What More Than Four Decades Around Sales, Marketing, Media and Digital Discovery Have Taught Me About Intent
By John Vincent Gordon
I have spent a considerable part of my working life watching the relationship between businesses and their customers change.
I did not set out to become an expert in search technology. In fact, much of the technology we now take for granted did not exist when I started working.
What I did become interested in very early was human behaviour around buying decisions.
Why does somebody choose one business instead of another?
At what point does interest become intent?
What information does somebody need before they are prepared to make a decision?
And what makes them trust one person, a business or a recommendation enough to act?
Those questions have followed me through sales, advertising, publishing, digital marketing, Expat Choice and, more recently, the work I have been developing around Answer Engine optimisation and authority.
The technology surrounding those questions has changed beyond recognition.
The questions themselves have not.
That is where I believe the real story begins.
I Learned About Intent Before We Had a Name for It
During my years working with businesses in traditional directory advertising, I was exposed to something that I did not fully appreciate the significance of at the time.
A person looking under a particular business category was already telling us something.
They had intent.
If somebody was looking for an electrician, removalist, restaurant, solicitor, plumber or car rental company, we did not necessarily have to create the desire for the service. In many cases, the need already existed.
The commercial challenge was to connect that person with the right business.
That experience taught me far more than how to sell advertising.
I spent years talking directly with business owners about where their customers came from, what generated telephone calls, which products made them money, which enquiries wasted their time and why somebody would choose them rather than the business down the road.
That is the part of the experience that remains relevant to me.
The printed product eventually became obsolete. The understanding of intent did not.
I would therefore not describe the old directory model as the foundation of what I do today. It was one chapter in a much larger education about how people discover businesses and make decisions.
Then the Internet Changed the Mechanics
When the internet arrived, the behaviour did not disappear. It migrated.
People stopped reaching for a book and increasingly went to a computer.
Then they went to Google.
Eventually they went to their phones.
The mechanics became faster and infinitely more sophisticated, but the commercial objective remained familiar: a person had a question or a need, and businesses wanted to be present when that need was expressed.
Search engine optimisation developed around that opportunity.
Businesses learnt that appearing prominently in search results could generate enormous commercial value.
Keywords became important. Website architecture became important. Links became important. Local search became important. Content became important.
Over time, however, I began to feel that parts of the digital marketing industry were becoming too preoccupied with the machinery.
We talked about rankings, traffic, impressions and algorithms, sometimes without spending enough time asking what the customer was actually trying to achieve.
I have always come back to the customer.
A thousand visits from people with no intention of buying can be less valuable than ten conversations with people who genuinely need what you provide.
That is not a technical observation. It comes from selling and working with businesses.
The Customer Has Changed Again
What interests me about artificial intelligence is that we are seeing another change in behaviour.
People are becoming increasingly comfortable asking complete questions.
They do not necessarily want ten websites to investigate.
They want help reaching a conclusion.
That is an important distinction.
A person can explain their circumstances to an AI system in a way they would rarely have done with an old search engine.
They can say where they live, what they can afford, what they dislike, what they have already tried and what outcome they are trying to achieve.
They can challenge the first answer.
They can ask for alternatives.
They can narrow the geography.
They can compare prices.
They can ask why one option might be more suitable than another.
That is much closer to a conversation with a knowledgeable salesperson, consultant, concierge or adviser than the traditional experience of typing several words into a search box.
For somebody who has spent much of his career talking with customers, that development makes enormous sense to me.
We Are Moving From Search Results to Answers
This is why I use the term 'answer engine economy'.
I am not suggesting that conventional search disappears tomorrow. It will not.
What is changing is the layer through which people interpret information.
Previously, Google largely gave the consumer a collection of possible destinations, and the consumer performed much of the research.
AI can increasingly perform part of that interpretation before the customer reaches the business.
That changes what visibility means.
A business can have an attractive website and still be poorly understood.
It can publish hundreds of articles and still fail to answer the questions customers actually ask.
It can have years of genuine expertise sitting inside the heads of its founders, employees and customers while almost none of that knowledge exists in a form that machines can reliably discover and interpret.
I see that as one of the largest untapped assets sitting inside businesses today.
The Real Asset Is Knowledge
This is where my thinking has moved considerably.
For years we built websites.
Then we optimised websites.
Then we created content to support websites.
I now think the more valuable exercise is to identify and structure the knowledge belonging to the business.
A good business knows an extraordinary amount about its field.
The problem is that much of this knowledge has never been documented properly.
Ask an experienced landscape designer why one plant survives in a particular coastal environment and another does not, and there may be thirty years of experience behind the answer.
Ask a chef why a particular ingredient is prepared in a particular way, and the answer may involve family, geography, culture and technique.
Ask an experienced school principal about a child who does not thrive within a conventional classroom, and you may hear insights that no school brochure could ever communicate.
Ask a business owner what customers misunderstand before purchasing and you may uncover the basis of twenty genuinely useful articles.
That is authority.
It existed before AI.
AI has simply made the organisation and retrieval of that authority commercially important in a new way.
This Is Where the Source of Truth Comes From
When we talk within RC Web Experts about creating a source of truth, I do not mean manufacturing another layer of marketing language.
I mean documenting what is actually true about the business.
What does it do?
Who does it help?
Where does it operate?
What does it specialise in?
What problems does it repeatedly solve?
What questions do customers ask?
What evidence exists?
Who are the people behind the expertise?
What experience do those people possess?
What relationships exist between the organisation, its services, locations, customers and specialist knowledge?
When those facts are scattered across websites, old articles, social media accounts, brochures and people's heads, the digital identity becomes fragmented.
When they are brought together properly, something quite different begins to happen.
The business becomes easier to understand.
That matters to customers.
It matters to Google.
And increasingly, it matters to AI systems trying to construct an answer.
Content Clusters Reflect How People Actually Think
This is also why I have become convinced about the importance of content clusters.
People rarely have one question.
They have a sequence of questions.
Take somebody considering a kitchen renovation.
They may begin by asking what a kitchen renovation costs.
Then they want to understand stone benchtops.
Then cabinetry.
Then whether they need a designer.
Then how long does the work take?
Then whether they can remain in the house.
Then which company operates in their suburb?
Eventually they want to know whom they should trust.
Those are not separate marketing opportunities. They are parts of one decision.
A properly constructed Authority Hub should reflect that decision-making process.
The pillar establishes the broad area of authority.
The supporting content goes deeper into the individual questions.
Frequently asked questions capture specific concerns.
Reports add experience.
Video adds another form of explanation.
Case studies provide evidence.
Locations establish relevance.
External citations help corroborate what the business says about itself.
Over time, those pieces begin supporting each other.
That is considerably more useful than publishing an unrelated article every week because somebody has decided the website needs fresh content.
The Reporter Has Become More Important
My experience with Expat Choice has influenced this thinking considerably.
We have always preferred the word 'report' rather than 'review'.
There is a reason for that.
A reporter experiences something and attempts to communicate what was discovered.
That may involve a restaurant, hotel, destination, person, product, cultural experience or business.
The important part is the experience.
AI can reorganise existing information remarkably well. What it cannot do is retrospectively attend the dinner, speak to the chef, walk through the hotel, meet the founder or notice something unexpected during the experience.
Somebody has to be there.
That first-hand material is becoming more valuable, not less.
The opportunity now is to make better use of it.
One good reporter conversation can reveal numerous questions and observations that deserve to become part of a larger knowledge base.
Instead of treating the resulting article as a disposable piece of editorial, we can connect that report to the broader authority surrounding the subject.
This is one of the reasons I see the Expat Choice Reporter Hub and the authority work being developed through RC Web Experts as naturally connected.
One captures human experience.
The other gives that knowledge architecture.
I Do Not Believe More Content Is the Answer
There is already too much content.
Generative AI will make that problem substantially larger.
Producing another thousand words has almost no intrinsic value if those thousand words add nothing to what is already known.
I would rather capture one genuinely useful answer from somebody who knows what they are talking about.
The challenge for businesses is therefore not simply content production.
It is identifying what they genuinely know that deserves to be found.
That may be expertise.
It may be experience.
It may be proprietary information.
It may be an unusual process.
It may simply be an exceptionally good answer to a question customers ask every day.
Our job is to find it, document it properly and connect it to the rest of the business's knowledge.
Authority Is Not Something You Can Simply Claim
This is another lesson I have learned over many years.
Businesses love describing themselves as leading, trusted, innovative, premium or experts.
Those words have become almost meaningless.
Authority is demonstrated.
Other people recognise it.
Customers experience it.
Reporters document it.
Evidence supports it.
Search engines discover relationships around it.
Other websites reference it.
People ask for the business by name.
The business consistently demonstrates knowledge within its area.
AI makes this distinction increasingly important because an answer engine has to decide which information deserves to influence the answer.
That is why I believe authority needs to be built deliberately but honestly.
We are not trying to fool an algorithm into believing somebody is an authority.
We are trying to make genuine authority impossible to misunderstand.
One Source of Truth, Many Expressions
This has become one of the simplest ways I can explain the model.
A business should not have one story for its website, another for Google, another for public relations, another for social media and yet another for artificial intelligence.
There should be one underlying body of truth.
From that truth we can create many expressions.
A detailed pillar.
A short answer.
A reporter feature.
A video.
A frequently asked question.
A location page.
A social post.
An interview.
A comparison.
A case study.
The expression changes according to the audience and the medium.
The underlying facts do not.
That consistency is important because authority becomes stronger when the different signals surrounding an organisation reinforce rather than contradict one another.
What Has Changed Most for Me
I have worked through enough technological change to be cautious when somebody announces that everything we knew before is suddenly irrelevant.
Usually it is not.
New technology changes behaviour, but human motivations have a habit of surviving.
People still want to make good decisions.
Businesses still need customers.
Customers still want confidence before spending money.
Trust still matters.
Relationships still matter.
Being understood still matters.
What AI changes is the scale and speed with which information can be interpreted.
For the first time, a machine can sit between an enormous body of information and a customer and attempt to construct an individual answer.
That means businesses have a new audience.
Not instead of the human customer.
Between the business and the human customer.
The answer engine needs to understand enough about the organisation to represent it accurately.
That is the challenge I am interested in solving.
From Being Found to Being Understood
Looking back across my career, I can see a fairly clear progression.
At one stage, businesses wanted to be found in a category.
Then they wanted to appear on the first page of a search engine.
Then they wanted traffic.
Then leads.
Then conversions.
All of those things still matter.
But another requirement now sits above them.
The business needs to be understood.
If an answer engine cannot establish who you are, what you know, where you operate, why you are relevant and whether your claims can be trusted, having more content does not necessarily solve the problem.
This is why I believe businesses should begin treating their knowledge as infrastructure.
Capture it.
Structure it.
Connect it.
Maintain it.
Allow people to contribute to it.
Allow reporters to enrich it.
Give search engines access to it.
Give answer engines enough context to understand it.
Then continue building it.
That is what I mean by a compounding authority asset.
It is not a campaign that finishes when the advertising budget stops.
It is the accumulated digital expression of what the organisation actually knows.
The Question I Would Ask Any Business Owner Today
If I were sitting across the table from a business owner today, I would not begin by asking how many keywords they rank for.
I would ask something much simpler.
What do you know about your business, your customers and your industry that an answer engine should know about you?
Then I would ask:
Can it actually find that information?
That gap between what a business genuinely knows and what the digital world can understand about it is where I believe one of the biggest opportunities of the Answer Engine Economy now exists.
I have watched customers move from directories to search engines, from desktop computers to mobile phones, from typed keywords to complete questions and now into conversations with artificial intelligence.
I do not pretend to know exactly where the technology will finish.
Nobody does.
What I do know from experience is that the person asking the question still wants essentially the same thing.
They want the right answer.
The opportunity for a business is to have earned enough authority to be part of it.
John Vincent Gordon
Founder, Expat Choice
Consulting Director, RC Web Experts
