Brand Discovery Index 2026: US

Senior marketers are trapped in a discovery confidence gap. They're set up to focus on traditional marketing funnels, believe they are visible in the right places, are optimizing for Al search, and trust their attribution. Yet, they are experiencing wasted reach, diminishing returns and attribution overlap.

Search has fragmented, AI now sits between your brand and your buyer, and the path to purchase runs across dozens of touchpoints, paid, organic, human, and machine, often before a customer ever lands on your site. Add in a US consumer who'll drop brand loyalty in a heartbeat to find what they need, and being visible stops being enough. Brands now have to be discovered: selected as the obvious right answer while customers are deciding, and proven as the better choice against everyone else in the running.

Discovery marketing will define the future of this landscape. That's why Journey Further is launching the Brand Discovery Index: a report measuring how confident, and how prepared, brands really are for a discovery-first world.

We surveyed 200 senior brand marketers across the US on 30 questions about discoverability, the first release in a recurring series that will track how sentiment and strategy shift as this new landscape matures.

Download the report to discover:

• The full extent of the discovery confidence gap: unearth insights like 86% believing that the linear funnel still reflects buying behavior, but 61% report significant drop-off between awareness and conversion


• The state of the machine mediated landscape: find out where you stand in comparison to your peers when it comes to adapting to a terrain governed by AI


• Your discovery diagnostic: use our three-step process to make breaking out of a linear world a reality for your brand