How to Get Found and Booked as a Tour & Activity Operator in an AI World

Letter from the CEO

At the end of 2025, I pulled our profitable 6-figure SEO package off the shelf because the 'old' way of doing SEO no longer works.

Not because customers stopped buying it.

Not because it lost money.

But because traditional SEO can no longer deliver the outsized ROI that it once did.

For years, Gondola offered our Foundational SEO Package with a 100% money-back guarantee. If it didn't generate more bookings across 12 months, we would give you your money back.

That was not a clever marketing trick. We knew with 99% certainty that it would generate more bookings for you.

And it consistently did its job. We never had to issue a refund for that service.

Unfortunately, over the last 2 years, the relationship between ranking, traffic, and bookings broke.

You would still rank. Sometimes you would rank even better than before, but a #1 ranking lost its associated traffic and bookings.

Concerned customers started calling us.

"Why is my traffic down?"

"Why is my website not performing like it did before?"

"Why are bookings down if I still show up #1 on Google?"

I kept hearing versions of that conversation, and I did not have a good answer for them.

That was a problem.

I created Gondola for the sole purpose of getting you more direct bookings. If I could no longer deliver on that promise, we weren't doing a good job as a company.

So we stopped what we were doing and invested over 18 months into a complete product overhaul.

That's why this research exists... and why I've put on 20 pounds. 🙈

Back when I ran my own sailing charter business, I would have climbed the tallest palm tree on the island for research like this... anything to help me get found, compete, and grow online.

Today, Gondola works with hundreds of tour and activity operators across many markets.

We host your websites, see how customers reach you, and have access to first party data that give us unique insight into the market that literally no one else has.

I would have climbed the tallest palm tree on the island if I could have gotten access to this kind of research when I was operating.

We tracked 530 prompts about 34 real businesses across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. From December 1, 2025 through June 9, 2026, Peec recorded 406,373 AI responses. The frozen citation source contains 3,388,833 citations across those 530 prompt IDs. We analyzed the pages AI cited, the businesses it mentioned, the Google clicks operators gained and lost, the outside websites that discussed them, and what happened when their own websites changed.

This is not a claim that SEO is dead (although that would be some good click-bait material).

Our own data shows that ranking high still helps in its own ways.

It is also not an argument that websites no longer matter.

It turns out that websites are actually becoming even more important, but in a different way.

This is an attempt to answer a more useful question:

How does an independent tour or activity operator get found and booked in today's rapidly changing AI environment?

This report includes many of our learnings from over 6 months of dedicated research and 5 years of building websites for hundreds of tour and activity operators.

We are publishing it because you deserve to see what we're seeing. Because our customers need us to adapt. And because Gondola needs to build around the way people discover and book now, not the way they did 5 years ago.

I have opinions about what the evidence means. I have tried to label those opinions honestly and show the underlying data that supports them.

You should challenge both.

Vitaliy Levit
Founder & CEO, Gondola

If you remember only 5 things, here's what you need to know

This is a dense research report. You can be sure that we've spent months analyzing and deliberating over how to best present these findings in an actionable way. If you don't feel like reading through the rest, here are the core concepts that you should take with you from this report...

1. The clicks disappearing fastest are the ones that used to introduce you to new customers. Search visits per site in the uninterrupted operator cohort fell roughly 41% in 2 years, while local activity searches fell much harder than searches for a business by name.

2. AI can do the research without sending a visit. A customer can ask 1 detailed question while AI searches, reads, and compares many sources. Direct AI referrals remain tiny, so ordinary analytics misses most of that research.

3. Your business has to be known beyond your own website. Google rankings still help, but independent mentions, Maps, local guides, platforms, customer discussions, and the wider web all contribute to whether AI includes you among the options.

4. Your website still matters when someone is choosing. Operator pages rise sharply in the citation mix when a question moves from general ideas to choosing a provider. Product, category, and booking pages give AI and customers the details they need to understand the experience and act.

5. More generic content is not the answer. Publishing volume does not track with higher AI visibility. The scarce information is what only the operator knows: current facts, real customer questions, first hand observations, and the specific details behind the experience.

The rest of the report shows the evidence, the limits, and what these 5 changes mean when you put them together.

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