Travel SEO is Dead, Travel AIO is the Future

Travel is a foundational global industry. The sector was valued by Bloomberg at approximately $11.0 trillion (USD) in 2024 and is projected to reach over $16.3 trillion by 2035. It globally employs roughly one in ten people worldwide.

This massive scale has made it a central focus for digital optimization efforts for decades.

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The First Disruption: The Rise of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)

The industry underwent its first major disruption when the internet arrived, effectively ending the information monopoly previously held by traditional travel agents. Large-scale digital platforms such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Priceline emerged, enabling consumers to manage their own flight details and hotel bookings directly.

The Vertical Search Era and Kayak’s Arbitrage

In the early 2000s, users often expressed frustration because they had to visit multiple websites to find the best travel deals. General search engines like Google weren’t in the business of aggregating meaningful travel information. This environment created an opportunity for vertical search.

This was the context in which Kayak was founded in 2004. The idea was to become a specialized search engine highly focused on travel, aggregating options from various airlines and booking sites. This approach proved highly profitable, as was told to me by the founders of Kayak, who served as advisors to my first startup.

This strategic insight into travel search was born from insider knowledge. Having worked on paid marketing for giants like Hotels.com and Expedia in the early 2000s, it was clear that owning the user acquisition layer was far more valuable than the fulfillment layer. The founder of Kayak understood that the gold mine was travel search, not the hassle of booking the trip and managing the customer service associated with it.

Kayak’s economic model was successful, making it a “cash cow from day one,” built on key components:

• Referral Fees: Kayak earned a fee (often six dollars per lead) when a user selected an organic result and was directed to the airline’s website. Airlines considered these leads highly qualified.

• Search Arbitrage: Kayak spent heavily on advertising on Google to acquire a user, allowing them to earn the $6 referral fee.

• SEO Strategy: Kayak invested significant time and money in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), creating pages for popular flight routes to rank highly on Google organically. This provided “Free Revenue” clicks.

Kayak’s success served as proof that vertical search engines could outperform general search engines.

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Google’s Entry and Dominance

The dynamics of this specialized industry shifted dramatically in 2011 when Google decided to enter the travel market directly.

• To achieve this, Google acquired ITA Software, giving them the capability to tap into airline booking systems and provide real-time flight information.

• Google launched Google Flights in the same year, a direct competitor to Kayak.

• Kayak wisely opted for a strong exit, selling to Priceline in November 2012 for approximately $1.8 billion.

Google Flights has since become the dominant player in the flight search market.

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The Future: Transformation via AIO (AI Optimization)

Despite the existing aggregation services, organizing a trip remains a time-consuming task. The industry is now poised for another major transformation driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the rise of AI Optimization (AIO).

AIO’s Core Shift and Agentic Commerce

AIO is expected to fundamentally shift the industry. The core difference is that future platforms will know user preferences far more intimately. Instead of merely checking boxes, a user can provide rich details (e.g., family demographics, activity level, preference for fishing near a lake rather than hiking) and ask the AI to fully customize and book a trip to a specific location (e.g., Latin America, Disney World, or a week-long cruise) based on budget and preferences, all without human intervention.

This shift to AIO is predicted to be a greater financial phenomenon than travel SEO because it brings the brand significantly closer to the customer transaction. Travel is expected to be one of the biggest categories for “agentic commerce,” where purchasing takes place directly within the Large Language Models (LLMs).

The Changing Competitive Landscape: AIO as the Small Brand’s Advantage

The transition to AIO creates two distinct paths to visibility:

• Big Brand Partnerships: Large travel entities, such as hotel chains like Hyatt or airlines like United, are establishing direct partnerships with LLM providers. These deals involve sharing detailed inventory, trip data, and product information directly with the LLMs in the hope that these results will be prioritized in agentic commerce responses. Smaller travel brands simply lack the power to forge these types of large-scale custom data and revenue-share deals.

• Small Brand AIO: For smaller businesses, AIO is the true entry point into the new world of travel AI. If a small resort, such as one in Upstate New York, does an excellent job of spreading content, information, data, and facts about its offerings and customer sentiment across many channels on the internet in a clean, insightful, and detailed way, it will show up properly in various LLM searches.

For example, when people ask questions like, “Hey, where should I go for an Upstate New York trip and leave the city for the weekend?”, the small resort will have a great shot of showing up properly versus some of the bigger brands. Unlike the traditional SEO era, where a small brand might only show up as a single link, AIO allows them to appear across dozens of different queries that people type in diverse ways to look at various resorts and travel options.

AIO is projected to change the dynamic, giving smaller, promising companies a “fair shot against the big boys” who might rely solely on custom data deals with LLMs. The ultimate impact of AIO is projected to be much bigger than the initial disruption caused by travel moving online, fundamentally increasing the velocity of travel happening around the world. We should be excited to see a decade of adventure ahead in travel.

To succeed in this new AIO landscape, smaller brands must focus on:

• Ensuring correct representation on platforms like Expedia.

• Maintaining solid reviews and promptly replying to negative feedback.

• Creating content across various channels, including their own website, third-party sites, and social media, especially videos.

• Securing independent third-party reviews from experts or publications.

The LLMs will synthesize this diverse information—from customer reviews to availability—to meaningfully rank unique opportunities. The traditional SEO industry is expected to become smaller as AI becomes the dominant starting point for travel planning.