Modern B2B Customer Journeys (2025)

by

Modern B2B customer journeys are messy.

Yes we all want simple & easy to explain attribution. But it doesn’t always work that way.


Bigger decisions = More Research = More Touchpoints = Longer Sales Cycles.


Thus the importance at looking at your marketing 𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲.


SEO (or any other channel) is not this thing over there.. that’s far away from sales & other marketing teams.

It’s connected. Everything is connected.

The marketers who see the entire chessboard, win.

As you can see, there are many possible touch-points across the b2b customer journey. For the purpose of example, we could have added another 100, but you get the point 🙂

What about B2B Customer journeys in the AI era?

There’s a lot to digest as I write this in 2025:

  • The rise of zero click search
  • AI overviews
  • Google AI mode
  • AI chatbots like Grok, ChatGPT, Peplexity

For me, this means 2 big things for marketers when thinking about customer journeys:

  1. Attribution is about to get (even more) messy and
  2. Marketing, SEO & Brand are going to get even more intertwined.

Messy Attribution

It’s never been simple, but as we move forward in the zero click search era, attribution lines will blur.

For example:

Your homepage gets surfaced in an LLM result.

But what caused that to happen?

Did the LLM:

  • Read your blog content?
  • Look at Reddit, Wikipedia?
  • Look at Bing Search Results?
  • See reviews?
  • Other blog posts?
  • Look at all the brand mentions?
  • View a press release?

Or maybe someone brand searches you in Google.

Did they find your brand in

  • LLM result?
  • Social?
  • Podcast?
  • Any other random channel?
  • Word of mouth?

The reality is (as per the visual above), there could be multiple reasons & touch-points on the road to someone searching your brand in Google or an LLM.

Some Remedies for better attribution

I don’t have a perfect answer… but

Here’s some ideas for now:

1) Use some form of self-reported attribution. For example, add ‘how did you hear about us’ to your contact forms.

2) Use more than 1 data source. Mix GA4 with some other analytics platforms. Cometly & Heap are platforms I’ve seen work well for different clients.

3) Use both ‘First & any touch reporting’. You can measure any contribution to conversions, by building a sequence using the ‘segment method’ in GA4 explorations.

Marketing, SEO & brand are getting more intertwined

As I said in the intro; everything is connected. My bet is that good SEO will be another way to say good marketing. At present, there’s a lot of truth to that; but there’s enough nuance to distinguish.

However, as we push towards rewarding brands more and more (in both conventional search and LLM’s).. everything will merge.

This takes a whole new mindset.. but when done right will separate the winners from the pack.

Will Customer Journeys become less complex with AI?

There is a growing argument that marketing will evolve to a point where your AI agent will go and do the research and communicate with other AI agents. Therefore taking the human out of the bulk of the research phase.

I think this is plausible as we go forward and AI evolves. However there’s a couple of things still to consider.

  • If it’s a big buying decision, people will still be involved to some degree (especially while AI is not super intelligence)
  • The need for targeted content creation will exist regardless if it’s a human or an AI agent reading it.

So yes the human customer journey could get a lot easier. But being present for the humans and AI agents in strategic places is still key.

Final words on B2B customer journeys

Think holistically.

Look at the full picture.

Don’t aim for perfect attribution (it doesn’t exist)

Instead appreciate the complexity of the journey and embrace quality strategic content.