If you spend enough time in B2B marketing, you start noticing patterns that don’t announce themselves. They don’t break dashboards or trigger alerts. They just sit there, quietly, until you realize they’ve been reshaping outcomes for a while.
For me, one of those patterns showed up in how buyers behaved before they ever reached our website.
You probably experienced this too.
Traffic was declining. Conversion rates were improving. Sales conversations felt sharper, more informed, and oddly more decisive. Buyers arrived with opinions instead of questions.
Something in the middle had changed.
Recently, we unpacked this with Praveen Das, Co-Founder of Factors, using data from more than 100 B2B companies. What emerged wasn’t a single dramatic shift, but a consistent pattern. Buyers were doing most of their evaluation before marketing ever had a chance to engage them directly.
By the time someone landed on a website, they already knew the category, the alternatives, and often where they were leaning. The website hadn’t disappeared from the journey. It had simply moved later.
You’ll see why this matters in a moment, especially when you look at where buyers are actually making their decisions today. It’ll give you a clear picture of how these shifts are showing up inside your pipeline numbers.
Quiet erosion of early-stage Inbound
Inbound worked for a long time because buyers depended on vendor content to understand the market. Blog posts framed problems. Guides created language. Webinars helped buyers compare approaches.
That dependency created leverage.
What has changed is not effort or to a certain extent even quality. Most teams are producing more content than ever. The difference is that buyers now have ways to learn without relying on vendors at all.
Answer engines and LLMs can synthesize dozens of perspectives in minutes. Review platforms compress years of customer experience into a few scrolls. Community conversations surface unfiltered opinions without any marketing wrapper.
Across the companies that the Factors team analyzed, a few signals appeared repeatedly:
- Overall organic traffic declined by 28% even among established brands
- Gated assets saw 26.3% drop in downloads
- Paid search costs rose by 24% in 2025 as teams attempt to recover lost volume
Each of these trends is manageable on its own. Together, they point to a loss of early-stage leverage.
Inbound still plays a role, but it no longer shapes the buyer’s thinking as early as it once did.
Brand preference forms before intent appears
The “dark funnel” used to feel like a side channel. Today, it describes how most B2B buying actually unfolds.
Buyers research across AI tools, review sites, private communities, peer conversations, and advertising impressions that never convert directly. Much of this activity leaves no trace in traditional analytics.
By the time intent becomes visible, buyers are rarely starting from scratch. They are checking alignment. They are validating assumptions. They are deciding whether a conversation is worth having.
This shifts how marketing influence works. Attribution becomes less useful. Repeated exposure, category framing, and quiet credibility matter more. Influence happens upstream, long before a form fill or demo request.
What buyers do on your website has changed
One of the clearest signs of this shift shows up in on-site behavior.
Scroll depth has declined. Reading is selective. Questions are pointed and specific.
Buyers arrive with context and urgency. They want to know whether you understand their environment and constraints. They want confirmation, not orientation.
Today, websites increasingly function as the first sales conversation. Most of them were never designed for that role. They were built as libraries, while buyers now treat them as interrogation rooms. When answers aren’t immediate or relevant, buyers move on without friction or feedback.
It’s why buyers no longer tolerate early sales friction
Inbound SDRs exist for good reasons. Sales time is expensive. Qualification matters. Process protects efficiency.
However, buyers experience these systems differently.
They experience delay, repetition, and unnecessary ceremony. They already know what they want to ask. They want answers, not delays.
AI-driven agents are beginning to absorb this friction.
For example, when our customers deploy Docket’s AI agent on their website, it handles discovery, qualification, and routing in real time. It draws from product knowledge, sales collateral, CRM data, and call recordings to respond with context.
For lower-ACV products, this can carry a buyer through much of the journey independently. For higher-ACV deals, it prepares the buyer for a more productive human conversation. The handoff improves because exploration has already happened.
How I’m rebuilding the demand engine today
What I’ve changed most over the last year is how I define progress. I no longer start with volume. I start with whether we’re showing up in the right places, for the right buyers, often enough to matter.
Qualified visibility over raw traffic
I’ve stopped optimizing primarily for traffic growth.
Traffic still matters, but only when it represents repeated exposure among accounts that could realistically buy from us. A smaller group of the right companies encountering us consistently does more work than a larger audience that shows up once and disappears.
In practice, I spend less time watching aggregate sessions and more time looking at whether the same accounts keep reappearing across touchpoints. Visibility compounds when it’s concentrated. Diffuse attention rarely turns into pipeline.
Channels that shape recall rather than clicks
I’ve also changed how I evaluate channels.
Clicks are easy to measure and comforting to report. Recall is harder to quantify, but far more predictive of future action. Buyers rarely act the first time they encounter an idea. They act after it becomes familiar.
That’s why I now favor channels that allow for repeated, lightweight exposure over those that promise immediate conversion. The work is about shaping how buyers remember the category and our point of view, not forcing them into action before they’re ready.
Websites optimized around buyer questions
The biggest shift has been how we think about the website.
Most of the most valuable content already exists. It lives inside sales calls, demos, objections, and the questions our reps answer every day. Buyers arrive with those same questions, often sharpened by research they’ve already done elsewhere.
So instead of treating the website like a static library, we’re treating it as a place where those conversations can start earlier. We’re making it easier for buyers to ask direct questions and get grounded answers immediately, in the language sales would use.
At Docket, this has changed the quality of downstream conversations in a very visible way. Buyers aren’t arriving for orientation anymore. They’re arriving to confirm fit, edge cases, and constraints. When the website supports that moment, the sales conversation starts at a much higher altitude.
Metrics that reflect momentum rather than comfort
I’ve also changed what I pay attention to week over week.
Some metrics move quickly and feel reassuring. Others move slowly but signal real progress. I prioritize the latter.
I look at engagement depth from target accounts, visibility across answer engines, and whether qualified meetings are trending upward over time. These indicators lag slightly, but they align far more closely with pipeline health than early-stage vanity metrics ever did.
When demand engines optimize for volume, they create noise. When they optimize for familiarity, relevance, and timing, they create motion.
The website hasn’t become less important. Its role has moved closer to the moment of decision. The same is true for channels, metrics, and visibility itself.
Once you accept that buyers are arriving later and better informed, the work becomes clearer. The job is to meet them with confidence, context, and answers… without adding friction where none is needed.
The Larger Pattern
B2B buying has become more compressed, more indirect, and more buyer-controlled.
Exploration happens earlier. Decisions harden faster. Visibility precedes intent.
Marketing teams that continue to optimize primarily for early lead capture will see diminishing returns. Teams that focus on influence before intent will accumulate advantage quietly and steadily.
Websites still matter. Sales still matters. Inbound still matters. They no longer own the beginning of the story.
Once that reality sets in, the work becomes clearer. The job is to reduce risk for the buyer early, earn trust gradually, and reawaken curiosity where it now begins.