AI Search and the Invisible Funnel: What B2B Startups Need to Know

There’s a lot of noise right now about how AI is “changing search forever.” Some people claim everyone is shifting to AI to help with every buying decision. Others insist that AI search is a consumer thing and B2B buying will remain the same. 

In my humble opinion, both are wrong.

AI is clearly rewriting how discovery works, but it’s rewriting it differently for B2C and B2B. In consumer markets, the transformation is louder and more obvious. In B2B, it’s quieter but ultimately more consequential. 

While your buyers may not (yet) be asking ChatGPT which specific SaaS tool they should buy, they are using AI to shape their early thinking before they ever talk to anyone in sales.

That early influence is what I call “the invisible funnel” and most B2B startups aren’t even aware it exists. 

Let’s break down what’s really happening.

B2C: The First AI Answer is the New Prime Shelf Space

To see AI’s impact in its purest form, look at consumers. 

The Collapsing Consumer Funnel 

Research shows that one-third of adults in the US already use AI tools for things like shopping, travel planning, and purchase decision-making. They’re not doing the classic Google dance of search → compare → click → scroll → maybe buy. Instead, they’re going straight to “ChatGPT, what should I get?”

The first answer becomes the recommended product, the comparison table, and - most likely - the shortcut to the checkout page. 

The New Fight for Attention

In B2C, the “first answer” inside ChatGPT is the new version of premium shelf placement. If you’re not mentioned, you may as well not exist. 

This works easily for B2C buyers because AI is picking from a familiar universe of products. B2B buyers, on the other hand, exist in a universe that is exponentially more complex. 

The B2B Reality: AI is Rewiring the Top of the Funnel

There’s not really such a thing as an impulse buy in a B2B setting. All the risk, compliance, budgets, approval, and political capital make that virtually impossible. So, it’s not likely that a factory manager, CTO or anyone else is casually going to ask ChatGPT - “which tech platform should we buy?” 

Instead, they might be asking questions like:

• What are the best practices for X?

• How do companies do X for their Y employees?

• Which types of tools solve X problem?

It’s these upstream questions that influence the shortlist before the shortlist even exists!

Shifting Buyer Expectations 

According to McKinsey, B2B buyers expect to “significantly increase” their reliance on AI assistants over the next 2-3 years. IT buyers are especially bullish and many already default to AI for their initial research.

A typical request from an IT buyer might sound like this: “Given [enter specific context], draft and RFP and generate a shortlist of vendors who meet these criteria.” In this context, AI isn’t the decision maker, but it’s a valued co-pilot with the power to determine who gets invited to the room. 

B2C vs. B2B: Two Very Different Modes of AI Impact

While it’s tempting to talk about “AI search” as a single phenomenon, that’s actually where a lot of confusion starts. AI isn’t affecting B2C and B2B buying in the same way, and expecting it to leads to the wrong conclusions and the wrong strategies. 

The simplest way to think about it is like this:

AI sits much closer to the moment of purchase in B2C, but much deeper inside the workflow in B2B.

That difference changes everything from how buyers ask questions to how vendors get discovered. 

Where AI Sits in the Funnel 

In B2C, AI has collapsed the funnel. Discovery, evaluation, and recommendation often happen inside a single AI interaction. If the answer is good enough, the buyer never leaves the interface.

In B2B, the funnel still exists, but AI reshapes the top of it. It influences how the problem is defined, which solutions are considered viable, and which vendors are even worth discussing. Approvals, budgets, and committees remain human, but they now operate on assumptions formed by AI-assisted research.

Query Style

Consumer queries tend to be outcome-oriented and personal. Buyers ask AI to decide for them.

B2B queries are structural and exploratory. Buyers ask AI to help them think about how to scope a project, what criteria matter, what opinions exist, and how similar companies approach the problem. Rather than looking for a single answer, they are looking for a clearer starting point.

Timelines

B2C decisions often happen in minutes. AI speeds up what can already be a pretty fast process.

B2B decisions still take weeks or months (especially if there’s bureaucracy to deal with), but the initial research phase is shrinking dramatically. What used to take weeks of Googling, analyst reports, and internal synthesis, can now happen in hours or days.

The User

In B2C, the user is an individual acting alone. 

In B2B, the “user” is a moving target. It could be one person, or, more likely, it’s a cross-functional buying committee with different priorities, incentives, and levels of technical depth. AI helps align those stakeholders earlier by creating shared language, frameworks, and reference points. 

The Invisible Funnel: How AI Shapes B2B Buying Before You Even Know It

Here’s where most B2B teams underestimate the impact of AI. Remember, the real shift isn’t that buyers are asking AI which vendor or solution to choose. Rather, AI is shaping the buying journey before the journey looks like a journey at all. By the time a sales process formally begins,much of the mental groundwork has already been laid. 

This is what happens in the invisible funnel:

Invisible Stage 1: Problem Framing

Buyers ask AI: 

• “What KPIs matter for X?”

• “What frameworks do companies use for Y?”

If your category language isn’t represented, buyers won’t frame the problem in a way that leads to you.

Invisible Stage 2: Category Formation

Once buyers understand their problem, the next thing AI helps them do is simplify the landscape of possible solutions. This is where category formation quietly happens.

If you don’t clearly define what category you belong to, AI will do it for you. And it will usually choose the nearest, most established category it can find, even if that framing undersells what you actually do:

• A differentiated platform becomes “another analytics tool.”

• A new compliance layer becomes “security software.”

• A workflow engine becomes “project management.”

If AI can’t clearly answer:

• What category is this company in?

• What problem does it solve?

• How is it different from adjacent categories?

then your startup risks being miscategorized, lumped in with the wrong alternatives, or excluded entirely from AI-generated overviews and comparisons. 

Invisible Stage 3: Vendor Discovery 

In a Google-driven world, a great blog post, a clever keywords strategy, or a well-timed ad campaign could earn you attention. In an AI-driven discovery layer, that’s not enough. AI-generated longlists reflect entities, not pages. And entities are built over time through clarity, consistency and repetition. 

If your messaging is fragmented, your positioning unclear, or your content thin, AI struggles to place you confidently. This is the part most teams miss: AI-driven vendor discovery often happens inside someone else’s workflow. Whether it’s procurement tools, internal research copilots, or RFP generators, you’ll never see the query and you won’t know you were considered. You’ll just notice that deals never seem to reach you. 

Invisible Stage 4: RFP Drafting & Evaluation 

By the time a formal RFP exists, many teams assume the playing field is level. Every vendor sees the same requirements, submits a proposal, and gets evaluated on merit.

In reality, AI is increasingly used to draft RFPs based on past documents, winning bids, and standard requirements. That means if your differentiators aren’t clearly documented and visible in public-facing content, they don’t make it into the requirements and you’re disadvantaged before you even respond.

Evaluation is AI-assisted too. Vendors that fit cleanly into familiar frameworks appear lower risk, while solutions that require explanation or category expansion look complex, even when they’re stronger.

In other words, if AI doesn’t already understand you, the RFP won’t either.

The Punchline

By the time a B2B buyer finally arrives at your website, AI has already shaped 50-70% of their understanding of the space and whether you're in it or not. 

This is why AI isn’t democratizing visibility for B2B. It’s doing the opposite, in fact. It’s reinforcing the dominance of established players.

AI models favor:

• Companies with longstanding brand presence

• Structured knowledge online

• Consistent documentation

• External references across the web

Startups, new categories, and niche vendors are invisible unless they deliberately fix it. 

What B2B Startups Must Do Right Now to Be Visible in the AI Era

Congratulations if you read this far - now’s the important part! Unfortunately, I can’t actually predict the future (although ChatGPT loves to tell me that I’m probably right about everything), and I think it’s too early for anyone to claim to be a true expert on how AI search really works. That being said, the following are what I consider the most important (and so far, proven) things that B2B startups should be doing now to be noticed by AI:

1. Build an AI-Readable Entity Footprint

AI needs to understand what you are, what category you belong to, what you solve, and for whom.

This means you need:

• Clear category and subcategory definitions

• Consistent messaging across your entire digital presence

• Structured, crawlable content AI can parse

• Clear and aligned schema, glossaries, documentation, and FAQs. 

2. Publish SME-Driven, Practical, Deep Content

Here’s where fluffy SEO content might work for Google but doesn’t work at all for AI. 

What does work is:

• Frameworks

• Best practices

• Explainers

• Evidence

• Real differentiators

3. Own Your Category Language 

If you don’t define your category clearly, AI will default to someone else’s framing. 

You must:

• Explicitly name your category and subcategory.

• Define the problem in your terms.

• Articulate how you differ from adjacent categories.

• Use the same vocabulary everywhere. 

• Teach AI what “good” looks like in your category. 

4. Optimize for AI Search, Not Just Google

No reason to ignore Google totally (in fact, that would be a huge mistake, but that’s a topic for another time!). But make sure you also check your visibility in:

• ChatGPT

• Perplexity

• Claude

• Gemini

• Microsoft Copilot

Don’t look for rankings, but for presence, accuracy, and positioning. 

Bottom line - don’t wait for AI search to “arrive” in B2B because it already has in its own way. AI isn’t necessarily choosing vendors outright yet. But it most definitely is shaping:

• How buyers define their problems.

• Which solutions they consider.

• Which vendors appear in the longlist.

• How RFPs are drafted.

• How vendors are evaluated.

Startups who act now will become visible in the invisible funnel. Everyone else risks being erased before the buying journey even begins. 

Want to Make Sure Your Startup is Visible in AI Search?

This is exactly what we help startups solve at Purple Chia.

We build the strategy, structure, and content systems that make you AI-findable, AI-understandable, and AI-recommendable even if you’re new, niche, or defining a category.

If you want to see how visible your startup is in the invisible funnel and what it will take to fix it, talk to us about an AI visibility audit!