AI Already Knows Where Your Guests Should Go. Does It Know About Your Brand?

Ask ChatGPT to plan a long weekend in the mountains, and it won’t hand you a page of links to dig through. It’ll just tell you: stay here, eat there, do this. That’s how a lot of trips start now, whether we’re ready for it or not.

Here’s the number every travel brand should pay attention to: According to eMarketer, 46% of U.S. travelers who took a trip in the past year say AI was part of how they planned it. And at the same time, the search results page — the thing we’ve all spent twenty years optimizing for — is quietly emptying out. SparkToro looked at four months of U.S. Google searches this year and found 68% ended in zero clicks. People ask, they get an answer, they move on.

That’s the world GEO is built for.

What GEO Actually Is

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) just means making sure the AI tools people are already using can find your brand, understand your brand, and describe it accurately when someone asks a question you’d want to be the answer to. Instead of chasing a spot on a results page, you’re trying to be part of the paragraph an AI writes on your brand’s behalf — and you don’t get a chance to review it before it is “published.”

If your website, socials, and content aren’t current and easy for a machine to actually read, you’re not slipping in the rankings. You’re just not in the conversation.

AI Makes Recommendations. People Still Book With Brands They Trust.

This doesn’t mean travel brands should panic or have a knee-jerk reaction. Expedia Group ran a survey this spring of 5,700+ travelers across the U.S., U.K., and India, and the results actually tell a pretty reassuring story about where the line is:

So here’s what that tells us: AI is doing the early legwork. The shortlist, the “where should we even go,” the inspiration. But the booking still happens with a brand people trust. As a travel brand, you have to be on that shortlist.

One more nuance is apparent here too: people don’t fully trust AI yet. Skift and Wunderkind found that 54% of travelers distrust AI’s travel recommendations. That means showing up in the answer isn’t the endgame — what it says about you when it mentions you matters just as much.

What To Actually Do About It

None of this requires a new department or a massive AI strategy deck. It requires a pivot and a shift in thinking — while still applying the discipline that good travel marketers have practiced for years.

Keep the facts easy to find and impossible to get wrong: hours, pricing, seasons, what actually makes the place worth the trip. Keep it on your own site, not buried in a PDF. Write like a person answering a question — AI tools are reading the same reviews and site copy your guests are, so if people keep asking your front desk the same thing, that answer belongs on the page. And regularly ask the AI tools yourself what they’re saying about your brand.

At Slingshot, we’re staying on top of this and would be thrilled to talk with you more about it. Feel free to reach out here.