The B2B buyer journey has never been a straight line. But for the last decade, it was at least a predictable sequence: awareness, consideration, decision; each stage with roughly corresponding content formats, channels, and conversion actions. That model is still useful. It is also increasingly incomplete.
What AI has done to the journey
Generative AI has inserted a new stage at the very top of the funnel that most content strategies have not accounted for: the AI research phase. Before a buyer Googles anything, before they visit a vendor website, before they ask a colleague; a growing proportion of B2B buyers are asking AI systems to orient them. “What solutions exist for this problem?” “What should I be looking for in a vendor?” “What are the tradeoffs between these two approaches?”
The AI answers to those questions shape the mental model the buyer carries into every subsequent touchpoint. If your brand, your category framing, or your key differentiators appear in the AI answer, you enter the subsequent research phase with the advantage of familiarity. If they do not, you are not on the shortlist at all. In our client base, the share of new inbound leads citing AI as a discovery channel has risen from under 5% in early 2025 to over 28% in late 2025 for B2B technology clients.
What this means for content at each stage
Pre-funnel (AI orientation): Your content now needs to serve retrieval systems before it serves human readers. Definitional content (what your category is called, what problems it solves, who it is for) needs to be structured, specific, and machine-readable. The buyer who asks an AI “what is [your category] and who are the credible Australian providers?” should encounter your name and your framing in the answer.
Top of funnel (awareness): The buyer who arrives having been oriented by AI is more sophisticated than the buyer who arrived cold from a Google ad. They have already processed a summary of your category. They want depth, specificity, and differentiation; not the basics. Top-of-funnel content that repeats category-awareness material wastes this audience.
Middle of funnel (evaluation): This stage has lengthened and intensified. Buying committees are larger. Scrutiny is higher. The volume of content consumed per deal is up. Comparison content, technical depth, independent case studies, and content that helps internal champions make the business case are all doing more work than they used to.
Bottom of funnel (decision): The content that closes deals is often not the content marketers write. It is the proposal, the security questionnaire response, the implementation guide, the ROI model. Building this content systematically (treating it as a content programme asset, not a sales team one-off) reduces average time-to-close and increases the consistency of the value proposition at the moment it matters most.
The practical implication
Map your existing content against this revised journey. The gaps are almost always in two places: pre-funnel AI optimisation (which most content strategies have not yet addressed), and bottom-funnel enablement material (which is chronically under-resourced in favour of top-funnel brand content). Fixing both simultaneously is the highest-ROI content investment available to most B2B companies right now.