BrightEdge finds big travel brands lead AI answers, with gaps in inspiration queries
New BrightEdge research into travel queries shows established brands taking most of the visibility in both Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, but the leader changes with the travel sector being asked about. American Airlines tops airlines on both engines, at 26.6% on AI Overviews and 25.3% on ChatGPT. Royal Caribbean leads cruise lines at 24.8% and 28.8%.
Hotels split by engine. Hilton leads AI Overviews at 28.3%, while Marriott leads ChatGPT at 29.4%. Among booking platforms, Expedia's visibility on AI Overviews is 31.3% against Kayak's 14.4%, a gap of 2.2x that narrows to 1.4x on ChatGPT.
Price-led prompts skew heavily towards booking platforms, which appear in 78% of AI Overviews answers involving terms such as cheap, deal, budget or last-minute, against 17% of other answers. Expedia alone shows up in 44% of the budget-related answers. Only 9% of tracked prompts carry booking intent, while inspiration and comparison make up most of the panel.
BrightEdge measures share of voice rather than ranking positions, because AI answers do not link out to individual results the way classic search does. The opening for smaller sites sits in inspiration queries, where YouTube, Reddit and AAA are more prominent and big-brand dominance weakens. Subjective questions that reward human experience leave room for travel blogs and niche publishers to compete.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Measurement