How much traffic do LLMs send to travel websites in 2026?

A year ago, I set out to separate hype from reality when it came to LLMs and AI in travel. Were travellers really flocking to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and others to find their next trip, as the headlines would have you believe?

The narrative was that Google was on its way out and travel was about to change overnight. Yet the data told a different story, with less than 0.12% of all website traffic to travel websites came from LLMs. It felt shockingly low then, and it still does now.

Research from a variety of places in 2025 showed that one in three people used AI on a daily basis. Anecdotally, many people I know are what I’d call ‘full-time AI’. They rarely touch Google or traditional search at all (or at least say they don’t). Instead, they rely on their preferred LLM for everything from planning meals to deciding which museum to visit on their summer holiday.

One year on from my original research, I expected the share of traffic from LLMs to have jumped dramatically, but this wasn’t the case.

Travel websites get just 0.37% of their traffic from LLMs in 2026.

Our analysis of 41 UK-based travel websites, using Google Analytics data, shows that traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and others account for only a fraction of overall visits.

That’s not to say the growth in the last 12 months hasn’t been notable. Traffic to travel websites in that time has grown 214% which is a decent increase. But a total of less than 18,000 across 41 websites, with some generating hundreds of thousands of visits a month, isn’t going to set the world alight. 

We still see many poorly configured Google Analytics accounts end up with five times that amount of traffic from undefined sources. Or looking at it another way, ChatGPT, by far and away the biggest referrer of LLM traffic, generated about as much as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo combined in many instances. I can’t remember the last time we had a brief wanting to spend significant SEO budget on those search engines, but there you go. 

With that said, a year ago the picture looked very different, as smaller search engines were driving more traffic than ChatGPT. At a micro level, change is clearly happening, although some of that may be due to the rise of AI Overviews in Google.

ChatGPT is still miles in front

Last year, speaking on stage at ABTA, CLIA and beyond, I talked about how far in front ChatGPT was in terms of driving website traffic compared to the rest of the other LLMs. And in the last 12 months, very little has changed. 

Despite all the hype towards the end of 2025 around the growth of Gemini as a big rival to ChatGPT, and how Anthropic is now worth more than OpenAI, in the end user’s mind, there is only one ‘AI’ tool. 

With a whopping 88.1% of all AI / LLM traffic generated to websites, it’s no wonder that most travel marketers are only talking about ChatGPT when it comes to increasing bookings. 

It gets nearly nine out of ten of ALL LLM visits to travel websites but has only grown slightly in the last 12 months (it was 86.4% last year, so just 2% year on year despite users supposedly doubling in that time). The other LLMs haven’t been able to make a dent in ChatGPT’s market share. 

The only other thing to note in our data is that Perplexity had 8.5% of visits in 2025 but has dropped to 4.4% which is a near 50% decrease. Their visits were shared largely broadly between Copilot and Claude. Whilst the growth in both was large percentage wise, the actual visits were still tiny.

Do LLMs drive better conversion rates for travel companies?

Yes, they do. 

In our study, LLMs converted at a much higher rate overall when compared to traditional channels like organic search (SEO) or PPC. The average conversion rate in our data set showed an overall website ‘key event’ conversion rate of 2.27%. However, LLM traffic converted at 4.15%, an increase in conversion rate of 82%. When LLMs were compared to organic search, the conversation rate more than doubled to 105%.

Again, anecdotally, I’ve had many chats with travel marketing directors in the last 12 months who’ve told me that LLMs convert at a far higher rate than traditional channels and that’s why they are focusing on it more intently. Our data confirms this. 

Nearly all travel companies prioritise quality over volume when it comes to enquiries, particularly in the world of tailor-made travel, so focusing investment here makes sense. It’s worth noting not all travel websites in our data set have conversion tracking in place (not our fault!) so we couldn’t completely correlate traffic with conversions with all our data. 

For some travel websites, LLM key event conversions were much higher than the average, with only six actually having less success compared to organic. 

Do luxury and tailor-made travel convert at higher rates than other sectors? Our data suggests they don’t. These audiences don’t appear to convert any better than the rest of our dataset.

That said, a significant proportion of our clients at Adido operate at the luxury end of the market. That makes it harder to draw clean comparisons with more mainstream travel, such as package holidays.

Summary

One year on from our original study, it’s not surprising to see an increase in traffic to travel websites from LLMs like ChatGPT. There’s no doubt usage has grown significantly.

Going into this year’s research, I expected overall traffic to reach around 0.5% or higher. That felt reasonable given that LLMs rarely link out to websites, and that for nearly a third of our dataset, ChatGPT actually reduced its citations, which would likely have limited clicks further.

So an overall attribution of 0.37% in Google Analytics was slightly underwhelming. Yes, traffic has grown by 214%, but the bigger question is whether it should have grown more.

Some clients are seeing stronger gains in both traffic and conversions, which suggests that as a route to market, this needs to be taken more seriously.

But are LLMs really worth all of the effort compared to other channels? I’m still not 100% convinced. Social traffic is still in double digits generally, while email marketing converts just as well and with 10x-20x the amount of traffic in some cases. Yet, ask any travel marketing manager where they would spend a £10,000 one-time investment in their digital marketing, and I’d expect nearly everyone would want to put it into AI ‘stuff’. 

I will say here again for repetition of my point I’ve been saying on stage for several years now – the biggest concern for any travel marketing person or director isn’t what ChatGPT does, it’s what Google does. AI Overviews have nearly halved traffic to travel websites in the 2025. PPC has become more expensive and more budget is being spent here to make up for the traffic and bookings lost. This will only drive up competition and, in turn, cost per acquisition this year and next. 

Yes, it is worth understanding more about how ChatGPT indexes and surfaces content. Yes, it’s worth setting up reporting to monitor inbound clicks from LLMs and reporting on them in your monthly analysis. But Google generates 65 times more organic traffic to travel websites on average than ChatGPT. Focus on where your customers are spending most of their time and attention and you’ll see more success this year.

About our study

Our research into LLM traffic generation in travel looked at 41 different Google Analytics accounts from 1st January 2026 to 22nd April 2026. Our study last year looked at 31 websites from 1st January 2025 to 1st May 2025 - a very similar timespan and scope. 

In 2026, we saw around 18,601 visits to our websites compared to 5,252,460 overall visits. These websites covered everything from ski holidays, safari trips to Africa, cruise holidays across Europe, youth-based travel to Asia and custom-made luxury travel across to the globe. We believe our diverse travel client base gives a very even spread how travellers are using LLMs to get to websites. 

Conversions were measured as ‘key events’ in Google Analytics which may not accurately reflect the actual booking enquiries or confirmations the business actually saw. Key event set up varies wildly across all clients for a variety of reasons. We did though use a like for like approach when comparing overall website, organic and LLM traffic and key event conversions. 

If you would like to get some more specific LLM research for your own travel business, please drop us a line. 

To find out more about Adido, please click here