According to Inc, brands are losing up to 40% of potential conversions due to digital friction in the post-click journey, not from broken links but from experiences that feel broken. This is accelerating as mobile becomes the majority of online purchases and AI-assisted shopping traffic surged 670% on the biggest 2025 holiday retail days, per an Adobe report. The issue is that 53% of users abandon a site if it loads slower than three seconds, but relevance is a bigger, hidden problem. A new wave of AI for URLs technology is addressing this by analyzing context like device and location in milliseconds to route users intelligently. Modern intelligent links make over a dozen micro-decisions in under 100ms to choose the best destination from potentially dozens of URLs. Despite growing AI budgets, most marketers still don’t apply this intelligence to the moment after the click, creating a major blind spot and opportunity.
The Post-Click Blind Spot
Here’s the thing: marketing has gotten incredibly sophisticated at getting the click. We optimize creatives, target audiences with laser precision, and time our campaigns perfectly. But then what? We hand the user off to a dumb, static URL and hope for the best. It’s like planning a flawless wedding and then forgetting to unlock the venue doors. The article nails it: a broken journey isn’t always a 404 error. It’s the user trapped in an app browser that won’t remember their login. It’s forcing someone on a phone to tap a tiny country dropdown. These are quiet failures that analytics can’t really see, but they murder conversion rates. You can’t measure the frustration, so you can’t fix it. Or at least, you couldn’t.
How Smart Links Actually Work
So how does this “AI for URLs” magic happen? Basically, it turns a link from an address into a decision engine. When a user clicks, the system instantly weighs a bunch of signals: Is this an iPhone or Android? Do they have our app installed? What’s their language setting? Are they coming from Instagram’s in-app browser? Based on that context—processed in under 100 milliseconds—it chooses the optimal destination from a menu of options. That could be the native app, the mobile web site, the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, or a specific regional site. One link, dozens of potential outcomes, all automated. What’s fascinating is that this isn’t new, bleeding-edge infrastructure tech anymore. The article points out it’s been democratized. Now, any marketer or creator can use it, not just the tech giants with massive engineering teams.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
The urgency is being driven by how we shop now. That Adobe data is wild—a 670% surge in AI-assisted shopping traffic. People are coming with clearer intent, often from social media, and they’re using mobile. Their patience is zero. They’ve been guided by an AI chatbot to find a deal, and then you hit them with a clunky redirect? The cognitive whiplash is real. And the payoff for getting it right is huge. Companies using this kind of AI-powered personalization see meaningful lifts. It’s the logical next step: if you’re using AI to target the right person with the right ad, why wouldn’t you use AI to deliver the right landing experience? It’s closing the loop on the entire conversion journey.
Rethinking Your Smallest Asset
Look, the cool part is you don’t need a full platform overhaul to start. The article’s advice is sound: pilot this with your biggest campaigns or customer touchpoints where context really varies. Anywhere you have app-vs-web, mobile-vs-desktop, or multi-language considerations, that’s your low-hanging fruit. Every time a smart link makes a decision for the user—saving them a tap, a dropdown, a redirect—it’s not just reducing abandonment due to speed, it’s building trust. It’s a small act of respect. In a world where we chase complex AI solutions, sometimes the biggest growth lever is making the simplest, most abundant asset you have—the humble URL—work intelligently. Now, who’s going to try it first?
