Businesses like Kayak and Tripadvisor are prepping for a new era in search, as AI begins to upend the way people find information online.
By Richard Nieva, Forbes Staff
When Google launched AI-generated search results in May, the announcement came with certain chaos: Google’s AI models instructed people to make pizza from glue, eat one rock per day and drink plenty of urine to pass a kidney stone.
But for the legions of businesses that rely on Google for traffic, the change was jarring for another reason. Some companies, like the travel booking site Kayak, said the new product, called AI Overviews, can discourage people from visiting their websites because they get all the answers they need right on Google’s homepage.
“They don’t go to Kayak anymore to check flight status, for example,” Steve Hafner, CEO and cofounder of Kayak, told Forbes. “They can get that done right on the AI summary.”
It’s just one way the product change is starting to hurt some companies that rely on Google search for traffic. Hafner said the AI-generated results have had a “small adverse impact on our business,” though he declined to share exact metrics. Kayak has reacted by bidding more on the first few sponsored links that appear beneath AI Overviews. “There’s fewer click-outs going across the ecosystem,” Hafner said. “So it’s more important than ever to fight for the clicks that are still going on.”
Google’s iconic homepage isn’t just the world’s online answer hub. As the most prized real estate on the internet, it’s a bedrock for millions of businesses, which find customers when people type in travel destinations, plumbing questions or food cravings. AI search results could collapse that model by answering more people’s questions without them needing to click away from Google. Now, businesses that rely on those clicks are scrambling to find new ways to lure users by adjusting their marketing strategies and even allying with AI upstarts hoping to dethrone the search giant.
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Companies in the travel sector in particular are already dependent on the whims of Google search, and AI summaries have prompted them to re-evaluate how they’re reaching people. For Tripadvisor, the travel reviews site, it prompted more internal testing of its methods for SEO, or search engine optimization, like observing how content is displayed differently across the world — something brands that rely on Google do regularly to analyze how the latest changes to its search algorithm impact their visibility.
Matt Dacey, Tripadvisor’s vice president of global marketing, told Forbes the company predicts more people will start to use AI search over the next six to 18 months, as Google deploys AI Overviews for more types of queries. “Once that starts to really meaningfully shift, then I think the actual search results will start to shift in a bigger way,” he said. “And so that is very carefully what we’re watching right now.”
At the moment, it’s more of a harbinger of a changing online economy than any direct revenue impact, at least according to publicly reported figures. Kayak’s parent, Booking Holdings, which also owns Booking.com, OpenTable and Priceline, saw a 9% revenue uptick in the third quarter year-over-year to $7.9 billion — before and after the launch of AI Overviews. The company doesn’t break out revenues specific to Kayak. In the same time period, Yelp also saw a 4% bump to more than $360 million, while Tripadvisor saw a small dip of less than a percentage point to around $532 million.
SEO experts told Forbes they haven’t seen a major change to SEO — yet. That might be because the shift to AI Overviews is the natural evolution of changes Google has been making over the last decade, moving away from the “10 blue links” it used to surface in response to a query. Even before debuting AI summaries, you might see tables, videos and maps before ever getting to organic search results from third parties. More than a decade ago, the company debuted “featured snippets,” which take passages from websites and present them as definitive answers to questions like how to clean a cast iron skillet (a small amount of soap is fine, Google says) or where the martini was invented (ostensibly San Francisco, but debated). Companies were already fighting for slowly diminishing real estate in search results. Though, it should be noted, Google’s AI summaries do provide reference links to other sites.
Like Kayak, Yelp is also concerned that Google will hoard eyeballs on its homepage instead of sending people to the open web. “Over time, there’s a good chance that this will lead to less traffic to third party sites,” David Segal, Yelp’s vice president of public policy, told Forbes.
The problem, Segal argues, will ultimately hurt Google in the long term: As the search engine takes content from third parties and regurgitates it in the form of AI results, those companies could become less incentivized to create new content. Then, the quality of information on the internet as a whole starts to degrade, and Google has less helpful content to serve back to users, Segal said, which could eventually chip away at Google’s formidable ad business.
The AI push in search evokes old antitrust fears, Yelp General Counsel Aaron Schur added. “If it’s not reigned in, we really run the risk of Google enhancing its monopoly using the same playbook it’s used in the past,” he said.
Google has long been in the cross-hairs for how it displays search results. When the Department of Justice was preparing its successful case against Google, it originally included claims about “self preferencing,” or Google’s alleged practice of ranking its own products or services above those of rivals, like Yelp and Tripadvisor. The self-preferencing claims were eventually nixed from the federal case, but the European Union’s top court last year ruled against the company for similar claims. Since 2021, both the House and Senate have also cited Google’s alleged self-preferencing when introducing bipartisan legislation aimed at reigning in tech giants.
In August, Yelp sued Google for alleged self-preferencing, emboldened by the DOJ’s win over Google for other business tactics, like its lucrative search distribution deals with Apple and other vendors. At the time, Google called Yelp’s suit “meritless.”
Google’s AI Overviews are a clear response to the increasing threat from ChatGPT, which beat Google to market, said Mike Salvaggio, CEO of SEO Brand, a digital consultancy. The OpenAI service, which doesn’t include links to citations, is quickly becoming a major alternative to traditional search. Both Tripadvisor and Yelp have also announced deals to license their data to another (albeit very small) competitor, the Nvidia and Jeff Bezos-backed AI search engine Perplexity. Yelp emphasized that its data won’t be used to train Perplexity’s algorithms, and that search results would provide links back to Yelp. Neither company disclosed terms of their deals, and neither has a similar licensing deal with Google. (In June, Forbes sent Perplexity a cease and desist after accusing the startup of using its reporting without permission.)
Meanwhile, Kayak and other brands have also expanded their use of other customer acquisition methods, including social and influencer marketing; one piece of Kayak sponsored content from last January currently has almost 44 million views on TikTok. And since Google’s launch of AI Overviews, Kayak has sponsored several more posts, including one video that got 18 million views, and a handful of others that got more than a million views each.
The idea is to find younger users as they are changing the way they discover things online. “If you’re under 25, you’re just forming lifelong behaviors now,” Kayak CEO Hafner said. “If you form the behavior of, ‘I’m going to search on TikTok or Instagram and look at influencers,’ or ‘I’m going to use ChatGPT as my default search engine,’ those are people that we can compete for.”
Of course, you can’t book flights on TikTok or ChatGPT — for now. But businesses still fear that Google referral traffic, a revenue stream that has been critical to companies for decades, is on the decline, said Nadja Sumter, co-founder of Pepper, a Los Angeles-based creative agency that works with Kayak to create social campaigns. “It’s kind of like, we put our eggs in this basket,” she said. “Now the basket doesn’t exist.”
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