Key points
- BrightEdge tracked travel brand visibility in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Each of three categories has the same top name on both engines: an airline, a cruise line and a booking site.
- Hotels split by engine: Hilton tops Google AI Overviews at 28.3%, while Marriott tops ChatGPT at 29.4%.
- Only 9% of tracked Google AI Overviews prompts show booking intent. Inspiration prompts surface YouTube, Reddit and AAA more often.
- Booking platforms show up in 78% of budget-related Google answers versus 17% of others, an association BrightEdge says is not causal.
Why it matters for marketers: Big brands own category-specific travel queries in AI answers, so smaller publishers have a better shot with inspiration and experience-led content than with price or booking terms.
New research from BrightEdge finds that well-known travel brands take most of the visibility in both ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. The leaders vary by sector, and in hotels they vary by engine: Hilton comes first on Google, Marriott on ChatGPT. In airlines, American Airlines leads on both engines, and Royal Caribbean does the same among cruise lines.
BrightEdge reports share of voice rather than rankings, because AI answers do not list results in fixed positions. The figures count how often a brand appears across tracked answers. Expedia, for example, appears more than twice as often as Kayak on Google AI Overviews, while the gap on ChatGPT is smaller.
The openings are in subjective queries. BrightEdge says YouTube, Reddit and AAA show up more in inspiration questions, while hotels and cruise lines are stronger in comparison prompts and booking platforms in booking-intent prompts. Search Engine Journal's Martin Ibuster argues this leaves room for travel bloggers and smaller sites that offer firsthand experience and judgment.
Price-focused wording is the harder terrain. Booking platforms appear in most Google AI Overviews answers that include words like cheap, deal or budget. BrightEdge cautions that this is an observed pattern, not proof that those words cause a brand to appear.
For content teams, the practical step is to separate tracked prompts by intent and see where big brands are thin. Building awareness and trust still matters, and experience-based content aimed at inspiration questions looks like the more realistic target for smaller brands.
Sources
This brief is our own summary. Read the full reporting at the source.
