What stage are your customers at when they find you?
Customers find you while learning about a problem or while choosing who to buy from. Most sites serve one of the two. Here is how to see which.
People find your business at one of two points on their way to buying something. Some are still learning: working out what their problem is, how something works, or whether they need help at all. Others are buying: they know what they need and are looking for someone to provide it, a price, or a way to compare the options. 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 whether the person was learning or buying.
The short version
- People find a business at one of two stages: still understanding their problem, or buying, which covers comparing providers, checking prices and choosing who to call.
- Each stage needs a different kind of page, and most small business websites are built for only one of the two.
- 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 or Buying) and shows each topic’s share of both, which reveals which customers a site is missing.
- For one business DepthFinder monitors, Google showed an AI Overview on almost every understanding-stage search and on more than half of its buying-stage searches, which are the searches its clicks come from.
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 “insurance broker Ottawa”, “how much is home insurance in Ottawa” or “home insurance broker vs direct Ontario” has got past that. They know they need coverage, or better coverage, and they’re working out who to get it from and what it should cost.
All of these searches contain the word insurance, and all of them could land on the same website. The first person is learning. Everyone else is buying, some of them comparing and some of them ready to call, and a page written for one kind of person tends to lose the other.
DepthFinder calls these two stages Understanding and Buying, and gives every search you appear for one of them. The line between them isn’t always 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, clearly, 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 buying wants help choosing, and then the facts to act on. Some of them are still comparing: what a broker does that a direct insurer doesn’t, what moves the price of home insurance in Ottawa, when a broker is worth it and when it isn’t. That page is the one most brokerages don’t have, because it means writing about the competition and about your own limits, and it’s the page that puts you on a shortlist. Others have chosen the kind of help they want and need a name. 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 for them than anything longer.
The same site is rarely good at both stages. A site that’s five pages about who you are serves the buyer who already knows what they want and nobody earlier. A site with a blog full of explainers serves the person who is learning and stops there. 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 its share of Understanding and Buying: home insurance might turn out to be two-thirds Understanding searches, while commercial insurance is mostly Buying. That mix is the diagnosis. A business whose searches are mostly Understanding is known and not chosen. One whose searches are mostly Buying is reaching people at the point of choosing and missing everyone who is still working out what they need, who will choose later. A topic that sits almost entirely at one stage shows you the customer nobody is landing on.
Where AI answers have reached both stages
Google now answers the understanding question itself, in an AI Overview. When we checked one business’s searches through August 2026, almost every check of an Understanding search came back with one. Those searches were never where its clicks came from: in every month of data we hold for it, they sent 6% of its clicks or fewer. The AI Overview has reached the buying stage too. Just over half the checks of its Buying searches came back with one, and Buying searches are where nearly all of its clicks come from.
So at the understanding stage, being present means being cited in an answer, and it always had more to do with being seen than with being clicked. At the buying stage it now means both: the click, and a place in the answer above it. Across the wider market, the buyers who are still comparing are where this is moving fastest. 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, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on the same topics as your search results, so you can see at which stage the answers include you and at which they leave you out.
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 people who are still learning, 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 people who are buying, it’s two kinds of page: the ones that help someone choose, such as comparisons, what affects the price, and when you’re the right fit and when you aren’t; and the specific pages that win the choice, such as a type of coverage, a place, a phone number.
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.