The monthly SectorWatch series returned to travel this month. In this additional analysis I take data from that report and extend it across chatbots to find the leaders and similarities. I also look at AI Overviews exposure.
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The organic view:
For the SectorWatch study [Charlie Williams], 100 of the most popular flight destinations were combined and curated into a keyword matrix of 4,763 search terms.
- Sector search volume, Google search UK: 2.8m per month
- Top search term: “Flights to Amsterdam”
- Top URL: Turkish airlines – London to Istanbul.
- Flight operators and aggregators compete. Ryanair is a successful example of a flight operator website
- Dedicated route pages dominate
Leading domain: Skyscanner.net
Charlie WIlliams has done a full analysis of the leading website and you can use that analysis to guide your own strategy. Congratulations to the organic search winner, Skyscanner.
The full organic search report is available here but I have taken the opportunity to add something else – chatbot data.
While classic Google search still dominates as a traffic source it has become increasingly important to assess both the impact of AI Overviews and Chatbot search, including Google AI Mode. My aim was to take Charlies search terms, generate related prompts and to look at the brands, domains and URLs so see if there are relationships.
Commerce or Information?
Flights searches can occur anywhere along the customer journey from a Sunday afternoon browse to a repeated check on flight prices and availability shortly before booking but they are rarely done without the idea of booking something like a holiday or business trip. Even so, the starting point for a search may differ for each search provider.
Thankfully, Google provides a list of related questions for most search terms and we can use these in an unbiased way to get a set of Chatbot outputs that can be analysed. I took the curated list of keywords and generated via the SISTRIX List processing tools (one click) a list of the most popular questions.
The most poplar 100 questions from this set were then used to set up a prompt project in SISTRIX for Chatbots.
Chatbot analysis results
Mentions are the marketing currency of the AI chatbot platforms and should be measured to get a picture of the prevailing brand environment. Here are the top brands mentioned in chatbot output.
Well known brands appear in this list but the aggregators are missing. Where’s Skyscanner?
Top URLs for the most popular questions
The top URLs show important sources that are not only providing clicks but are a strong indicator of the type of content that is working in large language models and the live searches that are done to augment and ground AI chatbot output.
The top domains for the most popular questions
There are successful individual URLs across a wide range of domains but if we look at the domain level we see similarities to the organic leaders chart. While Google likes to link itself the most, Skyscanner win again.
Common URLs and domains
Where the organic search intent has a similar informational aspect it’s interesting to look at the difference between URLs used in SERPS and Chatbot outputs. In a recent study of cat care informational search there was a big overlap of both domains and URLs. Here, where the intent is largely commercial, the results are slightly different.
There’s little overlap on linked URLs but 10 of the 22 domains listed in the top 200 URLs, also appear as linked domains in the chatbot output and serve as examples of domains that serve both organic and chatbot outputs:
- www.easyjet.com
- www.ryanair.com
- www.wizzair.com
- www.britishairways.com
- www.google.com
- www.bournemouthairport.com
- www.skyscanner.net
- www.cheapflights.co.uk
- exeter-airport.co.uk
- www.expedia.co.uk
How AI Overviews affect informational domains
AI Overviews have a big impact on CTR but it is clear to see from our data that commercial searches have fewer AI Overviews across them than on average. AI Overviews are a problem for informational websites that monetise through visits.
Across the full keyword set used for the report, 10% have an AI Overview in the SERP. That’s below today’s average of 42.3% across the 1 million keywords used to calculate the Visibility Index and it highlights a highly commercial intent across the searches.
As would be expected, not many of the 704 top domains operate with informative content, but there are a few examples to be found.
- rome2rio.com – 22%
- wegotravel.co.uk – 40%
- budgettraveluk.co.uk – 39%
As an example of the huge impact that AI Overviews can have, take a look at one of the leading projects from our Family Travel SectorWatch report.
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