As the travel industry began its AI transformation, one online travel agency (OTA) moved first with Enterprise AI Optimization (AIO), achieving big visibility gains for their hotels and holidays categories in ChatGPT.
Optimizing content to establish channel leadership
Travelers now research, plan, and book complete trips with AI search. In some cases they never leave the chat interface as the platform interfaces with airlines, hotels, or OTAs directly.
One global OTA saw an opportunity for key of their highest margin categories: hotels and holiday packages. Traffic and visibility were being impacted across the industry, but the emerging channel of AI search presented a clear first-mover advantage—despite fierce competition from rival platforms and hotels.
Manual spot-checks of AI responses seemed to confirm decent brand visibility. But the manual tracking process consumed hours weekly, delivered stale insights, and provided zero visibility into opportunity size or competitive gaps.
While they had best practices for their initial content optimizations, there was no framework to connect those improvements to visibility gains, bookings, or revenue. This made it impossible to know whether their content investments would actually move the needle.
Comprehensive, data-backed AI search capabilities
Topic gap identification
Concept Analysis automation surfaced the highest-impact opportunity instantly: trending destinations. Both categories lacked location-level coverage of sights, allowing competitors to dominate AI responses for timely, high-intent queries like "best places to visit in [destination]."
Content acceleration
Data-backed briefs that specified themes, priority prompts, and semantic clusters could now flow directly to content teams. Every article was engineered to fill a measured visibility gap. No more guessing.
Real-time optimization
Content pages were restructured for AI parsability, with results able to be followed daily in AIO. Winning approaches were identified within days and could be scaled immediately.
Authority amplification
AIO’s Source Analysis revealed which third-party platforms influenced AI citations most. Wikipedia emerged as priority one for ensuring accurate brand information. Second was reinforcing their content production by upping placements on destination-focused travel blogs, which projected to cascade brand mentions across dozens of new prompts.
From contender to leader in 90 days
Executing a comprehensive AI search optimization strategy in three months would be ambitious for any organization. Doing it while overtaking category leaders required precision, speed, and data-driven decision-making at every step.
- +155% share of voice for hotels
Rose from 20% to 51% in ChatGPT, moving from mid-pack to the co-leader in the hotels category.
- +45% share of voice for holiday packages
Grew from 40% to 58%, jumping other holiday contenders to reach first place.
Pushing for 100% share of voice
Reaching category leadership in 90 days proved the strategy works. Now the goal shifts from catching up to pulling away, expanding their focus to further global markets. Empowered by Enterprise AIO, their next steps are clear:
Deepen category dominance
Continue on-page optimization to capture the high-intent queries where competitors still appear.
Defend against competitive response
Maintain continuous monitoring to identify and close new gaps as rivals attempt to replicate this success. Speed of response will preserve first-mover advantage.
Expand their authority moat
Systematically add placements across identified impactful third-party sources. Use these as a messaging force multiplier that scales their topic ownership.
A first-mover with a mature strategy
While competitors hesitated on AI search, this OTA was already winning it. As their rivals began manual tracking experiments, this brand had hundreds of prompts being monitored, optimization strategies deployed, and was seeing measurable visibility gains.
In 90 days this OTA had already overtaken category and claimed the #1 position in both flights and holiday categories.
