Google Clicks Are Falling. For a Travel Agency, the Citation Is the Whole Point

Fewer people are clicking through from Google, and the drop is measured, not imagined. When Google shows an AI summary, users click a traditional result in 8% of visits instead of 15%, and the summary keeps the rest. For a travel agency, the response is not another acronym. It is making sure the answer names you, and being ready for the people who arrive after reading it.

I have spent 31 years in travel, from my first agency job in the 1990s to one of India's largest online travel companies, and now building NAMA. In that first job I booked a family on the Delhi-Agra circuit. Taj entry used to be free on Fridays, and that week they made Friday the closed day. There was no internet, no way to know, and the client simply lost the Taj. I still think about that family. Today a traveller asks an AI whether the Taj is closed on Friday and gets one answer in seconds. Somebody's knowledge is inside that answer. The question for every agency is whose.

A Halloween post by Valon Badivuku, a web developer, made the rounds this week: a costume box labelled AEO/GEO, with "Organic traffic down 76%. AI visibility up 376%." printed on the front. His numbers are a joke costume, not research. The measured numbers are less funny, and they are worth a travel agency's attention.

Are Google clicks really falling?

Yes, and the research agrees across methods. Pew Research Center analysed the browsing of 900 US adults this year. When a search page carried an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% on pages without one. They clicked a source link inside the summary itself in only 1% of visits, and they were more likely to end the session right there: 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% without.

Ahrefs looked at it from the ranking side across 300,000 keywords: when an AI Overview appears, the page ranked first loses about a third of its clicks. Bain and Company adds the widest frame: about 80% of consumers already rely on AI-written results for at least 40% of their searches, and roughly 60% of searches now end without a click to any website.

One detail from Pew matters for travel in particular. Searches phrased as questions produce AI summaries 60% of the time. Travel planning is nothing but questions: best time to visit, visa rules, which side of the island, is Friday closed.

Do you need to learn AEO, GEO and the rest?

No, and that is the real joke in Badivuku's costume. The industry has answered a confusing shift with a pile of acronyms: answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, and more arriving weekly. Under all of them sits one sentence: when someone asks an AI a question in your line of work, does the answer mention you?

Ranking meant being one of ten blue links. Being cited means being one of the three sources the machine names when it speaks. Pew found that 88% of AI summaries cite three or more sources. Somebody fills those three slots for "best time for Kerala backwaters" and "Schengen visa from India in two weeks". It can be an agency that actually knows.

Are travellers actually asking AI to plan trips?

They are. Phocuswright's research this year found more than half of US travelers have tried generative AI, one in three already use it for travel, and 78% of them found the AI results helpful for planning and while in destination. Between a quarter and a third of travelers across countries say they are interested in booking inside an AI platform or letting an AI assistant book for them.

The traveller's first question is moving from a search box to an answer box. The agency that used to win the click now has to win the sentence.

Is a citation worth anything when nobody clicks?

More than a ranking, on the pages where it counts. Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 informational queries from June 2024 to September 2025. On queries with an AI Overview, organic click-through fell 61% over the period. But brands cited inside the overview earned 35% more organic clicks than brands that were not cited on the same queries. Their own caveat deserves repeating: citation and brand authority move together, so this is direction, not proof of cause.

And there is a second, quieter effect. As AI absorbs the casual question, the people who still click, call or message are the ones who have already compared options and decided to talk to a human. Fewer knocks on the door, but the ones who knock want to buy. That changes what the first five minutes after an enquiry are worth.

What can a travel agency do to get cited?

Five things, all within an agency's own control.

1. Answer real questions in public, with the question as the heading and the answer in the first lines. This very post is built that way, and the FAQ block at the end ships in a format machines can read. AI answers favour exactly this shape.
2. Publish what only you know. The machine can summarise a thousand generic listicles without naming any of them. For specifics it must cite someone: market-specific rates, blackout patterns around a city's conference season, what actually changed in a visa rule and when you last verified it. I once watched API inventory carry no market-specific rates, so a Japanese client working in Gurgaon was booked at Indian-market rates, and convincing the hotelier took enormous effort. Singapore hoteliers reprice several times a day around year-round conferences. Knowledge like this is citable precisely because it cannot be invented.
3. Mark it up for machines. Structured data, FAQ blocks, dates on everything. A page that says "last verified on" with a real date beats a page that says nothing.
4. Be findable where the machine already looks. Pew found AI summaries cite Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit most often: the machine pulls from where people talk. A current Google Business Profile, answered reviews and the same agency name everywhere are part of citation hygiene, not marketing extras.
5. Answer fast when the enquiry lands. Fewer enquiries, higher intent, and the one that lands deserves a quote in minutes, not tomorrow morning.

What does this change for an Indian agency?

For an Indian agency, the question often arrives on WhatsApp before it ever reaches Google, and the same two rules hold. Be the source that answers questions in public, and be fast when the enquiry lands in private.

At NAMA we run this blog on the same structure described above, because being cited is now as important as being ranked. And for the second rule, the demand that survives AI answers is the highest-intent demand an agency has ever received. That is why we build software that runs a travel company end to end, from enquiry to invoice, so a quote that took hours goes out in 15 minutes, drafted from the agency's own rates and approved from the owner's phone. The agencies that get cited will get the questions. The agencies that answer in minutes will get the bookings.

Source and credit: this post responds to Valon Badivuku's LinkedIn post (the AEO/GEO Halloween costume). Research cited: Pew Research Center, "Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears" (pewresearch.org, July 2025); Ahrefs, "AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%" (ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks); Bain & Company press release on consumer reliance on AI search (bain.com, February 2025); Phocuswright, "From hype to habit: 78% of travelers say GenAI improves trip planning" (phocuswright.com, July 2025); Seer Interactive, "AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update" (seerinteractive.com).