What stage are your customers at when they find you?
Customers find you while understanding a problem, evaluating options, or deciding who to call. Most sites serve one stage. Here is how to see which.
People find your business at different points on their way to buying something. Some are still working out what their problem is. Some know what they need and are weighing who could provide it. Some have decided and are choosing who to call. Each of those people needs something different from your website, and most small business sites are built for only one of them. That’s the gap, and it’s hard to see in the data, because nothing in a search report says which kind of person was behind each click. Seeing it means sorting every search by how close the person was to buying.
The short version
- People find a business at one of three stages: still understanding their problem, evaluating who could solve it, or deciding who to call.
- Each stage needs a different kind of page, and most small business websites are built for only one of the three.
- Google Search Console lists every search a site appeared for but does not show which stage the person was at.
- DepthFinder gives every search a stage (Understanding, Evaluating, or Deciding) and shows the mix for each topic, which reveals which customers a site is missing.
- Google AI Overviews now answer most understanding-stage searches, so being present at that stage means being cited rather than clicked, while deciding-stage searches still mostly send the click to a business.
Who your customers are when they arrive
Take an insurance brokerage in Ottawa. Someone typing “does home insurance cover a flooded basement” doesn’t have a broker in mind. They may not know yet that they’ll need one. They have water in the basement and a policy they’ve never read, and they want to know whether they’re covered. Someone typing “home insurance broker vs direct Ontario” or “how much is home insurance in Ottawa” has got past that. They know they need coverage, or better coverage, and they’re weighing how to get it and what it should cost. Someone typing “insurance broker Ottawa” or “commercial insurance quote Ottawa” has decided a broker is the answer and wants a name, a phone number, and a reason to pick one over the next.
All three searches contain the word insurance. All three could land on the same website. They are three different people at three different points in the journey, and a page written for one of them tends to lose the other two.
DepthFinder calls these three stages Understanding, Evaluating, and Deciding, and gives every search you appear for one of them. The lines between them aren’t sharp; Google’s own research on buying decisions found that people loop between widening their options and narrowing them rather than moving in a straight line. But every search leans one way, and Google sorts searches by what the person is after too, before it decides where you appear.
What each type of customer needs from you
The person still understanding their situation wants the answer, plainly, before anything about you. Whether a flooded basement is covered depends on the policy and on where the water came from, and a page that says so in Ontario terms is the page they’ll stay on. Most of them will leave without calling, and that’s okay. This is how a business gets known by the people who will need it later, and a business that never appears at this stage is never on anyone’s shortlist when the right time comes.
The person evaluating wants help choosing. Comparisons, reviews, what a broker does that a direct insurer doesn’t, what moves the price of home insurance in Ottawa and what doesn’t, when a broker is worth it and when it isn’t. This is the page most brokerages don’t have, because it means writing about the competition and about your own limits, and it’s the page that turns a reader into a shortlist.
The person deciding wants the facts so they can act. Where you are, what you insure, who you insure it for, how to reach you, what other people said. A page for each type of coverage in each place you serve, and a map listing that’s kept current, does more here than anything longer. A business that’s strong at the first two stages and thin here gets people all the way to the choice and then loses it.
Each stage needs nurturing in its own way, and the same site is rarely good at all three. A site that’s five pages about who you are serves the deciding customer and nobody earlier. A site with a blog full of explainers serves the understanding customer and stops. Neither is necessarily wrong, but each is a portion of a complete website.
Why you can’t see this in the data you already have
Google Search Console will show you every search your site appeared for, thousands of rows of them. What it can’t tell you is what type of customer was behind each one. “Does home insurance cover a flooded basement” and “insurance broker Ottawa” sit in the same list, counted the same way, and nothing in the report says that one is a person three months from buying and the other is a person picking up the phone.
DepthFinder does that sorting. Every search you appear for gets a stage, and every topic shows the mix: a topic like home insurance might turn out to be two-thirds Understanding searches, while commercial insurance is mostly Deciding. That mix is the diagnosis. A business whose searches are mostly at the understanding end is known and not chosen. One whose searches are mostly at the deciding end is chosen by people who already knew its name and invisible to everyone earlier than that. It shows which end of the journey your content is serving, and a topic that’s all one stage shows you the end nobody is landing on.
Where AI answers have changed the early stages
The three stages also explain why traffic has fallen for so many businesses while leads have held, which Site traffic is down, but are leads down too? goes into. Google now answers the understanding question itself, in an AI Overview, and the person rarely clicks anything. At the deciding end it mostly steps aside. In our own monitoring of a local services business in August 2026, the searches Google didn’t treat as local carried an AI Overview almost always, and the ones it did treat as local about a third of the time.
So at the understanding end, being present now means being cited in an answer rather than being clicked, and at the deciding end it still means the click. The middle is moving toward the assistants too: between November 2025 and April 2026, Semrush found the share of research-mode searches carrying an AI Overview rose 71% while the share of ready-to-buy searches with one fell 5%. How AI search works, and why it’s not that different covers how an assistant chooses which businesses to cite.
DepthFinder tracks AI answers in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT on the same topics as your search results, so you can see which stage the assistants are answering with you and which without.
Building for the customer you’re missing
Once you can see which stage your searches sit at, the strategy writes itself. If you’re missing the start of the journey, the work is a small number of pages that answer the questions people ask before they know they need you, written to be cited. If you’re missing the end of the journey, it’s the plain, specific pages that win the choice: a type of coverage, a place, a phone number. If you’re thin in the middle, it’s the pages that help someone choose: comparisons, what affects the price, when you’re the right fit and when you aren’t.
None of it means becoming a search specialist. It means knowing which customer your site is missing and building the pages that customer needs. The strategy section of the product page explains how DepthFinder puts that into an order of work, starting from the searches you already win.