The funnel is dead. Gen Z buys in loops, not lines.
The straight line from awareness to purchase was always a story brands told themselves. Gen Z discovers, doubts, and decides inside a loop, often without ever leaving the feed. Here is how buying actually works now, and what it asks of the brands chasing it.
A POV from Rishi Bhattacharjee, CEO of TopScout.
The marketing funnel is dead. Not slowing, not softening into something gentler. Dead. The clean diagram every brand still keeps on a slide, awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, purchase at the bottom, describes a journey almost no one actually takes anymore. Gen Z does not walk down a funnel. They move through a loop, and most of that loop happens inside a feed they never leave.
This matters because the funnel was never just a diagram. It was a budget. It told you where to spend, in what order, and how to judge whether the spend worked. When the shape of buying changes, the shape of the spend has to change with it. Most brands have not caught up, and they are paying for the gap.
What actually replaced the funnel?
A loop. Google's own research named it the "messy middle," and it is the most honest account of modern buying I have read. In a study that simulated 310,000 purchase scenarios across five categories (financial services, consumer packaged goods, retail, travel, and utilities), Google found that people do not travel in a line from interest to purchase. They cycle between two modes: exploration, where they expand their options, and evaluation, where they narrow them. They run that cycle as many times as they need, and they can be pulled toward a different brand at any point inside it.
Read that again, because it is what kills the funnel. There is no bottom. There is no single moment of decision you can buy your way to. A shopper can be ninety percent decided, see one piece of content, and loop straight back into exploration. The brand that shows up well inside the loop wins. The brand that only buys the "top" or the "bottom" is spending against a map of a country that no longer exists.
Where does discovery actually happen now?
In the feed, and increasingly in the search bar of apps that were never built for search. Adobe's 2026 research found that nearly half of US consumers, around 49%, now use TikTok as a search engine, up from 41% the year before. For a generation raised on it, the first instinct for "best running shoes under 8000" is not a blue link and ten organic results. It is a scroll.
Discovery is also no longer a separate event from purchase. According to Bazaarvoice's Shopper Preference Report 2025, published in April 2025, 80% of Gen Z and millennials now drive purchases through social platforms, and nearly 18% of 18 to 34 year olds buy directly inside TikTok Shop or Instagram shops without ever visiting a website. The thing brands used to file under "top of funnel," a passive awareness moment, is now also the checkout. Discovery, evaluation, and purchase have collapsed onto a single surface.
The shift, in three numbers:
| What changed | The number | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Buying became a loop, not a line | 310,000 purchase scenarios modeled | Google, Think with Google |
| Search moved into the feed | About 49% of US consumers use TikTok as a search engine, up from 41% in 2024 | Adobe, 2026 research |
| Discovery and checkout merged | 80% of Gen Z and millennials buy through social, about 18% of 18 to 34s buy in-app | Bazaarvoice Shopper Preference Report 2025 |
Why does the old funnel still cost you money?
Because it tells you to pay for stages your customer is not standing in. A funnel-shaped budget runs sequential: an awareness burst, then a consideration nudge, then a conversion push, each handed to a different team with a different metric. That logic assumes the customer moves in one direction, once. They do not. They loop, and they loop fast, so the brand that went quiet after the "awareness" phase is simply absent when the loop swings back around.
The waste shows up in two familiar places. You over-spend retargeting people who already decided, chasing them with ads for the thing in their cart. And you under-invest in the content that actually does the work inside the loop: the creator review, the comparison clip, the comment thread, the answer a buyer trusts more than your own claim. The funnel taught a generation of marketers to treat that content as "top of funnel fluff." In a loop, it is the whole game.
How do you market to a loop instead of a line?
Stop thinking in stages. Start thinking in presence. Four shifts matter.
Be present at every turn of the loop, not just the ends. If a buyer can re-enter exploration at any moment, your brand has to be findable, credible, and persuasive at any moment. That is a content commitment, not a media-flight commitment.
Build for the scroll, not for the click. The unit of modern marketing is a piece of content that survives a half-second of attention and earns the next one. That is a craft problem, and craft is exactly where most brands cut corners when they shift to volume.
Earn the citation. Inside the messy middle, Google found that social proof and authority are among the biases that move preference. A buyer trusts a creator, a peer, and a visible body of reviews over your own adjectives. The work is to be the brand those voices reach for, not the brand shouting over them.
Close the distance between content and checkout. When 18% of young buyers are purchasing inside the app, every gap you put between the moment of desire and the moment of payment is a place the loop can carry them somewhere else.
What does this mean for the work?
It means the agency model built to feed a funnel is as outdated as the funnel itself. You cannot serve a loop with one campaign a quarter and a media plan that assumes a straight line. You need to produce more, in more formats, faster, while keeping the taste that makes any of it worth watching. That is the exact problem we built TopScout to solve: the craft of a brand world, produced at the pace of the feed.
The funnel was comfortable because it was a straight line, and straight lines are easy to plan. Buying was never a straight line. It just took a generation that grew up inside the scroll to make the loop impossible to ignore. Stop drawing the funnel. Start showing up in the loop.
Old-world craft. New-world pace.
