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.

First used in: 1.1 · How enterprise buyers buy