(Part 1)
AI is changing how travelers discover destinations, but the fundamentals that build visibility and trust are still the same: clear positioning, credible PR, useful content, clean data and a consistent story across the destination ecosystem. AI search does not replace good destination marketing, but it can reveal how well you have been doing it.
We are seeing a new question appear more and more often in destination marketing RFPs: What is your approach to AI search?
It is a fair question. Travelers are increasingly asking AI tools where to go, what to do and which destinations fit the trip they have in mind. But we think the question sometimes starts in the wrong place, because AI search is not just another channel to optimize. It is increasingly a layer sitting on top of the entire destination marketing ecosystem, pulling information from websites, media coverage, reviews, listings, partner content and other sources to form an answer.
AI search is a stress test for your destination’s brand
For years, search strategy focused heavily on getting found, earning the click and bringing travelers to the destination website. While this still matters, AI can increasingly answer travel questions before a traveler ever needs to view your site.
That changes the role of your website. It’s no longer just about getting a page to rank. It is to make the destination easy for both travelers and AI systems to understand, verify and recommend.
And that is where the good news comes in: Most destinations do not need to reinvent their marketing strategy. They need to get more disciplined about the fundamentals.
AI sees your whole brand ecosystem, so it has to be consistent.
A DMO may have a beautifully defined brand strategy, but AI is not sitting in the conference room where that strategy was approved. It sees what is actually published and being repeated. It sees the DMO websites. It sees hotel and attraction websites. It sees Google listings, reviews, travel articles, local media, creator content, restaurant pages, event listings and conversations happening elsewhere online. If all of those sources reinforce a similar idea of what makes the destination distinctive, AI has a much clearer story to work with.
If they do not, AI may simply expose the inconsistency. That is why we believe AI-search readiness is as much a destination alignment challenge as it is an SEO challenge.
If you want your destination to be known for outdoor adventure, culinary travel, family experiences or a particular cultural identity, that story cannot live only on your homepage. The experiences, content, partners and third-party voices surrounding the destination need to support it too.
Credible PR becomes part of the search strategy
This is also why we think traditional PR may become even more valuable in an AI-driven discovery landscape. Your own website saying, “we are an incredible culinary destination,” is one signal. Independent travel coverage, local chefs, hotel partners, visitor reviews and respected publications reinforce that story, from both the AI and the visitor perspective.
AI systems are drawing from a wide range of sources, not simply taking the DMO’s word for it. For destination marketers, that means earned media can help build a body of third-party evidence around the destination’s owned content.
Give AI something worth citing
We also believe AI makes generic destination content less useful, not more. If your content simply repeats information that already exists on dozens of other travel websites, there is little reason for an AI platform to rely on you as an authority. The opportunity is to publish the information your destination is uniquely positioned to know.
That might include:
First-hand seasonal recommendations and insider tips
Detailed itineraries
Neighborhood and community guides
Local transportation information
Accessibility details
Current event information
Local history and context
Specific lodging, dining and activity information
Answers to nuanced traveler questions
Google’s current guidance for AI-enabled search continues to emphasize original, useful, expert-led content rather than commodity content created simply to satisfy an algorithm.
Our rule of thumb is simpler: Are you giving AI something worth citing? If you are, you are probably also giving travelers something worth reading.
Clean data is brand work now
Some of the most important AI-search work is also the least glamorous. Business names, hours, addresses, events, attraction details and other destination information need to be current and consistent across the web. Your website still needs crawlable pages, clear architecture, useful internal links and accurate structured data.
None of this is new, but when AI is synthesizing information from multiple sources into one answer, inconsistency can become more visible and more consequential. An outdated listing can signal to the AI search engines that you are not a credible source to include in their answer.
Your partners are part of your AI strategy
This may be the biggest distinction between destination marketing and marketing a traditional consumer brand. A destination does not own the entire product or the entire story. Hotels, restaurants, attractions, chambers, creators, cities, residents, visitors and local media are all helping define the destination every day. So AI visibility cannot sit solely with the SEO team or the website vendor. Rather, it should become part of the broader work of aligning the destination ecosystem.
The stronger the shared story, the better the information and the more consistently partners reinforce the experiences a destination wants to own, the easier it becomes for travelers and AI systems alike to understand what makes the place worth visiting.
So what actually is new?
The fundamentals are familiar, but the monitoring layer is new. We think destinations should begin establishing a baseline for how AI platforms currently understand and recommend them.
That can include monitoring:
Whether the destination appears for priority traveler questions
Which experiences and themes AI associates with it
Whether factual information is accurate
Which sources are being cited
How competitors appear for the same questions
Whether priority brand themes are reflected consistently
AI-referred website traffic
Changes in branded search and other downstream behavior
This is where there is real new work to do, but resist the temptation to let the monitoring tool become the strategy. A dashboard telling you AI does not associate your destination with culinary travel is useful. But the bigger question is why. Is the website thin on that topic? Is the positioning unclear? Are partners telling a different story? Is there little earned media supporting the claim? Is the actual visitor product strong enough to justify it?
Where we think destinations should start
If AI search feels like another urgent item being added to an already long marketing list, we would start here:
1. Ask AI what it thinks you are: Test the questions real travelers might ask and document the answers.
2. Decide what you genuinely want to own: Choose a manageable number of destination themes that are distinctive and defensible.
3. Look beyond your own website: See whether partners, media coverage, listings and visitor conversations reinforce the same story.
4. Strengthen your source of truth: Make your owned content useful, original, accurate and easy for search systems to understand.
5. Clean up the information ecosystem: Consistent data and strong technical fundamentals still matter.
6. Establish a baseline and monitor it: AI search is changing quickly. Learn how your visibility shifts over time rather than chasing every new tactic.
AI search will continue evolving. The terminology will change, new tools will appear, and there will always be another optimization promising to put a destination ahead. Our view is that the destinations best positioned to succeed will not be the ones that treat AI as an isolated new channel. They will be the ones with the clearest story, the strongest third-party credibility, the most useful content, the cleanest information and the best-aligned destination ecosystem.