In his latest column, Alex Lamaro-McCrindle of Miroma Founders Network, turns an old proverb on its head as he looks at the hidden funnel, and the unseen user journey...

The lights are off and someone's home...

We've always used that phrase the other way around. Lights on, nobody home. Present but vacant. Visible but not thinking. It's rarely a compliment.

But I want to borrow it and flip it. Because I think it perfectly describes the buyer journey that marketers never get to see.

Right now, somewhere, your future customer is thinking hard about the problem your product solves. They're not on your website. They're not clicking your ads. They won't show up in your analytics. They're asking an AI, reading a forum thread, forwarding content in WhatsApp, having a conversation you'll never be party to. They are absolutely at home, and every dashboard you have is telling you the house is empty.

This is the hidden funnel. And it's getting darker.

The journey you can’t see

The hidden funnel is the portion of a buyer's journey that happens before they ever make contact with you. The research, the conversations, the comparisons, the opinions formed, all of it occurring in places you cannot track. And it isn't only active research. It includes the long idle periods where buyers aren't looking at all, they aren't yet in-market, but when that trigger occurs, you likely won't even see it.

The hidden funnel has always existed. Buyers have formed views long before visiting your website, filling in a form or getting in contact. But something has changed. The forces pushing that journey further into the dark are accelerating.

Which means the assumptions, models, proxies, and tools we have relied on to measure even the visible parts of the funnel require a rethink.

Why is it getting worse?

Three forces are pushing the hidden funnel deeper.

The first is LLM search. When a buyer asks [pick your preferred LLM] to recommend solutions to their problem, they get a synthesised answer. No click. No visit. No trace. Your future customer just formed a strong view about your category, and your analytics registered nothing. The research phase is now happening inside a black box, and the brands that get mentioned are those that have earned genuine authority across the sources those models draw from. Not the ones that mastered SEO.

The second is zero-click search. Even within Google, AI Overviews are answering questions directly on the results page. Recent data suggests 60% of searches now end without a single click to a website. You can rank first and be invisible.

The third is measurement erosion. Stricter cookie consent enforcement, accelerated by GDPR and Google's own Consent Mode requirements, means a significant proportion of the visitors who do reach your site are no longer being recorded. So when your analytics show a decline, the honest question is whether that's a traffic problem or a measurement problem.

The lights aren't just off. Someone turned the dimmer down.

Marketing for the invisible journey

So what do you do when the funnel you need to influence is the one you cannot see?

The first job is to be present before buyers are looking. That means showing up in the places where opinions form: trade press, analyst reports, review platforms, community forums. These are the sources that LLMs draw from. If you are not in them, you are not in the conversation. It also means investing in brand, not as a soft, unmeasurable luxury, but as the mechanism that puts you in a buyer's consideration set before they ever start searching. The hidden funnel makes the oldest argument in marketing newly urgent.

The second is to invest in tools that can help with measurement, whether that is to understand where you stand in the AI conversation or what factors are impacting your sales. Tools now exist to measure your share of mention across LLMs, which prompts you appear against, which ones you don't. That data should inform your strategy to improve it. Attribution measurement solutions are also improving with a suite of methodologies and platforms that can help you triangulate closer to the truth.

The third job is to create reasons for buyers to step out of the dark early. The creation of assets. Original research they want to share. Frameworks that help them understand their problem. Calculators, benchmarks, assessments with enough utility that someone in research mode will trade their anonymity for access. As a performance marketer at heart, this is what I enjoy the most, finding the thing that brings someone out of the dark. Content designed not to rank but to engage.

The goal isn't to drag buyers into your funnel before they're ready. It's to make sure that when they are ready, you're already familiar to them.

Don’t wait until the lights come on

The hidden funnel has always been there. What's changed is the depth of the dark and the inadequacy of the torches we've been using to navigate it.

The buyers are home. They are thinking, comparing, deciding. The question is whether you have done enough, in the right places, to be part of that thinking before the lights ever come on.

Because by the time they do, by the time someone fills in a form, books a demo, or even just visits your website, the most important work has already been done. In the dark. Without you knowing.

The lights are off. Make sure they are thinking about you.