Key takeaways
• Website traffic remains important, but it was never the ultimate objective of marketing for many industrial B2B organisations.
• AI isn’t breaking marketing measurement; it’s exposing the limitations of relying too heavily on metrics that are easy to capture.
• Industrial B2B buying journeys have always been broader and more complex than website visits, and many important customer interactions leave little or no trace in website analytics.
• A more complete picture of marketing impact comes from multiple indicators moving together, rather than one supposedly definitive number.
• Attribution will rarely be completely bulletproof, but that doesn’t mean marketing teams should stop trying to build a credible business case for investment
Recently, a prospective client approached SE10 with a concern. They said that, despite continued investment in SEO, GEO, and PPC campaigns, their website traffic was continuing to fall. Understandably, they were questioning whether their marketing was working.
Website traffic has long been one of the simplest ways to demonstrate the impact of marketing activity. If more people are coming to your website, the assumption goes, marketing must be doing something right.
But consider the opposite scenario. What if web traffic fell by 30%, while sales teams reported that prospects were arriving better informed, customers were mentioning your content, more people were recognising your experts at industry events, and the business was receiving more qualified enquiries?
Would the marketing have failed? Not at all.
The problem is that we’ve gradually allowed an easily measurable indicator to become a proxy for marketing success itself.
We’ve experienced something similar at SE10. Our website traffic and LinkedIn click-throughs have both decreased over the last year. However, inbound enquiries have increased and some prospective clients said they found us through ChatGPT.
None of that proves our marketing activities caused the increase in enquiries, and it would be irresponsible to claim that it did. However, it does provide a useful reminder that the relationship between marketing and commercial outcomes is rarely as simple as a dashboard makes it look.
Industrial B2B buyer journeys have never been simple
Most industrial B2B buying journeys have never been as straightforward as searching the internet for product, visiting a website, and purchasing online. A fleet manager might see a new excavator at bauma, read about it in International Construction, watch a video about its features and benefits on Facebook, talk to a peer about their experiences with excavators from that brand, and contact their local dealer weeks or months later to discuss it – without ever visiting the OEM’s website.
Forrester’s 2024 Buyers’ Journey Survey found that 41% of B2B buyers already had a single vendor in mind when starting a purchase process. That suggests that by the time a prospective customer reaches a supplier’s website, they’re looking for further details and evidence to confirm their choice, which raises a more interesting question for marketers: where did that preference come from?
It may have been shaped by previous experience, recommendations, trade media, events, social content, or search results. Which interaction caused the eventual enquiry? There may be no way of knowing, and perhaps no single one did. Likely, it was the cumulative effect of several touchpoints to help build enough familiarity and confidence for the buyer to take the next step.
The click is disappearing from some search journeys
There is growing evidence that AI is now decreasing the need for customers to visit websites to check details and do their due diligence, when they can get the information they’re looking for directly in a search environment.
A 2026 randomised field experiment by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University found that when Google AI Overviews appeared, outbound organic clicks fell by 38% on those queries, while zero-click searches rose from 54% to 72%.
The important point isn’t simply that traffic may fall, but that a search can still happen, your content can still contribute to the information being surfaced, and a buyer can still learn something about your organisation without generating the website visit your analytics platform is waiting to record. It doesn’t devalue website traffic as a metric but makes its limitations harder to ignore.
Look for patterns of evidence
We’re not saying that marketers shouldn’t worry about a decline in traffic. It’s definitely worth looking at, as it can indicate content performance and search health, but it also might be that prospective customers are finding the information they need elsewhere.
If buying decisions are influenced by multiple interactions across multiple channels, measuring their influence will inevitably require multiple forms of evidence. Some will be quantitative: website traffic, search visibility, relevant media coverage, qualified enquiries, tender invitations, pipeline, and conversion rates.
Some will be qualitative: what prospects say in sales meetings, whether customers mention your content, whether journalists approach your experts, or whether sales teams notice that prospects understand the category, problem, or proposition before the first conversation.
Strong evidence that marketing is contributing comes when several indicators move positively in the same direction. Together, they tell a different story from a falling traffic graph on its own and this is how marketing measurement starts to resemble the way organisations make other important business judgements.
Leaders rarely make a major investment decision because one number moved in the right direction. They look at financial data, market conditions, customer feedback, operational performance, and what people closest to the situation are seeing.
The most measurable thing isn’t always the most important
A website visit is visible. A click can be counted. A conversion can be attributed.
However, the influence of an article somebody read three months ago, a recommendation from a colleague, or the repeated appearance of your expertise in the places buyers trust is much harder to capture – and the difficulty of measurement doesn’t make those influences any less real.
So, as AI and zero-click search remove more of the visible steps between discovering a company and contacting it, marketers may need to become more comfortable with an uncomfortable idea: precision and importance aren’t the same thing.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
