By Roger Hurni and Halie Sutton Felish

If your website sessions are trending down and the usual SEO playbook isn’t reversing the slide, you’re not alone. DMOs across the country are seeing the same pattern and asking the same question: What changed?

The answer has less to do with your search strategy and more to do with shifting trends in how people approach search.  

According to McKinsey’s October 2025 report, half of all consumers now intentionally use AI-powered search tools to guide their decisions. And it’s not just younger demographics. A majority of older generations, including baby boomers, have adopted these tools, as well. In fact, 44% of AI search users say it’s now their primary source of insight, ahead of traditional search engines at 31%.

AI has fundamentally changed the search interface, and behavior is following. Whether travelers are getting AI summaries on the same search engine they’ve always used or querying ChatGPT and Perplexity directly, the result is the same: fewer clicks, faster answers, and less reason to visit your site.

Here’s what’s driving the shift, why traditional SEO alone can’t solve it, and what DMOs can do to stay visible in an AI-driven search environment.

From Blue Links to Built-In Answers

For years, online trip research followed a predictable pattern. A traveler searched for relevant terms on Google, scanned lists of results, clicked through to various sites to compare options, and repeated the cycle until they felt confident in a decision. At every stage, destinations that showed up in page-one search results had a chance to make their case.

AI search compresses the entire journey. Now, whether travelers ask questions via Google or go directly to AI agents, they get summarized, sourced answers. The blue links are still there, but pushed further down. The better those synthesized answers become, the more people’s motivation to do the work of scrolling down and clicking “blue links” drops. 

Travelers still want answers. They just don’t need to visit your website to get them.

Google’s own search results page tells you where this is headed. Already, half of Google searches show a Gemini answer before any hyper links. 

That figure is projected to rise above 75% by 2028, according to McKinsey’s analysis. And the firm estimates $750 billion in U.S. consumer spending will flow through AI-powered search channels by that same year.

The train has left the station.

Your Perfectly Optimized Website Might Be Invisible

DMOs that have invested heavily in traditional search should pay close attention to one finding in particular.

McKinsey’s research found that even when a brand appears in AI-generated answers, its own website typically accounts for only 5 to 10% of the sources cited. The rest comes from third-party publishers, affiliate content, user-generated posts, reviews, and community forums. 

And that’s assuming your destination gets named at all. For category-level queries like “best family beach vacations” or “top ski destinations in Colorado,” AI pulls from whatever sources it deems most credible and relevant. If your destination hasn’t built visibility across those sources, you may not make the list.

That means you can have the best-optimized destination website in the country from an SEO perspective and still be largely invisible in AI-powered search results. Your owned content is one small input in a much larger information supply chain.

McKinsey estimates that unprepared brands risk losing 20 to 50% of their traffic from traditional search channels. And only 16% of brands are currently tracking how they perform in AI-powered search at all.

Enter Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the discipline of optimizing your brand’s visibility in AI-generated search results. 

GEO and SEO share some overlap. Both benefit from clear, well-structured content that answers the questions your audience actually asks. Both reward relevance.

But GEO operates on different principles. SEO rewards ranking on a list. GEO rewards being woven into a vetted, synthesized answer.

With GEO, the AI pulls from dozens of sources across the web to construct a single response. Your destination needs to show up across that broader mix of sources, not just on your own site.

AI-powered search engines tend to favor credible, citable sources that boast third-party validation.

This includes 

  • Original research
  • Earned media coverage
  • Expert commentary from reputable publications
  • Creator and influencer content that generates real engagement

These third-party sources carry more weight than branded claims on your own site.

GEO is about building the kind of authority that AI recognizes and trusts enough to cite. Publishing more pages won’t get you there. Building AI-perceived authority will.

Your Visibility Now Depends on Dozens of Sources

Traditional SEO lets DMOs focus on a single channel: their website. GEO demands a much broader view.

Think of your destination’s search visibility as a network of interconnected sources. Each one feeds into the AI’s understanding of who you are and what you offer. 

The primary inputs include:

  • Your owned content. Website copy, blog posts, and resource pages still matter. They need to be explicit about what your destination offers and written in language that mirrors how travelers actually ask questions.
  • Reviews and community content. AI pulls from reviews, forums, and community discussions. How you manage and respond to reviews (including how quickly you take negative conversations offline) directly affects how your destination appears in AI-generated summaries.
  • Social media. AI search engines favor content that generates engagement. Your social strategy needs to work in concert with your broader content approach, not as a separate silo. Creator and influencer partnerships carry particular weight because they function as third-party validation.
  • Earned media. Coverage in respected publications, expert citations, and journalist-driven stories about your destination carries significant credibility with AI systems. A feature in a major travel publication holds more weight than a hundred branded blog posts.
  • Original research and thought leadership. Surveys, white papers, studies, and data-driven content that originates from your organization provide unique source material that AI can cite. This is first-party information that no competitor can replicate.

No single channel wins on its own. It’s the combined effect of all these sources, working in concert, that determines whether AI includes your destination in its answers and how favorably it represents you.

The Speed of Reputation Shifts

There’s another dimension to AI-powered search that DMOs need to account for. AI summaries update quickly to reflect real-time shifts in public conversation, news coverage, and social media activity.

Consider what happened recently in Puerto Vallarta. Within a single week, the AI-generated summary for that destination changed entirely. What had been a typical, tourism-friendly overview (beach vacations, romance, resort recommendations) was replaced with content reflecting recent news about safety concerns and negative tourist experiences posted on social media.

That kind of rapid shift in reputation was harder to see in the old search model. A DMO could maintain strong SEO rankings that effectively anchored the narrative. Negative coverage existed, but it was scattered across various links that travelers might or might not click.

In AI-powered search, there’s no hiding behind good search rankings. The AI synthesizes everything into a single summary. If the conversation about your destination shifts, the AI summary shifts with it, sometimes in days.

This makes real-time monitoring and active reputation management far more urgent than it’s ever been. Social mentions, creator content, news coverage, and community discussions all feed the AI’s understanding of your destination. You need to know what’s being said, and you need a strategy for shaping that conversation across every channel. Not just your website.

SEO Still Matters. But the Ratio Has to Change.

SEO still matters. Travelers still use traditional search, and your site still needs to be well-structured and discoverable.

But the allocation of effort needs to shift. Based on current adoption trends and McKinsey’s projections, the weight should lean roughly 60 to 70% toward GEO strategies and 30 to 40% toward traditional SEO. And that ratio will continue to shift toward GEO over the next 18 months as AI-powered search adoption accelerates.

The smart move is treating SEO and GEO as complementary. 

Strong website content helps with both. But the additional work of building third-party credibility, earning media coverage, activating social engagement, producing original research, and managing your broader information presence? That’s GEO work. And most DMOs aren’t doing nearly enough of it.

Design for Behavior, Not for Algorithms

It may be tempting to approach GEO the same way DMOs approach SEO: figure out the algorithm and game it.

That’s a mistake. The algorithms behind AI-powered search are opaque. They shift. They vary from one platform to another (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity each source and weight content differently). Chasing any single algorithm is a losing proposition.

A Behavioral Marketing approach offers a better path. Instead of chasing algorithms, focus on the behaviors you need to influence. Your travelers’ search behavior has changed. That means your content behavior has to change, too.

  • Create and disseminate the kind of content that earns the trust signals AI needs to make recommendations. 
  • Provide genuine value across multiple channels. 
  • Build credibility through third-party validation and original contributions to your field. 
  • Manage your reputation actively across every source that feeds into AI-generated answers.

When you design for behavior rather than for algorithms, you build something more durable than a ranking. You build authority that holds up regardless of which platform a traveler uses to find their next trip.

The Window Is Open

Half of consumers already use AI-powered search, but most brands aren’t yet tracking their visibility there. That gap between consumer behavior and brand readiness is both a risk and an opportunity for DMOs willing to act now.

The destinations that move first will shape how AI understands and represents them. The ones that wait will have their story told by everyone else.

Getting GEO right takes coordination across earned media, social, content, and reputation management. Off Madison Ave helps partners put that strategic picture together. If your website traffic is telling you something has changed, it has. Let’s figure out what to do about it.