOs: Start Here
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Ask: If someone asked ChatGPT who to work with in our space, would we even make the list?
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Check: Are our branded search conversions falling?
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Decide: Who in our organization owns AI visibility, and do they have what they need to lead it?
You don’t need to know how the algorithms work. But you do need to lead like they already shape your market.
Now, let’s retool and win.