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When Search Splits in Two: How DMOs Stay Relevant — and Trusted — in the Age of AI

Found and trusted: the new job description for destinations in the age of AI.

Header DMO people who are AI Ready

At the Tourism 2026 Trends Conference — themed ‘Room for Imagination’ — Signe Jungersted, CEO and Founding Partner of Group NAO, opened proceedings with a deliberately provocative talk entitled ‘The End of the DMO — as We Know It?’. The DMO was built for a different era of tourism — one of brochures, blue links and campaign reach. Today, space is scarce, expectations are rising and new technology is completely changing the playing field. The familiar certainties are disappearing.

This is most evident in the way people search. According to DTTT founder Nick Hall, search is splitting into two distinct categories. On the one hand, there is the traditional results page. On the other, there are AI Overviews and chat assistants such as ‘Ask Maps’, which provide travellers with immediate answers – often integrated directly into widely used tools such as Google Maps. By mid-2025, Google’s AI Overviews had reached around 1.5 billion users per month across more than 200 countries. Pew Research observed the click-through rate roughly halving — from around 15% to 8% — as soon as an AI summary appeared. Over a third of millennials and Gen Z now cite AI as their most important tool for planning a trip, on a par with the destination website itself.

The shift from ranking to citation is not a hunch — the data is direct:

  • 93% of searches in Google’s AI Mode end without a click (Pew Research, 2025).
  • Overlap between top-10 organic rankings and AI citations collapsed from ~75% to 17–38% in under a year (multiple SEO studies, early 2026).
  • 1 billion+ monthly users are already on Google’s AI Mode (Google I/O, May 2026).
  • 42% of U.S. leisure travellers now use AI to plan trips — +14 points year-on-year; millennials and families are at 59% (MMGY, Portrait of American Travelers).
  • Brands cited in AI Overviews earn ~35% more organic clicks than non-cited competitors in the same category (Seer Interactive).
  • The warning signs are already at scale: TripAdvisor reported −33% SEO-driven visits; HubSpot lost 70–80% of organic traffic.
  • Adoption is settled, execution is not: 88% of organisations use AI in at least one function, but only ~6% capture meaningful enterprise value (McKinsey, State of AI 2025).

The takeaway: visibility is no longer earned by ranking — it’s earned by being cited. And you only get cited if your content is both worth quoting and readable by a machine.

For directors, strategists and innovators at DMOs, this presents two challenges at once: remaining visible and remaining trustworthy. These are not the same problem, and solving one without the other is not enough.

Challenges for DMOs in the AI era

Challenge one: visibility you can’t see

The old formula for visibility rewarded a good story on a highly ranked page. The new one rewards content that a machine can read. In his keynote speech, ‘Evaluating the AI Visibility Question’, Nick Hall cuts through the jargon — GEO, AEO, AI Overviews, schema — to get to one strategic point: visibility on a results page is giving way to relevance within an AI response. What determines who gets cited is depth, speed and social authority — and the destinations preparing now will shape the visibility landscape for the coming decade.

The problem is that the destinations AI highlights are rarely the ones with the best story. As Mark Merrywest from Selfe pointed out at X. Design Week, they are the destinations whose content is machine-readable. Missing schema, poor structure and slow-loading pages silently determine where a destination does or does not appear. A large part of that visibility gap is technical — and therefore solvable.

One important caveat is worth noting here. As digital place-marketing consultant Brianna Vetrano explains in City Nation Place, an AI assistant doesn’t start with your website at all. It first builds its longlist from large, structured datasets (World Bank, OECD, UN Tourism, flight connections, etc.) and frequently cited rankings, and then uses destination websites to confirm and provide context. The benefit, therefore, lies not in clever copy, but in clear, specific and data-backed content that a machine can find and understand: named sectors and experiences, consistent figures across all pages, and a clean structure with schema and internal links. Or, in her words: clarity trumps creativity.

Challenge two: trust in an age of confident answers

Visibility without reliability is a pitfall. AI travel planners take travellers about 80% of the way — and then make up the rest: out-of-date opening hours, rescheduled events, closed attractions. Brianna Vetrano put this to the test in public: she planned a real trip based on ChatGPT’s recommendations and shared where the assistant helped and where it quietly got it wrong. If an assistant confidently recommends something wrong about your destination, the damage falls on your brand, not on the model.

It is precisely here that the role of the DMO is quietly becoming more important, not less so. The destinations that are doing well are establishing themselves as the authoritative source from which the models draw their data. The Slovenian AI travel guide ‘Alma’, presented by the Slovenian Tourist Board, works precisely because it combines in-depth local knowledge, partner content and real-time data into something more reliable than a generic model alone. The DMO is becoming the integration layer between destination, sector and visitor.

This question of trust is also an ethical one, and the field is beginning to formalise it. DTTT’s open AI frameworks — a Transparency Model, a Content Integrity Model and an AI Ethics Consideration Tool — exist to enable organisations to document the use of AI and manage the risks associated with AI-generated content. Being trustworthy in the AI era means being accurate, transparent and accountable — not just visible.

Challenge three: relevance — value, not just volume

Beneath the surface of visibility and trust lies the deeper question Jungersted posed in her keynote speech: what is the actual purpose of a DMO these days? It is here that her broader work at Group NAO provides the most useful perspective. Her work — from *The End of Tourism as We Know It* and the concept of ‘localhood’ to *Time for DMOcracy* and *Tourism Taxes by Design* — redefines the destination management organisation as the steward of a liveable, democratic visitor economy, measured by value created rather than visitor numbers.

AI does not render the DMO redundant

Taken together, the message is consistent: AI does not render the DMO redundant; it raises the bar for what the DMO must excel at. The organisations that remain relevant own their own data, curate authentic local context and use AI to better serve both residents and visitors — not those that simply publish more content. The national Canadian Tourism Data Collective is the clearest proof: by bringing together over 230 datasets in a single AI environment, 79 affiliated DMOs and 51,000 users gained a shared source of truth — extending even to small, rural destinations that had never had access to this intelligence before.

The first lesson is one that every DMO can put into practice: first build shared infrastructure, focus on your own – unique – data and local context, and then deploy AI based on this data. Event Connectors’ solution for DMOs is designed with this in mind.

Are you, as a DMO, ready for AI?

What AI readiness demands right now. The instinct is to wait for clarity. The frontrunners do the opposite — they choose the one or two moves that set the rest in motion, achieve early successes that build internal confidence, and bring their people along as the picture takes shape. Austria Tourism’s Change Tourism Austria platform demonstrates this pattern on a national scale: shared use cases, hackathons and a community-first approach that enables small businesses to truly adopt AI.

Janette Roush, Chief AI Officer and SVP of Innovation at Brand USA — a LinkedIn Top Voice and expert advisor to Group NAO’s AI Opener for Destinations — makes the same point from the perspective of a national tourism organisation: the benefit of AI stems just as much from streamlining internal processes and building a culture of innovation as it does from any individual tool. Closer to home, Destination Netherlands presents AI as “a new colleague” for destination teams — a useful reminder that AI readiness and AI literacy are just as much about people and culture as they are about technology.

For most DMO’s, the fundamental step is unglamorous but crucial: ensure your destination’s data—your events, venues, routes and stories—is structured, up to date, multilingual and machine-readable. That’s what makes you discoverable by AI, citable as a reliable source, and ready for whatever interface the future may bring.

So the straightforward question is simply this: is your destination AI-ready?

AI readiness for DMOs

AI readiness for a DMO isn’t a standalone tool or a one-off project — it’s structured data, a reliable source of truth, and a team with enough confidence and AI literacy to take action. If you can’t yet answer the question “Is our DMO ready for AI?” with a resounding yes, that’s exactly where you start. Loved by people, understood by machines: in the AI era, a destination needs both.

Would you like to find out more about our solutions for DMOs and CMOs regarding shared data, high discoverability and visibility within and through AI? Please contact us.

Sources:

Event Connectors is a member of the Digital Tourism Think Tank community and builds the data and technology layer that helps destinations become AI-ready — structured, realtime, multilingual event and destination data.

This blog post is the result of research conducted using AI and was drafted using AI. It was then checked and rewritten by a human. 

About the author

Arne Keuning

Arne Keuning is Product Owner and co-owner of Event Connectors — Digital Destination & Event Tech. Since 2017 he has led the development of the Event Connectors platform: a headless CMS and content hub with automatic connectors, a data platform for events, venues and routes, and data-driven solutions such as destination websites, what's-on agendas, interactive maps, venue finders and widgets for destination marketing organisations (DMOs) and city marketing. His focus is making destinations AI-ready — publishing events and venues as structured, multilingual, machine-readable data so they are found and cited by both search engines and AI (GEO), with accessibility (WCAG 2.2) and trusted data at the core. Event Connectors is a member of the Digital Tourism Think Tank (DTTT) community.

Arne Keuning - Event Connectors

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