In part one of our series on the future of search, we unpacked how “Social Search” is beginning to supplement traditional Google searches. We believe taking steps towards optimizing around social search will help prepare for tomorrow’s search landscape.
But regardless of where they search, users are all ultimately looking for the same thing: answers to their questions (not necessarily a page to visit). Google, other search engines, and even AI platforms like ChatGPT are all competing to surface the best, most thorough, most accurate answers to a user’s search —whether directly asked or implied.
Where Google used to rely on websites in its index to answer questions, today, Google strives to keep user eyeballs (and ad clicks) within its ecosystem. In fact, for every 1,000 web searches in 2024, only 360 send clicks to the open web. For the remaining 640 clicks, users either search again, or they conclude their session, often because Google surfaced the answer they were looking for without even pointing to an external source on the web.
The result? You and your competitors are fighting over fewer organic clicks, even though your audience size hasn’t changed.
Remember: SEO is ultimately a competitive field. Your competitors are dealing with the same contracting search landscape, and they’re also losing organic traffic to Google and LLMs that provide direct answers.
The need, then, is to better understand the changing search landscape and publish better content on better websites with greater authority and superior user experience than your competition. That’s how you get more organic search market share from the people that matter: your customers.
Here are 4 exciting opportunities in front of tour, activity, and attraction companies looking to win more customers from the web search of tomorrow (on Google or otherwise).
Zero-Click ≠ Zero Opportunity
Zero-click results for informational searches aren’t going away. It’s time to focus on your brand appearance in Google and LLMs like ChatGPT.
- Zero-click is now the default UX on Google. Long-tail, low-volume queries trigger an AI Overview more than 60% of the time, according to SE Ranking. What’s more, Google continues to expand the reach of AI Overviews, now appearing even when users aren’t logged in or when browsing incognito. AI Overviews take up more real estate on users’ devices; the average text length of AI Overviews has almost doubled since they were first rolled out, from 2,633 characters to 5,337 characters.
- AI Overviews have rolled out in 100+ other regions and languages. Google is betting its future on generative answers, not link lists, even in other markets and localities. With North America’s peak travel season just around the corner, virtually all sites we’re working with are seeing an increase in traffic from AI-powered search. Even without optimizations for AI visibility, adoption and seasonality should be sending more traffic than ever to your site from AI engines – and if you’re not getting AI visibility at all, that’s a red flag that your site isn’t ready for the future of search.
- Traditional SEO is changing, too. We haven’t even mentioned the dozens of bespoke SERP (search engine result page) features Google has developed for a variety of different search intents. All Google needs to do is decide it wants to show a certain kind of search result within its platform instead of sending users out to other sites (e.g., Google Flights), and organic search traffic could evaporate overnight. (Sorry, Orbitz…) Travel and attraction companies can expect to see less raw organic traffic, especially on top-funnel, informational searches where Google can often end the user’s search on the SERP without a click.
The Opportunity: Treat SERP positions like billboards in prime real estate—pricey, scarce, and worth thoughtfully designing your creative around.
From Search Engines to Answer Engines
Google still needs sources to ground its answers. The citations and links provided in Google AI Overviews skew toward pages with strong reputational, semantic, and contextual signals from around the web and from user behavior.
Google can solve simple fact-based queries in SERP, but on-page engagement and authority signals will help determine who gets cited in AI overviews and other LLM-driven results. Optimize for dwell time, click-through rate, and repeat visits to encourage user behavior that indicates a successful search.
The Opportunity: Fast load times, relevant headings, genuinely helpful FAQs, jump links, and clear CTAs will help users engage at higher rates – and that signals page quality and topical authority to search engines and generative engines alike.
Schema Markup: Not Just For Rich Snippets Anymore
Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, Fabrice Canel, told Pubcon attendees the fastest way to “talk” to AI search is with great content + structured data. Google’s 2023 deprecation of FAQ/How-To rich results caused some search marketers to stop paying attention to their structured data. But structured data is a powerful tool for helping AI agents and LLMs classify and contextualize your content.
“One of the ways SEOs can prepare for this new AI-enabled search is by writing great content and annotating with Schema Markup.”
Fabrice Canel, Bing Principal Program Manager
LLMs understand entities — the distinct people, places, and things that make up your business—and they prioritize content that helps them confidently connect the dots. Make sure your brand, your people, your offers, and your locations are clearly labeled on your website.
Connect those labels to your social channels, your listings on booking sites, your reviews, and anywhere else your brand shows up on the web.
Keep it fresh. Outdated info is a trust killer—for both users and bots.
The Opportunity: Own your own knowledge graph. How? By providing bots and users alike with clear and consistent citations across the web. Schema markup can help to clarify entity relationships between your site and web properties like social media profiles, OTA platforms, and other web directories.
Let’s Give LLMs Something To Talk About
Users talk to LLMs differently than they search the web through Google.
According to a SEMRush study, the average Google search is about 2-4 words long; the average ChatGPT prompt is certainly much larger, and able to contain much more context and direction. That added degree of specificity can help you show up if your site can spoon-feed answers to the LLM.
Thoughtfully organizing your content into tight summaries and reinforcing those summaries with connected schema markup helps your site surface when Google assembles an AI Overview, when Siri or Alexa answers a spoken question, or when Perplexity/ChatGPT looks for authoritative passages to quote.
AI is assembling your brand’s reputation one paragraph at a time. If you don’t communicate to it clearly, someone else will. Or, worse, the model will guess.
The Opportunity: Provide AI engines with the answers to the questions your customers are asking them. Format your Q&A, FAQ, and blog content conversationally; phrase common questions the way your customers are asking them—then provide a detailed, high-quality answer immediately.
Your Action Plan For AI Search Visibility in 2025
- Own Your Brand Narrative: Prioritize content that concisely and accurately answers high-intent questions. Structure pages to highlight who you are, what you offer, and why it matters. Then, back it up with the technical signals AI uses to trust and cite sources.
- Maximize Engagement: Tighten above-the-fold copy, add interactive elements, test your CTAs, and streamline page load times. A frictionless user experience turns traffic into conversions and signals trust to ranking algorithms.
- Publish a Living Knowledge Graph: Define your own digital footprint. Connect brand, product, offer and location entities with structured data libraries like schema.org. Update regularly and test new schema types relevant to your industry.
- Measure What Matters: Connect AI search citations and SERP feature appearances with conversions, not just clicks. Track referral traffic from LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others. (You can use our free LLM traffic dashboard to help do that.)
Zero-click doesn’t mean zero-opportunity. It demands zero ambiguity – in your entities, expertise, authority, and go-to-market strategy. Master those, and AI will amplify, not replace, your brand presence.
