Dark Funnel

The Dark Funnel describes buyer research activity that happens entirely outside the observable touchpoints your analytics can track. It has always existed — word of mouth, private Slack groups, conversations with peers — but AI has turned the dark funnel pitch-black. When a VP of Marketing asks ChatGPT "what are the best AI PR platforms?" at 11pm, there is no click, no form fill, no UTM parameter. Your CRM never sees it. But the purchase decision just narrowed to three brands.

The AI Acceleration

Traditional dark funnel activity was difficult to measure but at least left indirect traces — site visits, content downloads, webinar signups that eventually appeared in attribution models. AI-mediated research leaves none. The buyer gets a fully synthesized answer inside the AI interface, evaluates options, and may arrive at your sales team already decided — or already decided against you.

Research shows 37% of consumers now start product searches in AI tools rather than Google. For B2B technology buyers, that number skews significantly higher, with estimates placing it at 68% of initial vendor research. This means the majority of your pipeline is forming in a channel you cannot see and, until recently, could not influence.

Why Traditional Attribution Fails

Marketing attribution models depend on observable signals: clicks, page views, conversion events. The dark funnel in AI breaks this model entirely. A buyer who asks Perplexity to compare your product against three competitors and receives a detailed synthesis never touches your website. If they eventually convert, your attribution system credits whatever touchpoint happened to come last — a direct visit, a branded search — while the actual decision driver remains invisible.

This is why AI citation tracking has become essential. You cannot attribute what you cannot observe, but you can ensure your brand shows up when AI engines synthesize purchase recommendations. Machine Relations is the discipline of influencing what happens in this dark space — building the earned authority that causes AI engines to cite and recommend your brand during the research phase you will never directly see.

The Strategic Implication

Brands optimizing only for visible channels are optimizing for the minority of buyer activity. The dark funnel is where pipeline lives and dies. The brands that win are those present in AI-generated answers through sustained entity authority — not those waiting for buyers to click through to a landing page that fewer and fewer will ever visit.