What is really happening to web traffic due to AI?

Have you heard? SEO is dead!

You may have also heard that it is far from dead.

Anecdotally what I personally here is that organic traffic is dropping away for most companies I speak to. For some that has come in dramatic hits from Google updates and for others, it is more a steady decline.

This week, like most weeks threw up a bunch of contradictory articles depending on whether you are trying to defend your incumbent business (SEO practitioners) or upend it (AI gurus).

The good people over at Wikipedia are more certain about what is happening in their business.

“Wikipedia has lost more than 1.1 billion visits per month over the past 3 years.” The world’s online, open-source oracle is in a death spiral. “Similarweb’s data shows that – in March 2025 – Wikipedia.org attracted half a billion fewer site visits than ChatGPT.com”

Of course, our SEO friends will be quick to tell us that “It’s important to stress that Wikipedia still attracted roughly 2½ times as many unique visitors in March 2025 as ChatGPT did.” and that Reddit is up 42% or “+1.12 billion monthly visits”.

This GrowthGrind article is quick to remind us that “Google search is still 373x bigger than ChatGpt and all other AI models” and “Chatgpt saw 37million searches per day translating to about 0.25% of the market share.”

But then it also goes on to tell us that “Even though Google Search still dominates search, more than 60% of searches resulted in no clicks. Which means Google AI overviews have properly eaten into the clicks that Google would send websites.”

The advice I give is that the best side of the argument to be on is the pragmatic side. What happened today is only relevant today. Disruption in many forms IS happening and you should be preparing for it. And this is as it has always been.

The goals remain the same. The job of your sales and marketing teams is manage your businesses place in the world as the world evolves. If they aren’t looking to open up new sales channels and marketing pathways, then they aren’t really doing their job well.

The trend is human traffic to your website is heading downwards. So what is your next move? That can (and should) be looking to intercept agentic traffic. It should be listneng for the tactics that land you in AI overviews. And it should be looking at other places your customers are hanging out, and who they are hanging out with to tap that opportunity.

Videreo is the place for brands and creators to meet & create a new sales pipeline together.

Check out more here to join brands already in the vector database like global hotel meta-search business Vio.com or see Videreo in action from creator Mely in Paris.

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Contact Adrian for more details on how to get your travel product loaded.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Google massively expanding AI overviews for travel

Keeping with the same theme, Search Engine Land have released their latest findings on what is happening with AI overviews (you know, those summaries that just give the answer to the users question so they don’t have to click the blue link to your website where you crafted the perfect answer to rank in the Top 3).

Google are going after travel with the sector search results being “Up 108.09%. The Things to do trend is booming – 93.78% of new travel AI Overviews focus on location-specific activities (e.g., [things to do in Buffalo NY], [things to do in Providence this weekend]).”

Potentially ominously for those in the travel planning game the article also finishes that sentence with “and trigger full AI-generated destination guides.” Ouch.

But don’t panic - there will be ads you can buy!! 👍️ 🥳 

Apparently Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) hates ads. He once said ““I kind of hate ads just as an aesthetic choice. I think ads needed to happen on the internet for a bunch of reasons, to get it going, but it’s a momentary industry. The world is richer now. I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they’re getting are not influenced by advertisers.”

But he doesn’t hate them enough to be getting ready to flood the zone with them on his own platform according to this tweet referencing OpenAI’s own revenue projections where they talk to “free user monetization”.

This week they started setting the scene for this by turning on shopping in ChatGPT! Now your AI search result can not just tell you the best coffee machine to buy for medium course grind single origin beans sourced from the highlands of Guatemala - but also let you click and buy it!

Of course this doesn’t yet apply to travel (unless you count luggage as part of travel).

The way we’ve wired this big ball of spaghetti makes it very tricky to just “sell”. We have our own inbuilt moat that keeps these technology wolfs at bay. Well done everyone!

Travel’s big ball of spaghetti

I could have just hyperlinked this piece by Jeff Klee, CEO of TravelPerk’s AmTrav to the last paragraph of the one above but I thought it was so well written, practical and pragmatic that it deserved its own spot.

Jeff gives us a history lesson that is also rooted in the present to explain how TravelPerk is looking at AI.

“Back in the Stone Age when I started in travel, there were situations where, for one reason or another, we’d actually have to hand write airline tickets. This was a huge pain in the ass…” says Jeff.

He goes on to explain how that inevitably evolved and is pretty much the foundation story of this industry we all know today. But he also explains that it didn’t change overnight. That there is an annoying (my words) cross over period of doing things multiple ways.

Jeff tells us “In forums and at conferences, you hear that AI will kill not just OBTs, but also other mainstays of our industry, like human customer support, GDSs and maybe TMCs altogether” and leads him to question “Am I wasting my time? Are all of us who are working to deliver traditional travel management services – even those employed by the most “modern” TMCs – really just skilled carriage makers about to enter the age of the automobile?”

The TL:DR he lands on is regardless the tool, just do things that add more value than was previously available and if you do so, everything will probably be OK.

I think this is the great reminder for all of us. AI won’t take your job or kill your business so long as you find a way to keep adding exceptional value. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.

Priceline release new travel “vibe” product hoping to boost car rentals

Priceline this week jumped on the “vibe” trend for travel. I guess someone had to do it eventually.

We’ve got “vibe coding” and “vibe marketing” and now vibe travel. If you’re not across what this vibe is vibing - it is essentially getting AI to just do everything whilst you lay in a hammock. A simple prompt that builds a functional webpage. Or a prompt that defines your buying personas and builds the ads to match.

In the Priceline version you tell it a place you know you like, like say Williamsburg in New York and it will give you equivalents elsewhere, or the equivalent to where you are heading.

To be fair, this is a good idea and has been done before with some success. People like it and now it is instantly scalable (but with I’m sure very questionable quality). One yarn bombed cafe in the suburbs of a Midwest city is not Williamsburg. But the coffee might be good.

This product is released as part of their partnership with Carshare company Turo. This could be because these neighbourhoods may very well be difficult to get to for a non local on public transport or if you get there and realise its actually a bit crap, there is probably a car nearby you can hire and get the hell out of there!

Gemini gets it wrong on travel recommendations

A report this week matched the results from using Google Gemini to make holiday recommendations to the data of the company (that presumably paid for the report) to tell us: GEMINI IS WRONG!!

The crux of the report was that Gemini made the presumption that people from Manchester were downtrodden factory workers who could only afford a seaside trip to Blackpool when the data from Attraction Tickets actually told us they are all at Walt Disney World in Florida.

“AI made wrong assumptions for 57% of the UK cities in the study, with the technology capping the travel affordability of consumers in 20 of the 35 cities, assuming they could only afford staycations.”

I’m being a little unfair here because I think the report does highlight something I also notice quite often: “AI recommendations were based on outdated regional stereotypes.”

God forbid, this could be where something like Grok has the advantage although I think most people have left Twitter (X) these days. The OpenAI tie in with Reddit also looks like a very good idea to combat this with some (differently biased) recency.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: TravelAI.com

I actually found time this week to listen to an edition of Dan Christian’s Travel Trends podcast with TravelAI founders John Lyotier and Chris Jensen this week.

It was actually recorded back at Phocuswright last November and published early in 2025 but it still stands up extremely well as a listen for today.

I actually already knew some of the story but in this interview John & Chris go deeper into the methodology behind their business and how action X leads to outcome Y.

I made a ton of notes as things for us to learn from at Videreo.

Highly recommend.

If you have a B2B business underpinned by AI and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

AI sends cake

A great piece about an AI that sent a guest a cake when it mentioned that their hotel stay coincided with their birthday.

OK, there were a few steps between the conversation and the cake arriving - but there also don’t need to be in an agentic future.

The main point was that no-one told the AI that this is something it should be doing or thinking about. It put 2 × 2 together and pinged the human team to surprise and delight the customer.

A lot of other stuff in the article also - but that was the highlight for me!

Slack Group!

Shorts

Every week a lot of stuff is left on the cutting room floor. I thought maybe I’ll just lest those here for anyone interested in digging more:

• MENA now has an AI influencer too (hopefully they learned from the Germany debacle)

• Singapore Airlines taps OPENAI for partnership

• Rimigo lands $550K for AI travel packages

• Visa2Fly gets $2M for AI visa service

Podcasts and Sponsors

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Why am I listening to podcasts and instead of making new ones………… (really just a question for myself). New ones are coming soon!!

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Most clicked last week was the link the AI Agent explainer. Now the new club house leader in most ever clicked.

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