Buyer behavior is shifting fast, and SaaS vendors should be paying attention

Just a decade ago, Google was still a reliable traffic driver

According to Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince, Google once sent one visitor for every two pages it crawled

Six months ago, that ratio was 6-to-1. Today, it’s 18-to-1. 

And for AI engines, the picture is even starker: OpenAI scrapes 1,500 pages for every single visitor it sends, while Anthropic’s ratio sits at a staggering 60,000-to-1

Why? Because buyer research is moving from search to AI

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been clear: people won’t always need to buy SaaS software

With a single prompt, ChatGPT can generate code, spin up workflows, and even run processes directly within the platform

Instead of subscribing to a dozen point solutions, users may increasingly rely on AI-powered agents to build what they need, on demand

We’re already seeing the ripple effects

Many SaaS CEOs are selling out or merging to create bundled suites in a fight for survival

Bain & Company put it bluntly:

“Will AI and agents disrupt SaaS? Yes. In some cases, that disruption will grow the market; in others, it will commoditize it. Disruption is mandatory, but obsolescence is optional.”

This isn’t theoretical

Julia Vodolazska recently shared the story of her husband Oleg, whose start-up built an ABM research tool capable of scraping data and delivering insights at scale. It shut down

Why?

Because ChatGPT-5 now does it better, and even a competitor with $30M in funding folded for the same reason

And it’s not just start-ups. In the UK, PwC’s Head, Marco Armitrano, told The Sunday Times they’re hiring 200 fewer graduates this year, explicitly due to AI

Conclusion:
Agentic AI isn’t just another wave of innovation, it’s a tectonic shift

For SaaS vendors, the choice is clear: adapt business models to embrace AI or risk being swept away

Disruption is coming

Obsolescence, however, is still optional