New BrightEdge research finds that Expedia, Royal Caribbean, and American Airlines each top their travel category whether the traveler asks Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT. Hotels break the pattern: the top brand depends on which engine the traveler asks. Search Engine Journal reported the findings on Oct. 31, and the split matters because winning visibility on one generative surface does not carry over to the other.
BrightEdge reports share of voice, meaning how often a brand appears across a panel of tracked AI answers. It is not a rank position, because generative answers do not present ten ordered results. Every figure below measures frequency of appearance in that panel, and the scope is travel categories only.
Hotels show the widest engine gap. Hilton leads AI Overviews at 28.3 percent, while Marriott leads ChatGPT at 29.4 percent. A hotel marketer who tracks only one engine would crown the wrong winner for the other.
Airlines and cruise lines lean toward consistency. American Airlines holds 26.6 percent in AI Overviews and 25.3 percent in ChatGPT. Its margin over United is 6.1 points in AI Overviews and 9.1 points in ChatGPT, so United trails further behind in the chatbot. Royal Caribbean leads cruise lines on both engines, with figures of 24.8 percent and 28.8 percent across the two.
Booking platforms show a different kind of split. Expedia’s visibility is 2.2 times Kayak’s in AI Overviews (31.3 percent against 14.4 percent). In ChatGPT the multiple falls to 1.4. For Kayak, ChatGPT is the closer contest, and that is where a challenger would have the better odds of gaining ground.
Intent shapes which brands appear. In AI Overviews, a booking platform is named in 38 percent of booking-intent prompts but only 12 percent of inspiration prompts. Price language pulls platforms in harder: when an answer involves price words such as “cheap,” “deal,” “budget,” or “last-minute,” platforms appear in 78 percent of those AI Overviews answers, while the rate for other answers is 17 percent. Expedia alone appears in 44 percent of the budget-related answers. BrightEdge describes this as correlation only; the words themselves do not cause a brand to appear.
Booking-intent prompts are a small slice. Only 9 percent of tracked AI Overviews prompts fall into that group, so most of the panel is inspiration and comparison. YouTube, Reddit, and AAA surface more often in inspiration answers, while hotels and cruise lines surface more often in comparison questions. BrightEdge excluded YouTube and Reddit from the category rankings, which means the brand leaders were scored without those platforms in the field.
The research leaves open why large brands appear less often on inspiration queries. Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal offers one reading: those queries reward human experience, and big brands do not build content for them. That is a hypothesis, not a finding. The coverage also does not state the size of the prompt panel, so treat the percentages as directional until BrightEdge’s full report is checked.
The practical split is clear enough to act on. Head terms and price-led queries belong to established booking platforms, and a small site gains little by chasing them. First-hand trip reports, itineraries, and opinionated comparisons target the prompts where platforms and brands are less dominant.
Travel teams should report visibility by engine and by intent type before the next planning cycle, since a single blended number hides the Hilton and Marriott reversal. Smaller publishers should move effort from budget keywords toward experience-led inspiration content, and measure whether citations in AI Overviews follow.
Search Engine Journal, reporting BrightEdge research on travel brand visibility in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, published October 31, 2026.
