Top of funnel content is the blog and guide content that answers what your future customers search before they are ready to buy. For most local businesses it quietly outperforms their own service pages, because the people who will eventually hire you are not searching for your service yet. They are searching for the problem, the destination, or the plan. If you only publish pages about what you sell, you are showing up at the end of a decision and missing the start of it.
Service pages do not rank for early searches because they are built for commercial intent, not informational intent. A service page targets the queries with your service and your city in them, and it converts someone who already knows what they want. That is the right job for that page, and you should have one. The problem is volume. Far more people are searching one or two steps earlier, when they are still figuring out what they need, where to go, or how to solve something.
Those earlier searches are informational, and your service page will almost never rank for them. Google reads a "book a tour" page as a place to buy, not a place to learn, so it does not surface it for "things to do near me this weekend." The searcher who types that is a real future customer. They are just not speaking your service's language yet. To reach them, you need a page that answers their actual question, then points them toward you once you have earned their attention.
Adjacent content sits one step up the funnel from what you sell. A roofer writes about spotting storm damage before it leaks. A tax firm writes about what a new filing rule means for small businesses. The topic is not the service. It is the thing the customer cares about right before they need the service.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A tour operator we work with has one page that outperforms everything else on their site in search. It is not a tour page and it is not the homepage. It is a guide to spending a day in their city as a first-time visitor. That single guide pulls roughly 24,000 search impressions and about 550 clicks per month. Their other top pages follow the same pattern: a scenic day-trip route, a first-timer's guide to tidepooling, where to see wildflowers, waterfall day trips. Every one of them is about the trip, not the transaction. The booking pages still get traffic, but they are not what brings people to the door. The guides do that, then hand people to the booking pages.
There is a catch worth being honest about. Informational content earns fewer direct clicks than it did a few years ago, because Google now answers many of those queries inside an AI Overview and assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity answer them without a search at all. Ranking first no longer guarantees the visit. Industry analysis through 2026 has tracked this shift clearly.
That does not kill the strategy. It changes the target. The win is no longer only the click. It is being the source the AI quotes and the brand it names when it answers the question. That is why adjacent content and structure have to work together. Write the guide so a language model can lift a clean answer straight from it: short paragraphs, clear subheadings, direct statements, and a short FAQ that answers real questions in complete sentences. Do that and one guide can earn the traditional ranking, feed the AI answer, and route the reader to the page that actually books work. Traditional search and AI search are not two strategies here. They are the same page doing two jobs.
Choose adjacent topics that pass three tests: real search demand, a believable path to your service, and room to say something only you could say. Not every nearby topic is worth a post, but the ones that pay off share these three traits, and you can screen for them quickly:
The rule we hold every adjacent post to is simple. It has to earn the read on its own, then hand off to the service naturally. A guide that is secretly just an ad for your business gets closed and does not get quoted. A guide that genuinely helps gets read, gets cited, and gets remembered when the reader is finally ready to buy.
What is top of funnel content?
Top of funnel content is educational blog and guide content that targets informational searches from people early in their decision, before they are ready to buy. It attracts a wider audience than a service page and introduces your business at the moment someone is first researching a problem or plan.
Does top of funnel content still work in 2026 with AI Overviews?
Yes, but the goal has shifted. AI Overviews answer many informational queries in-page, so fewer searches turn into direct clicks. The value now is being the source the AI cites and the brand it names, which requires content structured so a language model can extract a clean answer.
How is adjacent content different from writing about my services?
Adjacent content covers the topics your customers care about right before they need you, not the service itself. A landscaper writing about drought-tolerant yards is adjacent. A landscaper writing "our lawn care packages" is a service page. Adjacent content reaches people the service page cannot.
How many adjacent blog posts does a local business need?
There is no fixed number, but a small cluster of strong, genuinely useful posts beats a large pile of thin ones. A handful of well-researched guides that each own a real topic will out-earn dozens of shallow posts, because search and AI engines both reward depth and original insight over volume.
Most local businesses only publish pages about what they sell, which means they are invisible for every search that happens earlier. We build a content system that finds the adjacent topics your future customers are already searching, then build content that ranks in Google, gets cited by AI, and routes readers to the pages that book work. Start with a free audit and see where the gaps are. You can also read how our process works or check out our success stories.
