Preparing Travel For The Future Of AI Search
Predicting the speed and shape of how search marketing will be changed by artificial intelligence is an impossible task. But marketers should take one thing for granted: Search marketing in Google should stay on top of the priority list for the foreseeable future.
Google will not give up on its $175 billion ad revenue in search for 2023 without a fight. And even if its search domination starts slowly crumbling, the unbeatable crawling, indexing and keyword matching capabilities across the world wide web will remain a critical underlying data source for many potential AI search disruptors.
In the second of two articles, let's dig deeper into the three areas where travel can start focusing today to stay ahead of the curve.
From SEO to GEO (Generative Experience Optimization)
Scrolling a list of blue links will become a thing of the past. The new challenge will be capturing a place among the referral links highlighted in the AI-powered answer.
The SEO cards might get reshuffled in this process. As recent Google SGE research uncovers, an average of 4.3 unique domains were featured in the SGE answers, but only 62% of the links originated from domains among the top 10 organic results for the same query.
Another study of Perplexity’s results reported an average of 5.28 website link citations in its answers. The overlap of domain links between Perplexity and Google SGE proved to be 60% in travel vs. only 20% in the general e-commerce vertical.
The report comparing top referral links in travel between Google SGE and Perplexity revealed the current AI search winners: five out of the 10 top displayed domains are the leading metasearch and OTAs.
Key Takeaway: Embracing generative search will require going back to the drawing board for SEO marketers. What are the right signals for each query to be seen by AI engines as the most relevant source of information? How can smaller competitors outmaneuver the domain authority of big brands for the top spots?
A recent research paper claims that adding quotations, statistics and citing sources are effective content strategies to increase the odds to be referenced in AI answers. But such tactics might be shortsighted in a constantly evolving landscape and different per vertical.
