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Marketing has changed. Your buyers aren't filling out forms on your website anymore. They're not downloading white papers. They're doing all their research before you ever know they exist.
The numbers tell the story: 70% of B2B buyers complete their research before they start a trial or talk to sales. They're making decisions about your product in places you can't track—ChatGPT searches, Reddit threads, LinkedIn feeds, industry blogs. This is the dark funnel, and if you're not there, you're losing deals you never knew you had a shot at.
The Dark Funnel Is Where Decisions Actually Happen
Here's what a typical buyer journey looks like today:
A product manager has a problem. They ask ChatGPT for solutions. They read a few blog posts. They check what people are saying on Reddit. They see a post from someone at a company in their LinkedIn feed. They look at a few comparison articles on Medium.
By the time they land on your website or book a demo, they've already formed an opinion. They've already narrowed their list. If you weren't part of that research phase, you're not making the shortlist.
The challenge? You can't directly measure most of this activity. You can't track when someone asks ChatGPT about your category. You can't see when they read your competitor's blog on Medium or stumble across a thoughtful post from their sales rep on LinkedIn.
But here's what I know: if you're not present in the dark funnel, your pipeline suffers. If you are present, your inbound leads show up warmer, more educated, and closer to a decision.
Start With AI Answers
The first place buyers go now is AI. They're asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity questions like "best project management tools for remote teams" or "how to solve [specific problem] at scale."
Do an assessment. Where does your company show up in AI responses today? For most B2B companies, the answer is: you don't.
This isn't about gaming an algorithm. It's about understanding what buyers are asking and making sure your brand, your solutions, and your expertise appear when those questions come up. If you're invisible in AI answers, you're invisible to a huge portion of your market during their most critical research phase.
Identify Your Topic Authority Gaps
Once you know where you stand in AI discovery, the next step is building real topic authority. Not just keywords—topics. What subjects should your company own? Where do you have credibility to build on, and where are the gaps?
Think about topic pillars that matter to your buyers. If you sell dev tools, you should own conversations around developer productivity, not just your specific feature set. If you're in the sales tech space, own topics around pipeline generation and sales efficiency.
Map out the topics where you need authority. Then look at what content you already have and what's missing. This isn't guesswork—there are ways to analyze what your competitors are covering, what questions your market is asking, and where the opportunity sits.
SEO Isn't Going Away
Let me be clear: traditional SEO still matters. Google isn't dead. Buyers still search, and you still need to show up in those results.
But SEO is now just one piece of a bigger puzzle. Optimize your content for search, but don't stop there. The dark funnel is much bigger than Google.
Publish Outside Your Own Walls
Your blog is important, but it's not enough. Buyers trust third-party sources more than branded content. Publish on platforms where your audience already spends time:
- Medium and Substack: Long-form thought leadership that gets distributed beyond your domain
- Industry wikis and knowledge bases: Places where buyers go for unbiased information
- Guest posts on respected industry sites: Borrowing credibility from established publications
When buyers see your insights in multiple places, you build authority. When they only see you on your own blog, you look like you're just talking to yourself.
Social Amplification: Beyond the Brand Page
Here's where most B2B companies get it wrong. They post on their company LinkedIn page or their brand Twitter account and call it a day. The problem? Company pages have minimal reach and even less authority.
Buyers don't follow company pages. They follow people. They trust insights from individuals, not brands.
Your executives, your founders, your sales reps—they all have networks. They all have credibility. When they share insights, perspectives, and valuable content on LinkedIn, X, and even Reddit, it reaches further and resonates deeper than any brand post ever will.
This doesn't mean everyone needs to become a content creator from scratch. Take the content your marketing team is already creating and make it easy for your team to share personalized versions. A survey result, a customer story, a product update—these all work better when shared by real people, not a logo.
The math is simple: if your company page has 5,000 followers but your 20 team members each have 500 connections, you just went from 5,000 potential impressions to 10,000+. And those impressions carry more weight because they come from people, not a brand.
Stay Present in the Dark Funnel
You can't measure every touchpoint in the dark funnel. You won't know exactly which Reddit thread or ChatGPT search influenced a buyer. But you'll see the results in your pipeline.
When you show up in AI answers, when your topics have authority, when your content appears on trusted platforms, and when your team amplifies your message across social channels, something shifts. Your inbound leads are warmer. They ask better questions. They're further along in their decision process. They already see you as credible.
That's the advantage of winning the dark funnel. You're not chasing cold leads. You're attracting buyers who already know you, trust you, and are ready to have a real conversation.
The dark funnel isn't going away. If anything, it's growing. The question is: are you showing up where your buyers are actually making decisions?
