The New Customer Journey Has No Middle

For years we drew the customer journey as a funnel with a fat middle. Awareness sat at the top, where someone first realised they had a problem. Decision sat at the bottom, where they finally bought. And in between was this long, thoughtful consideration phase, where people compared options, read reviews, weighed things up, and slowly narrowed down. Most marketing effort, and most content budgets, lived in that middle. We built comparison guides, buyer’s checklists, “X versus Y” articles, all designed to walk someone patiently through the weighing.

I’ve been watching that middle quietly disappear, and I want to explain what I think is happening, gently, because it changes what a lot of that careful content was for.

The middle was always a bit of a story

Here’s a slightly uncomfortable truth: the neat consideration phase was partly a story we told ourselves. Real people were never as tidy as the diagram. Plenty went from “I have a problem” to “I bought this” in one impatient afternoon. But enough of them did research the slow way that building for the middle made sense. It was where you could be helpful, earn trust, and be there when they were ready.

When the middle collapses into one session

Now picture the same person opening an AI chat instead. They describe the problem in their own words. They ask what the options are. They ask which is best for someone like them, on their budget, with their constraints. They ask about the downsides. And they get a shaped answer to each, in a couple of minutes, in one conversation.

Awareness and decision just happened in the same window. The long middle, the comparing and weighing we used to host across a dozen carefully written pages, got compressed into a handful of exchanges the person had with an assistant. They may never visit any of the pages that middle content lived on. The weighing still happened. It just happened somewhere you can’t see, using your information but not your website.

What this means for consideration content

I don’t think comparison and buyer’s-guide content is dead, but its job changed. It used to earn the visit and do the persuading itself. Now its more important role may be feeding the thing that does the persuading: being the clear, trustworthy, well-corroborated source the assistant leans on when it compresses the middle for someone.

So the question I’d ask about a consideration page now isn’t only “does this rank and get read.” It’s “if a machine handled the entire comparison in a chat, would it have my client’s facts straight, and would it have a reason to include them at all?” That’s a different bar. The middle didn’t vanish. It moved inside a conversation, and the content that used to own it now has to earn its way into that conversation instead.