The Buyer Journey Has Changed: How to Align Marketing With Modern Behavior

When marketing and advertising activities began shifting to digital in the early to mid-1990s, many agencies were slow to adapt. Some withered, while others recognized this was the way of the future and staffed up with innovative digital teams or broke away to launch their own digital agencies. These last two groups quickly picked up market share, while SMBs finally had agencies to turn to for improved exposure and brand awareness.

Once again, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the marketing space. This time, it’s in how people discover brands online. We’re moving away from queries that search and compare options and toward an “answer first” model, where systems like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and other AI platforms and large language models (LLMs) serve as a first step in the decision-making process.

Instead of browsing the top few blue links, people ask a question and expect a comprehensive answer. AI provides this answer by drawing on and citing relevant, trusted web pages, creating a synthesized answer from the resources it determines are best.

As the modern buyer journey evolves, it’s no longer enough just to rank on search engines. Appearing in AI Overviews and on AI platforms as a direct recommendation is what you’re after.

Are Your Search Engine Rankings Suddenly Slipping?

Brands are actively noticing that their search engine rankings and organic traffic are slipping. This is a result of major changes to Google’s algorithm, the rise in AI-powered answers increasing competition, and changes in analytics.

Your search engine visibility might have dropped, but that’s only part of the story; you might be showing up in AI mentions or citations, meaning people are still finding your content. Whether or not this extends to site visits is a different story. This is where changes in analytics factor in: You must have the tools in place to monitor SEO and GEO performance together so that adjustments to your content, website structure, and overall marketing activities align with today’s consumers’ needs and the digital environment.

Understanding How Your Website is Performing

Establishing new metrics to monitor major AI engines will help you know if your website is providing answers to what consumers are asking, and if it’s conveying your company’s information effectively.

There are countless tools that can provide that information (with varying degrees of accuracy). By reverse-mapping citations back to URLs, these tools attempt to measure how often your brand is mentioned in AI-generated answers (which may not result in a click, but can influence buying decisions), which specific pages on your site are being referenced, and which system was used to serve up your pages (such as Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, etc.). From this data, you gain a deeper understanding of the content AI trusts and where you might have gaps in your strategy.

AI analytics also measure potential exposure based on modeled prompts and modeled responses monthly. This is an estimated total audience size of AI users who may be seeing answers that include your brand (“impressions,” if you will, but in the AI space). They combine query modeling, AI response monitoring, and search volume estimates to show how many people could be exposed to your brand month by month, giving you a better idea of your top-of-funnel visibility.

Tools that score how well your website is optimized for AI search should also become part of your metrics monitoring processes. These tools evaluate:

• Content depth and clarity.

• Topic coverage and semantic completeness.

• Authority signals (links, citations, brand presence).

• Technical SEO (crawlability, structure, schema).

• Engagement metrics (time on page, bounce rate, scroll depth).

The goal is to move from a “Top 10” ranking to becoming the authoritative source that AI cites. Components that feed into this score include Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and Schema validators.

At GoEpps, we’re helping our clients understand this new utility stack so they can remain competitive. Get in touch if you’re missing this key element of today’s analytics options, and we’ll put you on track.

Content That Meets Buyer Expectations

Today’s consumers are a skeptical crowd and are no longer willing to be marketed to. Instead, they’re educating themselves through relevant, authentic, insightful information they find online, written to guide decision-making. Establishing trust is now your biggest asset, both in what AI deems relevant, new, and credible, and in whether target consumers will engage and want to learn more. But, just as the old saying goes, trust is something you earn.

To gain trust, your content needs to:

• Answer real-world questions clearly.

• Demonstrate authority, leadership, and experience.

• Be structured so AI can understand it (AI-powered search engines read and analyze web content in real time to determine what to mention).

• Reflect situational interests (i.e., “what’s the best CRM for a small healthcare startup?”).

Implementing “The Big 5” approach, which proactively answers questions regarding cost/pricing, problems/downsides, comparisons, reviews, and “best-of” lists, is the best way to check the above points off your AI era to-do list. And if you’re gating high-value content, it’s likely time to remove that barrier. By giving in-market audiences access to calculators, assessments, technical specs, and planning tools, you’re making it easier for people to learn more about you and begin forming a relationship with your brand.

In addition to being highly purposeful and full of useful information only your brand could produce, your 2026 content strategy should include:

• Interactive tools such as quizzes and guided demos that allow buyers to “test drive” solutions.

• Short-form video-first storytelling (rather than treating video as an afterthought) that explains complex ideas, builds emotional connections, and drives engagement across other platforms in your marketing plan.

• Snackable, value-packed posts and visuals.

• Content that delivers on knowledge, such as webinars and deep-dive guides.

When it comes to your site's existing content, it might be time to prune. Consider identifying and cutting ~30% (or more) of low-performing content, and reinvest in high-value, multimedia content that positions you as a leader in your segment. You might also spend your efforts refreshing outdated, valuable content and consolidating several blogs about a given subject into one piece of content with greater value.

Align a Multi-Channel Recon Strategy for Hyper Personalization

SEO, paid search, email, and social media have traditionally operated as independent tactics. The opportunity now is to align data across multiple channels so tools like your CRM, analytics, and ad platforms communicate with each other in real time, adjusting and refining your bidding, segmentation, and other activities based on user behavior.

Data fluidity is your secret weapon, supporting consistent, high-value messaging across all touchpoints. This level of multi-channel intel delivers more accurate personalization across all platforms and identifies hidden conversion paths taking place in data silos, mapping entire, non-linear customer buying journeys.

For example, by consolidating data from social, email, search, and offline CRM sources into a single, centralized platform, you can trace a user from a LinkedIn ad to an Instagram video, to a direct website search. Now your top-of-funnel and middle-funnel touchpoints are more apparent, revealing that your early-stage content did indeed play a role in introducing target audiences that later converted through paid ads.

Putting Predictive Analytics to Work

Predictive analytics forecast future behavior, anticipating needs, enabling hyper-personalization at scale, and impacting real-time decision-making. AI predictive analytics can also reduce churn by monitoring patterns of hesitation.

AI agents such as chatbots or autonomous assistants are valuable sources of this information, but to deliver, your data must be clean, structured, and accessible via APIs. These agents support hard facts (speed, price, specs), not brand loyalty or human emotion.

AI Can Only Do So Much

If you’ve ever turned a blog topic or landing page content over to AI to expedite output and reduce your workload, you may have seen your workload double.

AI is terrible at distinguishing brand voice, often opting for sanitized or homogenous language. Often, it blends information into erroneous sentences, repeats messaging, and fails to fully capture a brand’s distinguishing factors. It can’t strategize on its own based on what your data reveals about target-market behavior, nor can it put itself in the shoes of a defined buyer persona to offer innovative or meaningful solutions.

All these activities require a human touch. Empathy, creative problem-solving, targeted messaging based on insights that emerge from a more fluid approach to metrics create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

This is where talent, expertise, and moments of creative genius breathe life into your brand, engaging other humans and forging connections.

Modern buyer behavior demands advanced marketing strategies to outperform the competition in an increasingly cluttered digital space.

If your visibility is slipping or your strategy feels out of step with the modern buyer journey, get in touch with our team at GoEpps. Book a consultation today and let’s align your marketing to deliver on your goals.