Expedia built a team to earn the AI recommendation it cannot buy
Ten months after Expedia named answer engine optimization a priority, its CEO calls it the company's fastest-growing channel — and still a small one
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference on September 9, Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin called answer engine optimization the company's fastest-growing channel. Four weeks earlier, on the Q2 earnings call, she had called it "one of our fastest-growing channels." Ten months before that, on the Q3 2025 call, it was a priority mentioned in passing alongside the OpenAI partnership. Same channel, three descriptions, each one bigger than the last.
What they put behind it. The work is getting named inside the answer an assistant gives, instead of ranked on a page of ten links. Gorin described it on the August call: "increased testing velocity, both technical and content," and AI used "across the board in order to improve our performance in that channel." The company, she said, is "early in organizing ourselves around it."
The goal is that Expedia's brands show up "either completely organically" or through "connectors or micro apps, for example, in Claude and ChatGPT." Around that sit the other experiments she listed in September — agentic browsers, microapps, "and more recently with paid ads in ChatGPT."
She also said text alone does not sell travel well. Her words at the conference: "just a chat interface purely with text is not always the best way to shop for travel." Adding pictures and several properties to choose from raised engagement.
The old channel is going the other way. On the same August call: "Organic search traffic is stable to slightly up. SEO has remained a bit soft, but it's stabilized over the last few quarters." Soft and stabilized is what Expedia says about the thing hotels have spent fifteen years learning.
The catch. Gorin deflates it herself, in the same breath as the boast: "AEO is still a small channel." Expedia has published no number for it. No traffic share, no bookings, no spend. Two-thirds of consumer bookings come direct, and she places the AI opportunity in the third that does not. This is also one company describing its own channel on its own calls. Nobody outside Expedia has measured any of it.
What it means for hotels. Keep the two things apart, because Expedia does. The sponsored line under the answer is for sale, and Expedia is buying it. The recommendation inside the answer is not. That one has to be earned, which is what the testing and the content work and the apps inside Claude and ChatGPT are for.
That is the part worth sitting with. The comfort in "you can earn it" was always that earning is free. It is free for Expedia too. The AEO vendor emailing your inbox this week is selling you entry to a race. Expedia entered it ten months ago, and spent $2.12 billion on marketing in the second quarter.
What a hotel still has is the thing Expedia cannot assemble: one property, in one place, with facts that agree with each other everywhere they are written down. And guests who describe it in their own words. Gorin is optimizing a catalogue. You are the entry in it.
Ten months ago this was a line on an earnings call. Last week it was the fastest-growing channel Expedia has.
Read also: Your AI recommendation is not for sale. But a resort like yours can earn it. · Marriott says it already wins the AI answer. It's buying ads there anyway.
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