The short answer: ChatGPT recommends the travel brands it can find, understand and trust. It finds you through strong SEO foundations. It understands you through clear, specific content about the trips you sell. And it trusts you when other credible sites mention you. Most of that is the same work that ranks you on Google. The difference is where the trust comes from.
That’s the answer. The rest of this article explains how it works in practice, and what to do if your brand isn’t showing up.
Why this matters now
Travellers are asking AI where to go, what to book and who to book with. Ask ChatGPT for the best small group tours for over 50s and you don’t get ten blue links. You get a shortlist of brands, a few lines on each, and a follow-up question.
If you’re on that shortlist, you’re in the consideration set before the traveller has visited a single website. If you’re not, you may never get the chance to compete.
I spent years in-house at Ocean Holidays, leading SEO across three travel brands. Back then the job was ranking. Ranking still matters. But the travel brands that win the next few years will be the ones AI recommends, not just the ones Google ranks.
How AI decides who to recommend
There’s no secret switch. When we audit travel brands, the ones that get recommended tend to have three things in common.
1. They’re easy to find. AI platforms lean on what’s already published and indexed. Crawlable pages, a clear site structure, schema and strong entity signals still do the heavy lifting. A strong travel SEO strategy helps build these foundations, making it easier for both search engines and AI platforms to discover your brand. Around 90% of the work overlaps with good SEO, so if your foundations are weak, start there.
2. They’re easy to understand. AI answers specific questions. “Small group tours of Japan for solo travellers” is a specific question. A destination page that says “Discover the magic of Japan” doesn’t answer it. Pages that say plainly who the trip is for, what’s included and why it’s different give AI something it can quote.
3. They’re mentioned elsewhere. This is the part most travel brands miss. AI looks beyond your website for evidence: reviews, travel press, comparison articles, forums, YouTube and expert commentary. When we map who AI cites for a brand’s priority searches, the gap between them and their competitors is usually in those third-party mentions, not on their own site.
What this looks like in practice
For Magnetic North Travel, one sprint made them visible in Google’s AI Overviews for 77 keywords and in ChatGPT for 44.
For Hertfordshire Zoo, we built AI visibility into the wider SEO strategy, strengthening content, entities, schema and authority. They now appear in ChatGPT for every one of their tracked priority queries, ahead of the other major zoos.
For Dishoom, an AI visibility audit found commercial searches where they weren’t consistently showing up. By strengthening authority signals, brand mentions and content, we grew their AI search visibility by 38%.
Different businesses, same pattern: fix the foundations, answer the real questions, close the citation gaps.
What to do this quarter
Start by finding out where you stand. Write down the 10 to 20 questions a traveller would ask before booking a trip like yours, and run them through ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini. Note who gets named. That’s your real competitor set, and it’s often not the one you’d expect.
Then work through it in this order:
• Fix anything stopping your key pages being crawled and understood.
• Rewrite your priority trip and destination pages so they answer specific questions, plainly.
• Find the sites AI cites for those questions, and get your brand onto them: press, reviews, partners and guides.
• Track mentions and citations alongside rankings and bookings, so you know it’s working.
The goal isn’t visibility in ChatGPT for vanity. It’s to be easier to discover, easier to trust and more likely to be booked.
If you’d like us to do that first step for you, we’ll benchmark your brand against your competitors in AI search and send it over as a free report.
