How AI search platforms may change travel marketing

When ChatGPT first hit the mainstream, it seemed to many that the multibillion-dollar world of travel search marketing was about to change overnight. 

It didn’t turn out that way.

“When the whole ChatGPT thing exploded, I was very bullish that this would be a massive disruptor because users would be so excited,” said Mario Gavira, vice president of growth at online travel agency Kiwi.

“In fact, it didn't move the needle at all or, if it moved at all, it was marginal.”

The first major test of AI’s influence on search was when Microsoft started plugging OpenAI’s GPT-4 into its search results in February 2023. Back then, Bing had a 2.8% market share, compared to Google’s 93.4%. A year later that had increased to just 3.3% with Google at 91.6%, according to Statcounter.

It’s now clear generative artificial intelligence’s influence on search marketing is more of an evolution than a revolution.

“There is going to be a slow migration from what we know as search to this convergence of search and AI,” said Robert Patterson, who leads the AI expertise hub for travel marketing firm MMGY Global.

Advertising dollars will follow…eventually. 

“Brands are so reliant on the results of pay-per-click advertising and have such high confidence in that being a safe investment place. There's going to be a hesitancy to a degree to move,” Patterson said.

“Relevancy is where it's at and if AI provides more relevant, detailed results, it will win ultimately in the end.”

The new AI search engines

Several new AI-native search engines have launched, and Perplexity has emerged as an early leader. 

Perplexity provides a lengthy, “clickless” answer to search queries that summarizes real-time information and content from a variety of sources, such as trusted news outlets and blogs and academic papers. Sources for the information are explicitly listed.

You.com is another of the new entrants hoping to break Google’s dominance. It was launched in 2020 by ex-Salesforce AI executives and, unusually, offers users a choice of AI model to create results. It added real-time responses with citations in 2022.

ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI is also looking to get into the search game directly, not just via Microsoft. It launched a prototype of its own AI search tool, SearchGPT, in July 2024 to a closed group of 10,000 testers. It will integrate its search capabilities directly into ChatGPT in the future.

As focus shifts to clickless results, organic search seems certain to change. Much effort and money has been spent on trying to figure out Google’s search signals. In June, Phocuswire wrote about a leak of Google’s internal API documentation which gave insights for travel marketers.

“There is a whole cottage industry related to search engine optimization and making assumptions and testing and seeing what we can do to kind of get our ways to the top of the search results,” Patterson said.

“Over time those organic listings keep kept getting pushed further and further down,” he says.

And said Gavira, “When you look at search marketing, it's a combination of the paid plus the organic, and if the shift of organic is shrinking then then that is a challenge.”

“Even if you have a potential organic link in an AI overview answer, Google will not have 10 links in the future, it will have one or two.”

Understanding how search functions

The black box nature of AI, in which its creators may not know how it arrives at the results it produces, could also prove challenging for travel companies trying to game the algorithms.

MMGY is developing tools for brands that analyze how their content is perceived AI-powered search engines to advise them on how to modify the structure of their content and data for better performance.

“We need to produce content both for human consumption and for machine consumption,” Patterson said.

Yet search results from these new entrants seem unlikely to remain clickless forever.

A Perplexity spokesperson told Phocuswire that it plans to start rolling out ads before the end of the year, first in the United States and internationally over the next year.

“We'll launch with a few select brands across different categories to experiment with formats and gain initial user feedback.”

The spokesperson added, “It's important to us that we still maintain the trustworthiness of answer engine results, so ads will be separate from answer engine results, and a brand will not receive a more favorable ranking in our search index by agreeing to advertise.”

Suppliers are also considering adding AI search to their own digital properties. MMGY is working with search-as-a-service platform Algolia and will launch its first client website, for a state tourism destination, in Q1 2025.

“We learned that search was a really core functionality of their website for travelers but also stakeholders,” Patterson said.

Boston-based AI provider Mobi sees this as a huge opportunity. The company launched its Intent Driven Search (IDS) platform in early September this year. IDS ingests, cleans and structures more than 40 million data items relating to locations and properties, from dining and transportation options to activities, attractions and local wildlife.

Mobi CEO Anna Jaffe says that travelers are moving away from widget-based search toward more natural language searches.

“We can now do a structured search across our world content store to look for locations with great diving at this time of year, where there is no hurricane, the water has the right clarity and people have left positive reviews,” she said.

The road ahead

Will people move from the Google they know and, to some extent, trust to these new AI search engines?

“The short answer is yes, but the real question is, how much?” said George Roukas, president of consultancy Gaipan and co-founder of Hudson Crossing. 

“Google is a very formidable player and has a lot of smart people. They are going to figure out a way to ride this wave and they have Android, which is going to be key in this fight.” 

“They also have lots of relationships in the travel world and already has shopping and booking infrastructure which Apple and Microsoft don't have,” he said. “They’ve also got Maps, which will be hugely important for doing this stuff. And a bazillion businesses worldwide are on Google already.”

Kiwi’s Gavira thinks AI search will grow but agrees that Google will keep its dominance.

“Google, with its capabilities to AB test everything to death with the volumes of data they have, will walk this fine line between whenever relevant, providing the answer, but always optimizing for their core cash cow, monetizing whenever there is an intent in the query that can send signals to the algorithm that this customer actually is willing to pay for.”