For about a decade, SEO was king. Get your keywords right, earn some backlinks, nail your technical structure, and you could win the internet — or at least your corner of it. Great agencies built entire practices around it. Clients paid for it. It worked.
Then large language models entered the picture, and the rules shifted in ways most marketers haven’t fully reckoned with yet.
This isn’t a story about AI replacing search. It’s a story about what AI has revealed: that authentic brand building — the kind PR has always championed — now matters more than it has in years. And for tourism and hospitality brands especially, the implications go much deeper than updating your content calendar.
Let’s start with how we got here.
When Google was the primary discovery engine, winning online had a relatively clear playbook. Optimize your pages. Build domain authority. Target the right keywords. Yes, great PR helped, and yes, reputation mattered. But a disciplined SEO strategy could carry a brand a long way even when the underlying experience was mediocre. The system had a blind spot: it indexed and ranked content, but it didn’t evaluate whether that content was true.
Here’s what changed when LLMs arrived. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, or any other AI-powered tool to recommend a destination, a lodge, a tour operator, or a travel experience, that model isn’t just scanning your website and ranking your keywords. It’s drawing on an enormous, synthesized understanding of what the internet actually says about you.
That includes your Google Business Profile reviews. Reddit threads where travellers described their real experience. TripAdvisor comments from three years ago. Forum posts. Media coverage, and the absence of it. What your past clients put in writing when they thought they were just talking to other consumers. LLMs move through all of that quickly, and they’re looking for signal: does what this brand says about itself line up with what people who’ve actually experienced it are saying?
If the answer is no, the recommendation doesn’t come. Or worse, it comes with a caveat.
This is the uncomfortable truth for a lot of brands, and it’s especially sharp in tourism. The old approach of glossy photography, carefully crafted copy, a marketing budget that outspent the competition created a version of a brand that existed primarily in marketing materials. Real experiences lived somewhere else. Sometimes those two things were close. Sometimes they weren’t. In a Google-only world, that gap was manageable. In an LLM world, it’s exposed.
An AI model doesn’t weigh your website copy the same way it weighs 400 authentic reviews. It doesn’t accept your claim to be “world-class” at face value. It reads what guests, clients, and community members actually wrote. Your marketing voice is one input among many, and it’s probably the least trusted one in the mix.
A good starting point: Audit what actually exists about your brand online before you do anything else. Search your brand name in Google and read the first two pages of results as if you were a stranger. Look at your Google Business Profile reviews — not just the star rating, but the language people use. Search your brand name on Reddit. Check what shows up on TripAdvisor, travel forums, and Facebook groups related to your region. You’re not just looking for complaints. You’re looking for whether the story being told about you online matches the story you’re telling about yourself.
Once you’ve done that manual scan, there’s a faster and more thorough way to go deeper.
This is where Deep Research makes this easy.
Deep Research is a feature available in tools like ChatGPT (with a Pro subscription), Perplexity, and Google Gemini. Unlike a standard AI query, where the model answers from its training data, Deep Research actively searches the internet in real time, reads through dozens or hundreds of sources, and synthesizes what it finds into a structured report. It can take five to fifteen minutes, but what it produces is genuinely useful: a synthesized view of what the internet is saying about a topic, brand, or question, with citations.
For tourism operators, this is a powerful self-audit tool. You’re essentially asking an AI to do what an AI-powered search engine does when someone asks about your brand and to also show you its work.
Here’s a sample Deep Research prompt you can use right now:
I want to understand how my brand, [Your Brand Name], is perceived online. Please conduct a deep research analysis and answer the following: What are guests and travellers saying about [Your Brand Name] across review platforms, forums like Reddit and TripAdvisor, social media, and news or travel media sources? What themes come up repeatedly in positive reviews? What concerns or complaints appear most often? How does [Your Brand Name] describe itself in its own marketing materials, and how closely does that align with what guests actually report experiencing? What are the most common third-party sources where information about [Your Brand Name] appears online? Are there meaningful gaps between how the brand markets itself and how guests describe the actual experience? Please cite specific sources where possible and flag any areas where the online record is thin or inconsistent.
Run that and read it as a brand owner, not as a marketer defending your choices. What it surfaces will tell you a great deal about what an LLM is likely to draw on and how much confidence it’s likely to have when recommending your brand to a potential guest. If the online record is thin, AI systems have less to work with and will lean toward brands with more evidence. If the record is mixed or contradicts your marketing claims, that’s a gap you need to address at the product level, not the messaging level.
That last point is worth sitting with for a minute.
The most seductive response to this reality is to try to flood the internet with more positive content such as more blog posts, more social media, more five-star review requests. Some of that is legitimate. But none of it fixes the core problem if what you’re delivering doesn’t match what you’re promising. LLMs aren’t easily fooled by volume. They’re looking for consistency and corroboration across independent sources. Manufactured signals look different from authentic ones, and the gap tends to widen over time.
This is where PR earns its place at the strategy table, and why it’s making a comeback that a lot of people in digital marketing didn’t see coming. Third-party validation such as media coverage in credible publications, earned editorial mentions, expert endorsements, industry recognition, case studies with real clients speaking on record is exactly the kind of signal LLMs are trained to weigh. It’s external. It’s verifiable. It’s not self-reported.
A feature in a respected travel publication carries different weight than a landing page. A quote from a satisfied client in a media story reads differently than a testimonial you curated for your own website. An industry credential signals something your “About Us” page cannot. The media record is part of what LLMs are trained on and draw from, and presence in that record matters in a way it hasn’t since the early days of the internet.
Practical tip: Build a media relations cadence, not a one-off pitch strategy. Identify five to ten publications, newsletters, podcasts, or digital media outlets that your target guests actually consume and that cover your region or sector. Pitch stories that are genuinely interesting to their readers, not announcements about your business, but stories that happen to involve your business. A lodging operator in northern BC who partnered with a local First Nation to launch a new cultural experience has a story. A DMO that launched a carbon-neutral trail certification has a story. Your new room packages do not. Consistent, genuine media presence builds the kind of external record that gives AI systems evidence to work with.
Another practical tip: Treat your Google Business Profile as a content asset, not a directory listing. Respond to every review — positive and negative — in a voice that reflects your brand. Add photos regularly. Use the Q&A section intentionally. This is one of the most crawled and cited sources for local and regional businesses, and it’s free to maintain.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and SEO still matter. They are still essential parts of the approach. But they’re operating in service of something larger: building enough of an authentic, externally validated presence that an AI model reviewing your brand landscape has real evidence to work with, from multiple independent sources, that tells a consistent story.
And here’s where it gets interesting for tourism specifically.
If LLMs are cross-referencing what you say with what guests actually experienced, then the work of building trust online doesn’t start with your content calendar. It starts with your product. Are you delivering what you’re promising? Not approximately. Actually. Because if you’re not, no amount of digital PR, no volume of content, and no SEO strategy is going to fix the reviews that reflect the real experience. And those reviews are inputs your AI visibility depends on.
The most effective tourism brands operating in this environment have figured out something the best ones always knew: marketing strategy and product strategy have to be developed together. What you’re communicating externally needs to reflect what guests genuinely say when you’re not in the room. PR and media relations approaches need to be built around real stories, not manufactured ones. Familiarization trips need to go to the actual experience. Client success stories need to reflect what clients genuinely found valuable.
Practical tip: Before your next marketing planning cycle, sit down with your operations team and your front-line staff and ask them a simple question: what do guests compliment us on most? Then look at your marketing materials and see if those things are front and centre. If there’s a gap close it. Your marketing should be the most honest and accurate version of your product, not the most aspirational one.
The brands that win in AI-powered search are the ones where the story told by their marketing, their media coverage, their reviews, and their guest experience all point in the same direction. When those things align, LLMs have confidence. When they contradict each other, LLMs hedge or go elsewhere.
The good news for brands that have been doing things with integrity, including delivering real experiences, building genuine relationships with guests and communities, earning coverage rather than buying it, is that you’ve been building exactly the kind of trust that AI systems are designed to surface. You may just need to make more of it visible.
The old way of winning the internet was mostly technical. The new way is mostly real.
