- AI has compressed into minutes a search that used to take days: customers arrive with their decision almost made.
- Your annual marketing plan is built for a buyer who no longer exists: decision-makers already have a shortlist before they visit your site.
- Half of adults now use AI assistants to look for information, and you weren't part of that conversation.
- You need an audit of the real buying journey: understand where customers find you (or don't) before they even search for you.
A potential customer arrives at your first call having already compared prices, read reviews and narrowed the choice down to three names. Meanwhile, your website is still explaining what you do.
Why this change matters now, not a year from now
Until recently, anyone buying something important, like a machine, management software or a consulting service, spent days or weeks gathering information. They visited sites, asked for quotes, compared everything by hand. That time was also your time: to introduce yourself, explain your product, build trust.
Today an AI assistant (a program that answers questions in natural language, like ChatGPT or Perplexity) does that same research in a few minutes. The customer comes to you with a ready-made list of three or four names, prices already compared and very specific questions. The problem isn't that customers have become more demanding: it's that your marketing plan is still calibrated to the old pace.
According to a Pew Research Center study of more than 5,000 American adults, about half now use AI assistants to look for information, a sharp rise from one third in 2024. Searching for information is the most common use of these tools. That means a significant share of your potential customers has already talked about your category with an AI before opening your site.
Your website is still talking to people who are gone
Think about how your communication is structured today. The homepage explains what you do. The first contact email introduces the company. The salesperson, on the first call, starts from the beginning. It all makes sense if the customer is at the start of the journey, knowing nothing yet.
But if the customer is already halfway there, having figured out what they need and heard your name and two others, then you're repeating things they already know. You're wasting their time and yours. Worse, you're missing the chance to say what really matters: why they should choose you over the other two names on their list.
This is a positioning problem with a timing component. You don't solve it by producing more content: you solve it by understanding where in the journey customers really arrive and what they want to hear at that moment. If you run advertising campaigns, it's also worth reading how automated media buying is changing the rules in 2026: the buyer who decides alone is the same one who will soon buy through AI agents.
The shortlist gets written elsewhere, and you weren't in the room
There's an even more critical step: candidate selection. When an AI assistant answers the question "what are the best companies for X," it doesn't scroll through ten pages of results. It returns three names and a paragraph. If your name isn't in that answer, you don't exist for that customer, no matter how many years you've been in business or how many pages your site has.
The problem is that many companies still measure their visibility with metrics designed for traditional search engines: Google rankings, organic traffic, clicks. These numbers are still useful, but they don't capture what happens earlier: the conversation between the customer and the AI where it's decided who makes the list. On this topic, the article on the hidden costs of AI in marketing shows clearly why some metrics look positive while the real result moves in the opposite direction.
For us, the point isn't to chase every new measurement tool. It's to first understand where customers really form their opinion of your brand, and to work on that with method, not out of trend-chasing.
The annual plan can't keep up with the market
A marketing plan built in January to last twelve months assumes that customer behavior is stable. In 2025 that assumption was already shaky. Today it's simply false.
Take a company that makes components for the food industry. Its typical sales cycle lasted six months: first contact, visit, offer, negotiation, order. If the industrial buyer now arrives at first contact having already compared three suppliers through AI, that cycle gets shorter, but only at the start. The later stages still require relationship and trust. A rigid plan misses this shift and keeps allocating budget to the awareness phase (making the brand known) when the real problem is the consideration phase (being on the shortlist).
The solution isn't a longer or more detailed plan. It's a plan with more frequent review cycles, quarterly rather than annual, and with metrics that measure where customers find you, not just how often they click. This applies to paid media investors too: the experience with ChatGPT Ads shows that optimizing for clicks and impressions tells you nothing about where the real buying decision takes shape. And watching how platforms evolve, as in the case of Meta's AI vision, helps you see where buyer attention will shift in the coming months.
To explore the topic in the broader context of the Marketing and ADV performance cluster, you'll find more articles linking these changes to everyday operational choices.
What to check in your company right now
- Run the AI customer test: ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "what are the best companies for [your category] in Italy" and see if your name appears. If it doesn't, you have a visibility problem that traditional metrics aren't picking up.
- Review your first touchpoint: does your homepage or first email assume the customer knows nothing? If so, you're talking to someone who's no longer there.
- Map the real journey: interview three or four recent customers and ask how they researched before contacting you. Their answers will show you where their opinion of your brand was formed.
- Check your information for consistency: are your website, online reviews and industry sources saying the same things about you? Contradictions hurt your presence in AI answers.
- Review your plan's cadence: if you update your strategy once a year, switch to quarterly reviews. Buyer behavior changes faster than that.
- Measure what you're not measuring yet: add citations in AI answers to your tracking, not just organic traffic and paid clicks. Tools like Google Analytics 4 already have a dedicated channel for AI assistants.
Frequently Asked Questions
The fastest way is to test it yourself: search for your category on ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google with AI answers turned on, and see if your name appears. Google Analytics 4 has added a dedicated channel to track clicks coming from AI assistants, but it only measures people who actually clicked, not those who evaluated you without visiting your site.
Not abandon it, but restructure it. An annual plan works well as a framework for budget and goals. The problem starts when it becomes rigid and leaves no room for mid-year reviews. Moving to quarterly cycles of review and adjustment is enough to regain flexibility without throwing out your planning.
This matters most for SMEs, because they have fewer resources to waste on messages aimed at the wrong customer. A small company that understands where the purchase decision really takes shape can focus its budget on that moment, instead of spreading it across the whole funnel.
When an AI assistant answers a question like “which suppliers should I choose for X,” it doesn't list ten options. It cites two or three. Making that list depends on how many authoritative sources talk about you consistently: industry sites, reviews, forums, technical content. It's not a matter of ad budget, but of digital reputation built over time.
The buyer has already decided almost everything before finding you. The question is whether your marketing was there when that decision was taking shape.
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