OpenAI didn’t just launch a feature. It bulldozed the traditional marketing funnel. Here’s what to do next.

Did anyone else feel the marketing ground shaking?

There are moments when the entire world of marketing begin to shift. Like the internet becoming a thing. The launch of the iPhone. The rise of Google Ads. The dawn of social media.

Yesterday was another one of those moments and man, this move is mind blowing!

As The Wall Street Journal reported, OpenAI has officially launched Instant Checkout, allowing users to buy products from Shopify and Etsy merchants directly inside ChatGPT. However, this isn’t just another shopping feature. It’s the first shot in a war that will absolutely reshape how brands acquire customers. And I’d bet the farm on that!

Just from their announcement, I see this as the beginning of The Great Funnel Collapse.

But why is this happening now? This isn’t just a technology in search of a problem. It’s a direct, aggressive answer to a deep sickness in the current digital ecosystem—a sickness I’ve previously called “The Great Migration.“ Users are fleeing the chaos, inauthenticity, and algorithmic whiplash of legacy social platforms in search of smaller, more trusted “digital campfires.”

The AI agent is the ultimate digital campfire: a community of one, built on perfect personalization and trust. The Great Funnel Collapse is the market’s radical solution to the problems driving The Great Migration. While we’ll explore that deeper connection in Part 2 of this series, let’s first focus on the immediate, earth-shattering implications of the collapse itself.

The History of Marketing Funnels

For years, we’ve been taught to live by the funnel: a multi-step, friction-filled journey from discovery to purchase. E. St. Elmo is often credited with inventing the term “marketing funnel” from his book, “Getting the Most Out of Advertising“, written in 1924. The funnel has since evolved thanks to like pioneers like John Wanamaker and David Ogilvy who helped create more data-driven approaches. Experts like Seth Godwin and Brian Balfour helped shape it in the digital age so that now it looked something like this:

Google Search → Click a Link → Browse a Website → Add to Cart → Enter Shipping Info → Enter Payment Info → Checkout

Cue the record scratch.

That entire process is now being collapsed into a single, conversational interface. The new journey is:

Chat → Intent → Checkout

The distance between a customer’s desire and a transaction has been reduced to zero. For most marketers, this is a terrifying reality. Your old playbooks and tactics are now obsolete. For a Fixer, it’s the single greatest opportunity we’ve seen in a decade.

At B3, our motto is, We Don’t Guess. We Fix. And the fix begins by understanding the new battleground.

The New Battleground Isn’t Search; It’s Trust.

In the old world, the goal was to rank #1 on a search results page. I’ve talked previously about the shift to AI SEO and the importance of brands to recognize the shift now, rather than later. In the new world of Agentic Commerce, the goal is to be the one and only brand the AI agent trusts enough to recommend and transact with.

This is a new discipline we know as “Agentic SEO.”

This is simply the practice of optimizing your site for AI agents. It’s not about keywords; it’s about a deep, verifiable understanding of your brand’s authority, product quality, and audience sentiment. Your AI agent will be your customer’s personal shopper, and it will only recommend brands it has absolute confidence in. As brand marketers, our job is no longer to get the click; it’s to earn the AI’s trust.

Not to switch gears on you, but in the same breath, OpenAI also announced its new Sora 2 app—a TikTok-like feed of entirely AI-generated video. It’s currently being tested internally, but it is igniting an arms race of imagination. Why This Matters Now? When anyone can create a visually stunning video, the premium is no longer on production value, but on the originality and strategic brilliance of the creative concept. OpenAI’s expanding footprint—from conversational agents to shopping carts and video feeds—suggests a clear thesis: every interface is an AI interface.

The uncomfortable truth is this: the low-value work of basic SEO and generic content creation is being automated into oblivion. The high-value work of building trust and generating brilliant ideas is all that’s left.

The B3 Fixer’s Playbook: Winning in the Agentic Age

So, how do you adapt? How do you move from reacting to this shift to leading it? You adopt the same F.I.X. Method we use to decode any strategic challenge.

(F) – Find the New Signals

• The Old Way: Keyword research.
• The Fixer’s Way: You must now focus on Intent and Context Mapping. Our job is to understand the complex, conversational questions your future customers will be asking their AI agents. We use Cultural Sensing to find the “digital campfires” where these conversational patterns are born. We don’t just ask what people are searching for; we decode the human motive behind the query.

(I) – Interpret the Trust Factors

• The Old Way: Building backlinks.
• The Fixer’s Way: You must now focus on Holistic Authority Building. The AI agent will synthesize data from every corner of the internet to determine your trustworthiness. This isn’t just about your website; it’s about your product reviews, your social media sentiment, the authority of your leadership, and the quality of your customer service. Our human “Fixers” interpret this vast landscape of data to find and shore up the weaknesses in your brand’s “trust score.”

(X) – X-ecute the Agentic & Creative Shift

• The Old Way: A/B testing landing pages.
• The Fixer’s Way: You must now engage in Agentic Optimization and AI Creative Direction.
  1. For Commerce: We re-architect your product feeds and brand information (Product Feed Structuring) to be perfectly structured for the Agentic Commerce Protocol, ensuring your brand is the easiest and most reliable for the AI to transact with.
  2. For Content: We move from creating content to providing “AI Creative Direction.” With Sora 2, the new skill is the ability to write the one-sentence prompt that generates a video so original and on-brand that it stops the scroll. It’s the ultimate fusion of human insight and AI execution.

Conclusion: Your Moment to Lead

This great collapse is a threat to any brand still looking in the rearview mirror, focused on yesterday’s funnels, campaigns, and metrics. But if you’re ready to look toward the horizon, you have an unprecedented opportunity and a short window of time to OWN Agentic SEO for your brand.

At the end of the day, the winners will be the brands that are ruthlessly authentic, rigorously data-driven, and relentlessly focused on earning the trust of both humans and their AI agents.

Guys, this isn’t the future. This is happening right now. And we’re already building the playbook for it.

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