The Un-Paradox: Why Search Conversions Are Down but Demos Are Up

Your analytics dashboard is sending mixed signals. It’s like the person who meets for a date, says they’d love to meet again, and then sends three messages every four days for the next six weeks (he’s just not into you, BTW).

Paid search conversion rates are down 20% at the median. Organic traffic is declining 1.25% for the median company. The charts are red. Your search agency is scrambling for explanations. Your CFO is asking uncomfortable questions about your Google Ads ROI. 

But then you look at demo requests. Demo requests are up 9.5% overall.

And this isn’t just a ‘you’ thing, this is across the board. The median company saw demo requests grow by by 17.4%. Sixty-three percent of organizations reported increases. Some companies in the 75th percentile are seeing 56% growth in demo bookings.

What. The. Heck.

Welcome to the great B2B marketing paradox of 2026. Search is struggling, but bottom-of-funnel conversions are thriving. Traffic is down, but sales conversations are up. Traditional demand gen metrics are tanking, but pipeline quality is improving.

This isn't a bug, nor is it some hot-and-cold romantic prospect. It's a fundamental restructuring of the B2B buyer journey. And if you understand what's driving it, you can stop panicking about declining search metrics and start optimizing for what actually matters.

TL;DR

• Search conversions are falling due to reduced top-of-funnel activity, especially from paid channels.
• Demo requests are rising because buyers now engage only when they’re close to a decision.
• AI tools and peer networks are replacing traditional search during early research stages.
• B2B marketers must refocus on brand visibility, high-intent engagement, and quality pipeline over vanity metrics.

The Data: Two Trends Moving in Opposite Directions

Let's start with the search situation, because it's genuinely rough out there.

In our report, we found that paid search is under severe stress:

• Overall paid search traffic grew just 4.9%, but that masks massive divergence
• The median change in paid search traffic was -25.2%
• The bottom quartile saw traffic declines of -58.9%
• Conversion rates from paid search declined for 65% of companies
• The aggregate conversion rate from paid search dropped 8%
• The median conversion rate change was -20%

To make matters worse, cost per click increased by a median of 24%. So you're paying more, getting less traffic, and that traffic is converting at lower rates. It's the trifecta of paid search pain.

Organic search isn't much better. Overall organic traffic grew just 1.7%, but the median company experienced a -1.25% decline. The bottom quartile saw traffic drop by 25%.

Now here's where it gets weird.

Demo requests are absolutely crushing it:

• Overall demo requests grew 9.5%
• Median growth was 17.4%
• The 75th percentile saw growth of 56.1%
• 63% of organizations reported increases in demo requests

These trends are moving in completely opposite directions. Search metrics (the top and middle of your funnel) are declining. Demo requests (bottom of your funnel) are growing.

How is this possible?

The Answer: Higher Intent, Lower Volume

Here's the key insight that explains the entire paradox: website traffic is becoming more concentrated among high-intent, later-stage buyers who have already narrowed their vendor shortlist.

What does that mean, without the marketing gobbledegook? 

When organizations experience traffic decline but their conversion rate improves, it’s because buyers are doing a new and different thing to discover vendors. LLM-based tools and social validation are the culprits for this change.

Among companies that saw organic traffic decline, even though overall traffic dropped -28%, conversion rates grew 18%.

Lower volume. Higher conversion. This is the pattern.

The buyer journey has been restructured by two massive forces:

1. LLMs Have Absorbed Informational Research

89% of B2B buyers now use generative AI in their purchasing process, according to Forrester research.

Think about what that means for search behavior. Buyers aren't Googling "what is marketing automation" or "best practices for demand generation" anymore. They're asking ChatGPT. They're using Perplexity. They're getting synthesized answers from Claude.

And all that informational, top-of-funnel search traffic is evaporating.

LLM platforms don't show up in your analytics. So you have a black box in your marketing equation, with no way of knowing what’s happening in a crucial part of your strategy.

The remaining searches are high-intent, vendor-specific queries from buyers who already know what they want and are narrowing their options.

2. Buyers Know What They Want Before Signaling Intent

According to Forrester, 92% of B2B buyers start their journey with at least one vendor in mind. Even more striking: 41% have already selected their preferred vendor before formal evaluation even begins. That’s four out of ten buyers who have already decided who they're going to buy from, before they ever contact you.

By the time they're searching for your brand, clicking your ads, or visiting your pricing page, they're not in "learning mode." They're in "validation mode" or "building internal consensus mode."

This is why demo requests stay strong while search conversions decline. Buyers are researching elsewhere (LinkedIn, peer networks, G2, LLMs), forming preferences, and only visiting your website when they're ready to evaluate.

The Vendor Pre-Selection Phenomenon

Traditional funnel thinking assumes buyers move linearly: Awareness → Consideration → Decision. You catch them at the top with content and paid search, nurture them through the middle with email sequences and retargeting, then convert them at the bottom with demos and sales conversations.

That model is dying. Dead, some marketers say.

Modern buyers are conducting extensive research through channels you don't control and can't measure. They're:

• Asking peers in Slack communities and LinkedIn groups
• Reading reviews on G2 and TrustRadius
• Consuming executive thought leadership on LinkedIn
• Using LLMs to compare features, pricing, and use cases
• Watching product demos on YouTube

By the time they land on your website, they've already:

• Identified their problem
• Educated themselves on solutions
• Compared multiple vendors
• Formed initial preferences
• Maybe even built internal consensus

What looks like a website visitor in your analytics is actually a buyer who's most of the way through their journey.

That's why conversion rates from organic content pages are improving for accounts that have seen your LinkedIn ads (+112% lift), why paid search conversion rates are higher for ICP accounts exposed to LinkedIn (+46%), and why demo requests are growing even as top-funnel metrics decline.

The funnel hasn't disappeared. It's just happening somewhere else.

This Means You Need To Stop Optimizing for Vanity Metrics

This shift requires a fundamental rethinking of how you measure marketing success.

If you're still judging performance primarily on:

• Total website traffic
• Number of leads generated
• Top-of-funnel conversion rates
• MQL volume

You're measuring the wrong things. Or more accurately, you're measuring lagging indicators of a system that's already changed. You’re a dinosaur, measuring dinosaur things.

The companies winning right now are focusing on:

• Share of voice in professional communities
• Brand presence where buyers do research (LinkedIn, peer networks)
• Quality and intent level of the traffic they do get
• Velocity from interest to demo
• Bottom-of-funnel conversion rates

Shiyam Sunder, from TripleDart, says “Buyers today don't wander around the internet. They go where the signal is. LinkedIn has quietly become the research layer for B2B, and only high-intent users even bother coming to your site. Lower traffic with higher conversions is a quality upgrade, not a problem.”

You don't have a traffic problem. You have a visibility problem in the places where research actually happens now.

What’s Your Strategy Now?

So, what do you actually do with this information? How do you restructure your marketing strategy around this new reality?

1. Invest in Brand Before Demand

If 92% of buyers start with a vendor in mind, the battle is won or lost before they ever signal intent. That means brand investment isn't a nice-to-have. It's the prerequisite for everything else working.

This is why LinkedIn advertising budgets grew 31.7% year-over-year while Google spending grew by just 6%. CMOs are realizing that being present and visible where buyers conduct research is more valuable than catching them at the moment of search.

Brand awareness and engagement objectives grew from 17.5% to 31.3% of LinkedIn campaign spend. Marketers are shifting dollars from bottom-funnel lead capture to top-funnel presence and trust-building.

2. Accept That Most Touchpoints Are Now In An Invisible Black Box

End-to-end tracking shows that most demos come from multiple marketing touchpoints but ultimately appear as direct website traffic in your analytics.

A buyer might:

• See your CEO's LinkedIn post about industry trends
• Click a Thought Leader Ad to read a case study
• Visit your G2 profile to read reviews
• Ask ChatGPT to compare your product to competitors
• Discuss options in a Slack community
• Finally visit your website directly and book a demo

In your attribution model? That shows up in a roundabout way as "direct traffic."

You can't measure everything anymore. But you can make sure you're present in the channels where invisible research happens. LinkedIn. G2. Peer communities. Executive thought leadership.

3. GI:GO

The old playbook was about volume. More traffic. More leads. More MQLs. Pointless blogs. Erratic posting. Just getting things in front of people. Garbage? No problem.

The new playbook is about precision. Right accounts. Right intent signals. Right timing. 

This is why cost per ICP account engaged matters more than cost per lead. Why 75% website visitor identification is becoming table stakes. Why account-level analytics is replacing lead-level tracking.

If you're still celebrating 10,000 monthly website visitors, but only 200 are from your ICP and only 50 are showing high intent, you don't have a traffic asset. You have noise.

4. Rethink Your Search Strategy

Here's what not to do: panic and slash your search budget.

Paid search is still valuable. It still captures bottom-funnel intent. It still drives demos. But its role has changed.

Search is no longer a standalone demand generation engine. It's a capture mechanism for buyers who were influenced elsewhere.

This means you need to:

• Accept lower traffic volumes as the new normal
• Optimize aggressively for conversion rate, not click volume
• Focus search budget on high-intent, branded, and competitor terms
• Stop trying to use search for education and awareness (that's gone to LLMs)
• Measure success on demos and pipeline, not form fills

Kamil Rextin, General Manager at 42 Agency, puts it this way: "B2B is finally realizing how important brand is because technology is becoming more and more commoditized, and everybody is doing the same thing. And then we also have better measurements of brand through qualitative surveys and statistical modeling, so I think it's easier to understand how brand impacts the bottom line."

Search still matters. But only after your branding has done its job.

The Upside: Better Leads, Better Pipeline, Better Deals

There's a silver lining in all of this. Yes, your search metrics look worse, and you’re getting questioning looks from the money-crunchers. But your pipeline is probably getting better.

Lower-volume, higher-intent traffic means:

• Shorter sales cycles (they've already done research)
• Higher conversion rates (they're ready to buy)
• Better product fit (they understand what you do)
• Larger deal sizes (they've identified real use cases)

The companies experiencing this shift report that even though they're generating fewer leads, those leads are converting to opportunities and closed-won at much higher rates.

You're not losing effectiveness. You're gaining efficiency.

This Isn't a Paradox at All

Search conversions are down, but demos are up. Once you understand what's actually happening, it's not a paradox. It's a logical consequence of buyer evolution.

Buyers are doing more research in places you can't track (LLMs, peer networks, LinkedIn). They're forming preferences before signaling intent. They're only visiting your website when they're already 70% of the way through their journey.

You can’t change this. The genie isn't going back in the bottle.

Your job is to adapt. Build brand presence where research actually happens. Accept that most touchpoints are invisible. Optimize for quality over quantity. And measure success on demos and pipeline, not traffic and MQLs.

The companies that figure this out will look at declining search metrics and shrug. Because they'll be too busy handling the flood of qualified demo requests.

Want to understand which accounts are engaging with your brand across LinkedIn, your website, and other channels before they signal intent through search? Factors.ai unifies account intelligence across all your GTM data so you can identify high-intent buyers earlier in their journey.

FAQs for Why Search Conversions Are Down but Demos Are Up

Q1: Why are search conversions declining while demo requests are increasing?

Search conversions are declining because buyers are no longer using search engines for early-stage research. They now rely on AI tools, peer reviews, and communities, arriving at websites only when ready to evaluate, hence the increase in demo bookings.

Q2: How has the buyer journey changed in B2B marketing?

Today’s B2B buyer often pre-selects vendors before formal evaluation. Most research now happens off-site: on LinkedIn, G2, Slack groups, and AI platforms, leading to fewer visits but more decisive actions.

Q3: What should marketers measure instead of traffic or MQLs?

Marketers should focus on metrics like demo-to-opportunity conversion rate, velocity from interest to meeting, and engagement from ICP (ideal customer profile) accounts. These offer a clearer picture of revenue impact.

Q4: Should B2B companies stop investing in paid search?

No, but its role has shifted. Paid search should be used to capture, not generate, demand. Focus spend on high-intent keywords, brand terms, and competitor searches, and judge success by demos and revenue, not clicks.