How AI-powered search might impact travel discovery
There has been a lot of news recently about the impact of artificial intelligence in search and how it may or may not impact the future of Google.
Generative AI's rise in the past two years allows many searches to occur directly within AI models. Perplexity has been offering a hybrid model for a while now, and the release last week of ChatGPT Search could be a significant threat to Google.
People value trusted sources. Brands and influencers add credibility in our minds. Results powered by the best source of knowledge in history — but backed up by trusted sources that we are already comfortable with — has the potential to shake things up further.
So what do we need to do as travel companies? As search dynamics evolve, you should probably be about mindful of maintaining online traffic from these new sources.
Large language models [LLMs] excel at providing general knowledge but struggle with specific, current business information. These models are pre-trained on vast datasets (like the entire internet) but do not continuously learn or update facts. Unlike LLMs, tools like ChatGPT Search, Perplexity and Google's Generative Search Results fetch live website data and summarize it in real-time, linking back to the sources — something LLMs cannot do directly.
Assuming this new stage in a world of generative AI isn’t going to slow down, you have two new goals:
- LLM pre-training — to be discovered by the LLMs themselves, so that they can train on your content and serve up in response to prompts. This one is an unknown quantity. The most popular LLMs train on 12+ trillion words. Even if you have 200 blog posts of 1,000 words each, that’s a drop in the ocean for an LLM and unlikely to impact its training.
- Generative AI search — to be discoverable by the LLM searching for data to enhance results. This is an area where you can take significant action. And the good news is that if you do the right things here, it will also probably maximize your chances of having an impact on the pre-training part. It’s also mostly the same fundamentals you should be looking at for standard search engine optimization.
Google Travel
In many ways, Google Travel is an ideal product in the age of Ggenerative AI. It’s all about surfacing the actual product (flight, hotel or thing-to-do) rather than the company offering it. Products are already surfacing in more and more areas within standard search results. These could be directly within a search results page or directly within a Google Travel result. They are also showing up for an increasingly broad set of search terms.
With generative AI search, the live, structured product data that you feed to Google is exactly what the LLM struggles with. In Gemini (Google’s LLM), Google Travel results are already used in generative responses when it comes to hotels and flights. For example, if a user is searching for information about visiting Paris, Gemini may choose to offer hotel suggestions and will pull listings directly from the Google Travel hotel feed. These display with links, either to the hotel website or to an OTA. Transactions never happen on Google.
