Last year a Statista-backed survey put a hard number on something SEOs had been sensing for months: roughly 13 million U.S. adults say generative AI has replaced Google as their starting point for online discovery. In B2B, Forrester data shows the change is even more dramatic—nine out of ten buyers now lean on tools such as ChatGPT or Perplexity before they ever talk to sales. Taken together, those two stats confirm what traffic logs have hinted at since late 2023: the funnel we optimised for the last decade no longer describes how people learn, compare and decide.