Dark funnel

The portion of the buying journey completed anonymously before any vendor is contacted — peers, communities, review sites, silent website vetting, and increasingly LLM research. 6sense pegged it at ~70% for years, shifting to ~61% in 2025 as buyers moved research into AI assistants. You cannot track it; you can only be present and remembered in it, which is why “how did you hear about us?” answers are the main window into whether that presence is working.

Source: Term popularized by Chris Walker (Refine Labs) and 6sense (Latané Conant). Their point: most of the buying journey happens where you can’t track it — peer conversations, communities, DMs, AI assistants — so you must market for influence there, not just measure clicks.

First used in: 1.1 · How enterprise buyers buy