Customer Journey
The customer journey is every step a person takes from noticing a problem to buying a solution and living with the result — research, comparison, hesitation, purchase, follow-up. It used to run through search engines, review sites and word of mouth. Now a growing share of it runs through AI assistants: someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini a question at each stage, and what those tools answer shapes which brands even make the shortlist.
Why the customer journey matters
Almost nobody buys on the first visit. Between first interest and final decision there are usually several separate moments of research, each with a different question attached. Map those moments and you can be useful at each one, instead of putting all your effort into a single landing page nobody reaches until they've already decided. This matters more, not less, with AI in the mix: research from Ahrefs shows AI Overviews now correlate with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the page ranking #1 in classic search, and SparkToro/Similarweb found 68% of US Google searches in early 2026 ended with no click at all, up from about 60% two years earlier. People are getting more of their early-stage answers without ever landing on a website. If your content only exists to convert a visitor who's already on your site, you're invisible for most of the journey that now happens inside the AI's answer itself.
How the customer journey works
The journey is usually described in stages: awareness (a need appears), consideration (options get compared), decision (a choice gets made), and retention (life after the purchase). Each stage carries a different kind of question — "how do I even think about this problem" early on, "which option fits my situation" in the middle, "is this specific one trustworthy" near the end. Getting cited by an AI assistant at each stage is not the same problem as ranking in Google for each stage. Ahrefs' analysis of ChatGPT citations found only 6–8% overlap with Google's top 10 results for the same queries, and about 80% of pages ChatGPT cites don't appear in Google's top 100 at all. That means content built purely to rank in search can miss the journey entirely in AI answers, and vice versa — the two need to be planned as related but distinct efforts, each phase covered on its own terms.
Common mistakes
The most common mistake is optimising only for the last stage: the comparison page or the pricing page, while the earlier, question-shaped stages go uncovered. A second mistake is writing content that sounds like marketing rather than answering a real question — that's exactly the kind of text AI systems have nothing to extract and cite. A third is chasing technical fixes that don't move the needle: Google has said explicitly that no special schema, markup or llms.txt file is required for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and warned against writing content specifically "for AI" rather than for the person asking. An Ahrefs review of roughly 137,000 sites that published an llms.txt file found about 97% saw no measurable referral traffic from it. The stage most brands skip entirely is retention: what happens after the sale. That's a mistake, because third-party mentions of your brand — reviews, forum answers, press coverage — correlate with AI citation far more strongly than backlinks do, and those mentions are usually generated by customers you already won.
Relevance to AI recommendations
AI assistants are now a genuine mass channel for journey research: ChatGPT reported 900 million weekly active users in early 2026, Google's Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users in August 2026, and Google AI Overviews reach over 2 billion monthly users across 200-plus countries. A person might ask one of these tools an open question early in the journey, a comparison question in the middle, and a specific "should I trust this one" question right before buying. Getting named across all three depends less on optimising any single page and more on the evidence about your brand that exists across the web. Ahrefs' analysis of roughly 75,000 brands found that how often a brand is mentioned online correlates with its AI citation rate at about 0.664, close to three times the correlation for backlinks alone (about 0.218). Earning citations, reviews and mentions at each stage of the journey does more for AI visibility than link-building by itself.
Example
Picture a small accounting firm in Rotterdam. A prospective client first asks an AI assistant, "what should a freelancer look for in an accountant?" — a pure awareness question with no brand names involved. A week later the question narrows: "which accountants in Rotterdam handle freelance VAT filings?" Right before booking a call it narrows again: "is [the firm] good for freelancers specifically?" Three different questions, three different moments, and three different kinds of content needed to answer them. A firm that only publishes a services page built for the last question is absent from the first two conversations entirely — and by the time the prospect reaches the third question, a competitor who showed up earlier may already have the relationship.
Common questions
Is the customer journey the same thing as a sales funnel?
No. A sales funnel describes the path from the company's side and typically stops at the purchase. The customer journey takes the customer's side, is rarely a straight line, and explicitly includes what happens after the purchase — which is exactly the stage that generates the reviews and mentions AI systems draw on later.
Do I need llms.txt or special schema to show up at each journey stage?
No. Google has stated plainly that no special markup, schema, or AI-specific file is required for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and an Ahrefs study of about 137,000 sites publishing llms.txt found roughly 97% got no measurable referral traffic from it. What tends to work instead is answering the real question at each stage clearly enough to be cited, and earning genuine third-party mentions.