Generative Search Is Quietly Changing How Travelers Find Advisors
Travel Leaders Network says early data shows advisor leads increasingly coming from AI-driven search behavior, not traditional keywords.
Photo: Aerps.com / Unsplash
For one of North America’s largest travel advisor networks, the AI shift isn’t a future-state talking point—it’s already visible in the data.
Travel Leaders Network, which supports roughly 6,000 agencies and more than 100,000 travel advisors through its technology, marketing, and distribution platforms, says consumer discovery is moving rapidly away from traditional keyword search and toward generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. And that change is no longer theoretical: executives say the network is now seeing measurable lead flow coming from AI-driven search behavior that barely registered a year ago.
In a recent media briefing, TLN leaders described a market where travelers are increasingly skipping short, transactional searches in favor of longer, more descriptive prompts—asking not just for a “travel agent,” but for someone who can plan a specific kind of trip, in a specific place, with a specific style of experience. “The reality is that the consumer behavior is changing and is more centered around generative AI-type searches in ChatGPT or in Google’s Gemini,” Cory Voss, TLN’s chief information officer, explained, pointing to a shift that’s beginning to reshape how advisors get found in the first place.
That change matters because TLN’s lead-generation ecosystem sits directly in the path of that discovery. The network’s advisor-search and matching platform is built on thousands of advisor-generated profiles, reviews, and destination expertise, which is exactly the kind of structured, credibility-rich content that generative systems now surface when travelers move beyond basic search terms.
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The company reports that the share of leads from generative AI-driven discovery is already rising. Voss pointed to a growing mix of sources that now includes “AI-generated areas as opposed to Google long tail search,” adding that the shift is “only going in one direction.” Consumer search behavior has been evolving for some time—and will continue to do so, Voss added, as travelers move toward more conversational, AI-mediated ways of finding advisors.
TLN’s approach, however, is not to chase every new model headline, but to make sure its network is legible to the systems that increasingly mediate consumer discovery. Voss explained that the company has spent significant time “modifying what we have already in place to ensure that these generative engines can successfully get the information that they need out of TravelLeaders.com,” including adjustments to the site’s structure, hierarchy, and content.
The company is also aware that generative search optimization comes with tradeoffs. TLN has been “calculated” about which automated crawlers it allows to index the site, noting that “every single little bot” is not enabled because of the bandwidth load that continuous crawling can create. “The bandwidth that gets sucked up when a bot is continually crawling your website [can] have a negative impact,” said Voss, describing the need to balance AI discoverability against site performance and the health of the broader digital ecosystem.
The proof point Travel Leaders keeps coming back to is lead source reporting. The company tracks where leads come from, and notes that AI-based sources have moved quickly from negligible to meaningful. “[It was] zero, this time last year,” Voss said, followed by a steady rise. “Every month, that number is more,” adding that it’s a new normal TLN is planning around, especially as Google makes Gemini more visible in the search experience.
For advisors, TLN’s message is that the path to winning in an AI-mediated marketplace may look surprisingly familiar: build strong, specific, human content—and keep it current. “We’ve got the content,” Voss explained, referencing the scale of the network and the unique material inside advisor profiles. The bigger question is how to ensure the content remains authoritative and personal enough to stand out in systems that can now summarize the internet in seconds.
That’s why TLN says it’s also pushing advisors to think about content quality as a business imperative, not a branding exercise. Writing a compelling advisor profile remains one of the hardest tasks for many sellers, and TLN is exploring tools that help advisors get started without losing their individuality. The organization is planning a GEO (general engine optimization) workshop for its Edge conference, but suggested the guidance won’t be about gaming prompts; it will instead be about making the case for expertise with enough specificity that both humans and machines can recognize it.
The implication is straightforward for luxury sellers: generative AI is doing more than changing how travelers plan their itineraries, but it’s also changing how they choose who gets the booking. And TLN is betting that the advisors who invest in credibility-rich profiles, fast response, and clear proof of expertise will be the ones surfaced when a traveler stops typing “travel agent” and starts asking, in full sentences, for exactly what they want.
