Glossary
Dark Funnel
The dark funnel is the portion of the buyer journey invisible to a vendor's analytics — peer recommendations, private communities, podcasts, and now AI chat sessions. AI assistants are the fastest-growing dark-funnel channel: prospects arrive at 'request demo' already shaped by answers you never saw, from conversations no tracking pixel can observe.
The dark funnel was always the majority of B2B buying — colleagues, Slack communities, word of mouth. What AI changes is scale and consistency: an assistant delivers a similar framing of your category to thousands of researching buyers, functioning like an analyst firm with infinite meetings, none of which you can attend.
You cannot instrument other people's chat sessions, but you can sample the channel: run the questions buyers ask, across engines, and observe what the funnel is being told. That is the difference between the AI dark funnel and, say, private Slack — this channel answers the phone when you call it.
Attribution follows the same logic. 'How did you hear about us — did you ask an AI?' in demo forms and sales calls is currently the most reliable way to size the channel for your own pipeline.
See what AI currently says about your brand
Perciva runs buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude and shows you the answers verbatim — including which competitor gets recommended instead of you.
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