It’s a flow that’s so familiar by now that it’s almost accepted as dogma:
But as more channels, and AI, have fused into the journey, consumer behavior has shifted and one question is often asked: Is the marketing funnel dead?
While some argue for getting rid of linear planning, and others cling to the traditional awareness-to-conversion pipeline, the reality sits in a more complex middle ground.
The funnel isn’t dead. But it has fundamentally lost its shape. Consumers no longer move in one direction. They enter at any point, skip stages entirely, and convert through paths that feel shapeless. We have moved from a single flow to an era of the “Spaghetti Monster,” a tangled, non-sequential web of strands that a consumer can follow on their path to purchase. To win in this new world of consumer choice, marketers need to stop trying to fix the funnel and start learning how to navigate the mess.
The cost of pretending the funnel still works
For paid media teams, a broken mental model means broken budget allocation. If your campaign architecture still maps neatly to awareness → consideration → conversion, you’re funding a structure that doesn’t match how people actually buy. A user might discover a product on a TikTok stream, immediately jump to a specialized subreddit to read reviews, ask ChatGPT for a price comparison, and then buy through a retargeting ad — all in one sitting. Or they skip straight from an AI recommendation to checkout. These entry points multiply. The sequence randomizes.
CPCs rose nearly 13% last year and are projected to climb higher throughout 2026. That’s the tax for clinging to click-based search strategies while the audience migrates to zero-click environments.
The brands that adapt will capture a disproportionate share of consumer attention. The brands that don’t? They’ll spend more to reach fewer people — and measure the wrong things while they’re doing it.
Discoverability as defensive planning
The clearest evidence for the emergence of the Spaghetti Monster appears in the search data. We’re watching traditional organic search erode in real time as consumers head to LLMs or rely on no-click search results for the information they’re seeking. While it’s true that Gen AI is a massive new player in a consumer’s journey (especially toward what older models designated as the top of their funnel), we must be careful not to ignore the omnichannel capture network.
The traditional blue link is still a vital capture tool, but it now shares that responsibility with AI-driven citations. Consumers who are searching through AI are also converting through Google PMAX, Demand Gen, YouTube, and social. The result is that, as some brands see clicks decline, market share is growing for others that are being cited by AI. Yes, they’re earning fewer website clicks, but they’re still winning the purchase because they’re appearing in the right places across the web. Which confirms what we’ve been practicing: The actual purchase often happens off-site within the strands of the Spaghetti Monster — AI, social commerce, and retail apps — requiring a network of entry points rather than a single destination. Welcome to decentralized conversion, where, if we only focus on the LLM, we miss the blue link that still catches the intent when a user finally wants to hit buy.
The synergy between paid search, SEO and GEO efforts becomes existential at this juncture.
Aligning paid, SEO and GEO in lockstep helps ensure that we’re combating low site traffic. SEO and GEO are the fuel for the AI engine, so if your organic content isn’t structured to be machine-readable, AI models like Gemini and ChatGPT — which are massive aggregators — won’t cite you as a top choice. While paid ads win the traditional blue link, SEO ensures your brand is also the answer that the AI provides. Without this synergy, you stay invisible to the very models recently handling 58% of consumer recommendations.
The efficiency of essentialism: Fewer, bigger, bolder
What’s the implication for budget allocation within the Spaghetti Monster? Stop sprinkling dollars across every touchpoint hoping to cover the entire journey. If you spread your budget across every strand of the spaghetti, you end up with media anemia. Fewer, bigger, bolder placements with high mental availability outperform the spray-and-pray approach. That logic aligns with Mindgruve’s commitment to strategic essentialism:
Strategic audience reduction to scale frequency
To scale, you must often first shrink. In the Spaghetti Monster web, reach without frequency is functionally invisible. By strategically reducing the target audience size to a segment of high propensity users, we can afford the frequency required to break through. Being everywhere for 100,000 high-intent people is far more effective than being nowhere for 1,000,000 low-intent people.
Owning the niche entry points
As AI-generated content floods every channel, human authenticity, relevancy, and trust compound in value. Speaking directly to a target audience in a way that resonates will continue to prove valuable as consumers are flooded with bland messaging. A few examples we’ve found inspiring:
- The Subreddit Strategy: Move beyond broad interests to place ads within specific subreddits — high-intent communities where the conversation is the conversion and where brands can establish a primary entry point for modern consumers. Coupled with organic efforts to gain trust within a specific audience, this tactic can shift opinion and influence action.
- The POS Moment: The Arizona Lottery mapped physical and digital proximity to pinpoint when a consumer was most ready to purchase, ensuring their brand was the only one in front of them at that critical moment. That insight validates our own focus at Mindgruve on intentional placement across the most relevant strands of the consumer web.
- Authentic Representatives: The Dutch Bros model illustrates this well. Their high-energy baristas (known as “Broistas”) aren’t just the staff. They are the core product experience. By hiring for personality over technical skill and fostering unscripted interactions, the brand has built a culture that acts as its primary differentiator.
Restructuring for the world that actually exists
With consumer behavior and the funnel diverging, restructuring your operations to better match the new reality is essential.
- Metrics & measurement overhaul. If you’re only reporting site traffic, you’re measuring the 8% of influence that happens on your owned properties and ignoring the 92% happening in zero-click environments. Identify where your influence sits in the GEO environment and where you’re lacking. Audit your KPIs against the actual consumer journey, not the one drawn on a whiteboard in 2019.
- Path-to-conversion analysis. We use detailed path-to-conversion reporting to analyze campaigns and appropriately cap frequencies across the entire spaghetti web, a best practice that ensures that big and bold campaigns aren’t irritating consumers. Furthermore, if we identify a trend where consumers typically convert at a specific frequency, we cap it at that exact threshold to conserve budgets. That strategy allows us to document and prioritize the frequencies that are truly efficient by product, by initiative, and by campaign.
- Run an AI readiness audit. LLMs scrape your site to find product descriptions, structured data, and backend content in order to form recommendations. If that data isn’t optimized for machine consumption, your brand is invisible to the AI agents steering purchase decisions. Collaborate with your SEO, content, and tech teams to treat your digital shelf as a media channel, rather than just an ecommerce page.
- Real-time optimizations: When we see a dip in engagement on a specific strand, we execute deep optimizations through frequency plays, honing geography, updating messaging, and making negative targeting adjustments. All of which prevents diminishing returns and ensures that big bets don’t turn into expensive background noise.
The funnel didn’t die. It just changed its shape. The teams that win from here will build systems that can adapt within an ever-changing media landscape, rather than try to impose a framework onto a traditional funnel that seems to be dwindling more every year. It’s not yet clear that the Spaghetti Monster can be tamed. But at least it can be untangled.
