The top of the funnel fell off. AI ate it. Here's what the funnel looks like now.

The funnel content model has been the backbone of content marketing for a decade. You map content to where someone is in their journey, awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, decision at the bottom, and you publish for each stage. It is a genuinely useful map, and it still describes how a human decides to buy. The problem is not the model, it's what just happened to the top of it.

The three stages, and the slice AI took

TOFU content was built to capture people asking broad questions in a search box. That behavior is being intercepted. AI Overviews now answer the "what is X" question at the top of the results page, and a growing share of people ask ChatGPT or Perplexity instead of searching at all. When the answer appears without a click, the traffic that used to flow to your awareness post does not arrive. On queries where an AI answer shows, organic click-through can fall by more than half, and the majority of those searches now end with no click at all.

I see it in our own numbers. Ask our newest paying members how they found us, and an AI tool is the most common answer we get, around four in ten, more than classic search. People are not browsing ten blue links to a top-of-funnel article anymore. They ask a model, it answers, and sometimes it names a source.

That second part is the whole new game.

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Two things AI can't take

Two things hold their value. First, bottom-of-funnel content, because AI cannot answer it for you. A model will not tell a buyer that your product is the right call, will not write your honest comparison against a named competitor, will not stand behind your pricing.

Decision-stage content is yours to own.

Second, being the source the AI cites when it answers the awareness question. If the model is going to give the answer anyway, the win is being the name it credits.

• Go bottom-heavy. Shift effort toward comparisons, alternatives-to pages, pricing, and your specific solution, the content a model cannot generate on your behalf.
• Write to be cited, not just ranked. Lead with the clear answer, structure it so a model can lift it cleanly, and back it with something only you have, like real data, a named example, or a strong point of view.
• Consolidate thin awareness pages. Ten weak "what is X" posts competing for the same fading traffic are worth less than one authoritative page a model will trust and quote.
• Keep the TOFU that earns it. Awareness content is not dead, but it now has to be genuinely the best answer on the internet, not the tenth adequate one.

We're doing this to our own funnel

The proof is the post you are reading. We are in the middle of retiring more than a thousand thin top-of-funnel pages on GrowthMentor, glossary definitions, programmatic city pages, and accelerator interviews, the kind that pulled traffic for a one-line answer and converted almost nobody. Here is what they did for us last year.

This post is one of the nine we kept.

There's a name for this: content pruning

What we just did has a name, content pruning, and the counterintuitive part is that cutting pages usually lifts the site left behind. Ahrefs put a number on the opportunity, the average site has a quarter to a third of its pages pulling zero organic traffic. Delete or merge that dead weight and the survivors tend to climb, because a leaner site is easier to crawl, the pages stop cannibalizing each other for the same term, and authority concentrates on the few that earn it. In 2026 that concentration is also what gets you cited, because a model reaches for the one authoritative page, not the tenth thin one.

The funnel did not disappear. The cheap top of it did, and we are reallocating to the parts that still pay.

Adapting content to the AI era

The funnel did not break, but the playbook changed. These mentors work in content, SEO, and demand, and they are adapting strategy to a web where AI answers the top of the funnel.

Ryan Turner

Funnel strategist and agency operator. Demand generation and conversion across the whole journey.

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Will Soprano

Product, SEO, and content consultant. Building authority that gets ranked and cited.

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Vassilena (Vassy) Valchanova

Digital strategist and trainer. Content strategy, copywriting, and branding.

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Mentors adapting content to the AI era

AI already owns the top of your funnel,
the decision stage is still up for grabs.

The cheap traffic is gone. Talk to a content and SEO mentor who is already rebuilding strategy around decision-stage content and getting cited, and keep them as the rules keep moving.

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