The title is misleading relative to the article's content. Surely, as the author points out, sometimes A/B tests can be misleading especially if you ignore longer term cohort analysis, etc.<p>But often times, if you fix an obviously broken part of your funnel, particularly in the early acquisition stages, you're fixing things that are universally lifting the amount of people who ultimately are able to engage with your brand and product to the point where they can even form intent. The reality is most people are only willing to give you a tiny bit of their time during their first one or two engagements with your brand, so at that stage you're trying to sell them on your product, and build intent. A/B testing helps reduce the friction needed to get them through the core of your sales pitch.<p>It's easy to come up with a thought experiment that shows A/B testing can sometimes be as simple as you'd imagine: just break the site. Your conversion drops to 0%, now split test the fix. Like magic, your control stays at 0% and your variant returns to normal. Nothing about "intent" in this scenario, this is pure friction resolution. Just a thought experiment, but shows that surely there are plenty of places where pure A/B testing and removing friction is a net positive without any fretting over this "conservation of intent" issue.