From Dead End to Highway Sign
In Part 1, we saw how SEO’s overreliance on single-click thinking left marketers vulnerable. For years, most strategies focused on capturing one query, one page, one click—while ignoring the continuum of how people actually search. AI has blown that model apart. AI spits out a neatly packaged answer—complete, confident, and often detached from the source.
For many brands, that seems fatal. If the AI satisfies the query, what’s left for us?
But this doesn’t mean opportunity is gone. It means the model has to change. Here’s the mindset shift:
AI answers aren’t destinations. They’re signposts – high-visibility markers that point the way but don’t actually take the user there.
The action is no longer “How do we rank?” but “How do we design our answers so they inspire the next step?”
The Danger of Mistaking Visibility for Success
The easy trap is thinking the job is done once you’ve bought the latest GEO tool or hired an expensive agency. They’ll polish your answers, secure citations in AI engines, and deliver dashboards showing thousands of users “glancing at the sign” every day. Marketers celebrate when they see their content cited—“Look, we’re in the answer box!”
And that’s usually where the effort stops. Comfort comes from the thought: “At least we’re in the mix. Our brand is visible.”
That line has become the selling point of many GEO tools and agencies: “be the answer or be invisible.” But being the answer isn’t the same as driving action. A signpost without a compelling destination is just scenery. The real question is: Does your beautiful signpost trigger the next step? If it doesn’t spark curiosity, trust, or engagement, you’ve paid premium prices for an audience that keeps on driving.
But visibility alone isn’t impact. If the user feels satisfied and moves on, that citation is nothing more than brand wallpaper—noticed for a second, then forgotten. In the AI era, being visible is the starting line, not the finish line. What matters is whether your appearance in the answer sparks curiosity, trust, or the next step. Without that, you’re not leading the journey—you’re a silent partner in someone else’s ecosystem.
This is how legacy publishers lost ground to aggregators: they provided the raw material while someone else curated and monetized the user journey. If you don’t engineer your signpost to trigger action, you’re setting yourself up for the same fate.
Why the Signpost Metaphor Works
- Answers Are Contextless → Like a roadside signpost, stripped of environment.
- Attention Is Fleeting → A signpost gets a glance; an AI snippet gets seconds.
- The Action Happens Elsewhere → The signpost points, but you must design the destination.
AI answers function in exactly the same way. They’re high-visibility, low-engagement by default. The only way they work for you is if they’re designed to spark the exit.
Engineering the Signpost for Action
If AI answers are signposts, the job of the marketer is clear: design them to prompt curiosity, trust, and progression. Here’s how:
- Seed Curiosity, Don’t Just Satisfy It
Don’t stop at the minimal answer. Add a hook that naturally raises the next question.
- Example: Instead of just defining “hybrid cloud,” mention, “The real complexity comes in cost trade-offs between private and public workloads.” Now the user wants to know more.
- Example: Instead of just defining “hybrid cloud,” mention, “The real complexity comes in cost trade-offs between private and public workloads.” Now the user wants to know more.
- Align with Decision-Making Prompts
AI tends to reward generic “what is” content. But users eventually want “should I” or “which one” prompts. Build content that speaks to those decisions so your answers nudge users into evaluation. - Use Context to Point Beyond the Answer
Frame your answer as part of a bigger story. “Yes, you need a visa for India. But the bigger challenge is understanding processing delays and avoiding common mistakes.” That’s an exit ramp. - Think in Ecosystems, Not Pages
One signpost won’t drive results; a sequence of them will. Design content clusters where one answer cascades into another, keeping users orbiting your brand instead of floating away.
Case Study: Expedia vs. TripAdvisor
This difference shows up clearly in travel.
- Expedia’s play was transactional. Their content centered on capturing decision-stage queries like “book flights to Rome.” Effective in the old continuum, but brittle in the AI world—AI engines can summarize availability and pricing directly, skipping Expedia altogether.
- TripAdvisor’s play was layered. Reviews, comparisons, guides, forums—their ecosystem created depth. Even when an AI summarizes “best hotels in Rome,” users often still click through for depth, nuance, and validation.
The lesson: Expedia treated answers as destinations. TripAdvisor treated them as billboards that point to richer journeys. The brand that builds depth beyond the answer captures lasting engagement.
Relevance Engineering: A New Discipline
This shift calls for something bigger than SEO—it calls for Relevance Engineering.
SEO was about making content visible to the algorithm. Relevance Engineering is about making content meaningful when stripped down and reassembled by AI. It’s about anticipating how your answers will appear as snippets and ensuring they naturally invite the user to go deeper.
Think of it as reverse engineering the AI’s synthesis process. If your content is the raw material, you want to bake in the cues that survive extraction and still spark engagement.
The Metrics Must Evolve
If you adopt signpost thinking, your metrics can’t stay the same. Success is no longer: “We ranked #1 and got 50,000 clicks.”
Instead, measure:
- Citation frequency → Are we surfaced as the go-to voice?
- Trigger engagement → When users do click, do they move beyond one page into a journey?
- Downstream actions → Are smaller traffic volumes producing higher-value conversions?
The volume may be smaller, but the value per visitor can be much higher—if the signpost was engineered correctly.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- Answer Fodder
Giving bare-bones answers that AI ingests and regurgitates without attribution. - Overstuffed Schema
Spamming FAQ or HowTo markup in hopes of winning snippets, only to feed AI with contextless answers that bypass your brand. - Ignoring Experience Design
Thinking the answer itself is the endgame instead of connecting it to calculators, tools, or stories that AI can’t summarize.
Practical Checklist: Is Your Content a Signpost or a Dead End?
- Does the answer hint at a bigger challenge or trade-off?
- Does it naturally lead to the next decision question?
- Does it cite authority or data that signals trust?
- Does it connect to a tool, experience, or journey AI can’t replicate?
- Would someone choose to “exit” into your site rather than stay with the AI?
If the answer is “no” to most, you’ve got wallpaper, not a billboard.
Continue Reading
AI answers give you visibility, but they don’t guarantee impact. To turn signposts into gateways, you need to embed the next step inside your answers.
That’s where Part 3 comes in. We’ll move from metaphor to playbook—unpacking Intent Connectors, the practical hooks and trust anchors that transform a satisfied query into a deeper journey.
