Understanding How AI Can Put Your Destination on the Map

At this point, everyone has a relationship with AI. Even if you’ve never tapped into ChatGPT or Gemini, you’ve been served AI results in a regular Google search. With the tech moving faster than the speed of sound, we thought this would be a good time to define some of the acronyms and language being tossed around as well as uncover opportunities AI presents for destinations.

SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO. What Does It All Mean?

In the alphabet soup of optimization, even the most casual end user knows that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and how it’s all about moving up the ranks of internet browser search results to gain more visits to a website. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) first hit the scene to deliver direct answers in place of search results. These direct answers included “Position Zero” replies from voice assistants and featured snippets on Google. Today, AEO has immense overlap, even interchangeability, with GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Bottom line? We all need to set our sights (and sites!) on AEO/GEO to be sourced in summarized responses to user inquiries — whether through Siri or ChatGPT.

What is Generative AI?

To get your site AEO/GEO-ready, you need to understand what Generative AI is and how it works. The technology uses vast learning to map patterns and predict what should come next to synthesize results. ChatGPT, Google Gemini and other chatbots use large language models to generate text. Midjourney and DALL ·E 3 create art and images. OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo produce video.

To ensure your website is in the Generative AI consideration set, you need to boost your EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Let’s break that down, letter-by-letter.

• Experience: Firsthand perspective is best (think: a narrator telling their own story).
• Expertise: Professional credentials and deep knowledge.
• Authoritativeness: THE go-to source.
• Trustworthiness: The upfront aspects of accuracy, site security and transparency.

What is Agentic AI?

Going beyond Generative AI with its summarized responses, Agentic AI is empowered to actually take action on a user’s behalf by following a set process:

• Perception: Seeing and monitoring the environment surrounding the goal you gave it.
• Reasoning: Interpreting data and deciding what needs to happen next to fulfill that goal.
• Planning: Breaking this goal down into smaller subsets of tasks.
• Action: Executing on the plan above using external tools.

Your website needs to be machine-readable for AI to seamlessly crawl content. Multiple AI agents can be used for segmentation and personalization of experiences. These AI agent(s) can communicate with websites in two ways:

• MCP (Model Context Protocol): A universal port that allows them to discover and plug into your site’s tools to manage integrations.  
• A2A (Agent-to-Agent): A direct connection from one agent to another to communicate securely and collaborate on tasks.

How Can My Destination Use AI?

You can leverage AI to positively impact every stage of the traveler journey. We’re sharing some examples below. Note that this is not an exhaustive list.

Dreaming

Tapping into AI to identify travel intent through search, marketers can leverage predictive ad targeting. These efforts reliably yield higher conversion rates.

Planning

Travelers are already using Generative AI to build trip itineraries. That’s a win for destinations because it often leads to longer stays and increased visitor spending. Looking ahead, Agentic AI needs to be on your radar as visitors will use it to automatically book their accommodations, tours, attraction tickets and more.

Experiencing

Once travelers have arrived in your destination, you have more opportunities to increase spending. Creating a virtual concierge provides visitors immediate assistance, 24/7 (something welcome centers cannot do), so they can act on spontaneous desires. For destinations that seek to create solutions before problems have a chance to arise, Agentic AI is the answer. Think: identifying a planned event that has been canceled last minute and recommending an alternative activity.

Sharing

People love to share their thoughts about everything online. Especially their travel experiences. Destinations can use AI to aggregate results across social media channels, review sites and more to give you a clear picture of traveler sentiment. You can also take drip campaigns to new levels with automated retargeting. Let’s say someone searches for “best romantic retreats in [ your destination ]”. AI can segment the user into a specific audience, generate dynamic creative that speaks to their intent and provides a real-time incentive through a chatbot or email offer.

Feeling overwhelmed? Dana is here to guide you through what’s happening now … and next. Contact Lynn Kaniper at 609.466.9187 ext. 117 or lkaniper@danacommunications.com to start the conversation today.