by Sigvard Alarcon, Trove's Director of Digital

For two decades, destination marketers optimized for one thing: showing up on the first page of Google. Blue links were the gateway to visitor research, and SEO was the discipline that got you there. That era is ending.

In 2026, the way travelers discover, research, and plan trips has fundamentally changed. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, or Copilot where to take a family beach vacation or which Caribbean island has the best diving, the answer they receive is not a list of ten links. It is a synthesized, authoritative response that names specific destinations, recommends specific experiences, and cites specific sources. If your destination is not part of that answer, you are invisible to a growing share of high-intent travelers.

This is the core challenge of Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO: ensuring that AI systems recognize your destination as a credible, relevant answer to traveler queries. And for destination marketing organizations, tourism boards, and hospitality brands, GEO is no longer a theoretical concern. It is an operational priority.

The Shift: From Rankings to Recognition

Traditional SEO was about position. You wanted to rank number one, or at least land on page one, for target keywords. The mechanics were well understood: optimize title tags, build backlinks, publish keyword-rich content, and monitor your position over time.

GEO operates on a different logic entirely. AI models do not rank websites. They synthesize information from across the web and surface the sources they consider most authoritative, structured, and contextually relevant. The question is no longer whether your destination appears on a search results page. The question is whether an AI model considers your destination worth mentioning at all.

This distinction matters for tourism marketers because the research phase of trip planning, which is where destination marketing has its greatest influence, is the exact phase being disrupted. When a prospective traveler asks an AI assistant to compare beach destinations in Central America or recommend a long weekend for couples on the East Coast, the model draws on a knowledge graph built from the web. Destinations with well-structured, authoritative, and entity-rich digital presences get cited. Destinations without them do not.

Why GEO Matters More for Destinations Than Almost Any Other Category

Tourism has characteristics that make it uniquely exposed to the GEO shift.

The research cycle is long and AI-mediated

International travel decisions involve weeks or months of research. Travelers are not making impulse purchases. They are asking broad, open-ended questions ("best islands for snorkeling," "safest destinations in South America," "where to go in September") that are exactly the type of queries AI systems are designed to answer. If your destination is not in the AI-generated consideration set, it never enters the funnel.

Destination selection is inherently comparative

Unlike product searches where a consumer often knows what they want, destination selection is a comparison exercise. Travelers weigh multiple options against each other. AI models excel at comparative queries, and the destinations they include in their responses shape the competitive set. Being excluded from that comparison is the equivalent of not existing in the traveler's mental map.

Authority signals are concentrated

AI models lean heavily on authoritative, well-structured sources: government tourism sites, established travel publishers, Wikipedia, and recognized industry organizations. DMOs that have invested in strong entity definitions, structured data, and authoritative content partnerships are disproportionately rewarded. Those that have relied primarily on paid media and thin blog content are disproportionately penalized.

What GEO Actually Requires: A Framework for Destinations

GEO is not a single tactic. It is a strategic orientation that touches content, technical infrastructure, partnerships, and measurement. Here is how we think about it at Trove.

1. Entity definition and knowledge graph presence

AI models understand the world through entities: people, places, organizations, and the relationships between them. For a destination, this means ensuring that your destination, its regions, its key attractions, and its signature experiences are clearly defined entities that AI systems can identify and relate to one another.

Practically, this involves maintaining accurate and comprehensive Wikipedia and Wikidata entries, ensuring your Google Knowledge Panel is complete and current, implementing structured data (schema.org) across your website for places, events, attractions, and travel actions, and building consistent entity references across authoritative third-party sources.

2. Authoritative, citable content

AI models cite sources that provide clear, specific, well-structured answers to the questions travelers are asking. This is not about keyword volume. It is about creating content that an AI system would confidently reference.

For destinations, this means publishing definitive guides that answer common traveler questions directly and specifically, not vague promotional copy but concrete information about what to do, when to visit, how to get there, and what it costs. Content should be structured with clear headers, factual claims, and specificity that AI systems can extract and cite.

3. Source diversity and third-party validation

AI models do not rely on a single source. They triangulate across multiple authoritative references. Destinations that appear only on their own website have a narrow citation footprint. Destinations that are referenced by travel publishers, news outlets, industry organizations, academic research, and user-generated content platforms have a broad one.

This makes PR, media relations, and content partnerships a GEO lever, not just a brand awareness play. Every credible third-party mention of your destination strengthens its position in the knowledge graph.

4. Technical infrastructure for AI crawling

AI systems crawl and index the web differently than traditional search engines. Destinations need to ensure their content is accessible to AI crawlers, that structured data is properly implemented, and that their sites are not inadvertently blocking AI indexing through robots.txt configurations or JavaScript-rendering dependencies that prevent content extraction.

This is an area where many DMO websites, particularly those built on legacy CMS platforms with heavy JavaScript frameworks, are quietly failing. If an AI crawler cannot access and parse your content, your destination does not exist in its training data.

5. Measurement and monitoring

One of the biggest challenges in GEO is measurement. Unlike traditional SEO, where you can track rankings and organic traffic, AI citation is harder to quantify. But it is not impossible.

Tools like Perplexity and AI Overview monitoring platforms allow destinations to track when and how they are cited in AI-generated responses. Referral traffic from AI platforms is visible in analytics. And competitive audits, asking AI systems the same questions your target travelers are asking and documenting which destinations appear in the responses, provide a clear picture of your current GEO position relative to competitors.

We recommend destinations establish a GEO baseline by auditing their visibility across the major AI platforms for their top 20 to 30 target queries, then track changes over time as they implement optimization strategies.

What This Means for Your Media Mix

GEO does not replace paid media, SEO, or social. It adds a layer. The destinations that will perform best over the next three to five years are those that treat GEO as a foundational strategy that strengthens every other channel.

Strong entity definition improves your paid search quality scores. Authoritative content boosts organic rankings and provides better landing pages for ad traffic. Third-party citations build brand credibility that increases conversion rates across all channels. And a well-structured digital presence ensures that when AI systems recommend your destination, the traveler's subsequent research experience, whether through search, social, or direct site visits, reinforces the recommendation.

The risk of ignoring GEO is not just reduced visibility in AI platforms. It is a compounding loss across the entire marketing funnel as AI-mediated discovery becomes a larger share of the traveler journey.

Getting Started: Where Most Destinations Should Focus First

If your organization has not yet developed a GEO strategy, the good news is that the foundational work is straightforward to begin.

• Audit your current AI visibility. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Copilot the questions your target travelers are asking. Document where your destination appears and where it does not.
• Review your entity presence. Check your Wikipedia entry, Google Knowledge Panel, and Wikidata records for accuracy and completeness.
• Assess your structured data. Run your website through schema validation tools and identify gaps in your structured data implementation.
• Evaluate your content for citability. Review your top pages through the lens of an AI model: does your content provide clear, specific, authoritative answers to traveler questions, or is it vague promotional language?
• Map your third-party citation footprint. Identify where your destination is mentioned across travel publishers, news outlets, and review platforms, and where critical gaps exist.

These five steps will give you a clear picture of your current GEO position and a roadmap for improvement.

GEO is redefining how travelers discover destinations, and the window to establish your competitive position is now. At Trove Tourism Development Advisors, we help DMOs, tourism boards, and hospitality brands build GEO strategies that integrate with their broader digital marketing programs to drive measurable results.

If you are thinking about how generative AI is changing the way travelers find and choose your destination, we would love to talk. Reach out to our team to start a conversation about GEO for your destination.

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