By H1 2026, SEO is no longer a channel you “invest in” alongside paid media or social.
It is the information system that feeds every discovery surface your brand appears in. That includes search engines, AI assistants, social platforms, travel apps, and voice or visual interfaces. Whether you want to call it SEO, GEO, AEO, E-I-E-I-O, the end goal is the same.
The question is not how much to spend on SEO. The real question is what parts of SEO now act as force multipliers across the rest of the marketing stack.
This is how a travel CMO should think about prioritisation.
Start with data foundations, not content volume
Before allocating budget to new content or AI experimentation, the first priority should be data quality and structure.
Travel brands sit on complex data. Destinations, properties, experiences, availability, pricing, reviews, imagery, policies, seasonality. If this data is fragmented, inconsistent, or poorly structured, no AI system can reliably surface or explain your offering.
Budget priority should go to:
- Cleaning and unifying destination and product data
- Strong internal linking between locations, experiences, and intent states
- Schema and structured data that reflects how users actually search and compare
- Clear canonical versions of key pages that represent truth
This is not glamorous work. It is also the work that determines whether AI systems trust your brand as a source.
If your data layer is weak, every other SEO investment underperforms.
Treat attribution as a strategic problem, not a reporting one
In H1 2026, attribution is not about proving SEO value. It is about understanding influence across journeys that no longer look linear.
A travel customer might:
- Discover a destination in an AI answer
- Refine options via image search or maps
- Compare hotels on a marketplace
- Return via brand search weeks later
- Convert after an email or paid push
Traditional last-click or even position-based models miss this entirely.
SEO budget should be allocated to:
- Blending GA4, Search Console, and platform data into one decision view
- Measuring assisted visibility, not just clicks
- Tracking where your brand appears in AI responses, not only rankings
- Understanding which content shapes consideration, not just conversion
This allows CMOs to protect investment in content that creates demand, even when it does not close the sale directly.
Optimise for multi-modal discovery, not just text queries
Travel is inherently multi-modal. People choose places based on images, maps, videos, reviews, and context. AI systems now consume and return all of these formats together.
SEO budget should shift away from text-only optimisation toward:
- Image assets that genuinely explain place, scale, and experience
- Video that answers practical questions, not just inspiration
- Map-based visibility for destinations and experiences
- Page layouts that support skimming, comparison, and reassurance
This is not about chasing every new surface. It is about ensuring that when AI systems assemble answers, your assets are usable inputs.
If your brand does not show well visually, it will not show at all.
Plan for multi-platform SEO, not just Google
In H1 2026, search behaviour is fragmented by default.
Users ask questions on:
- Traditional search engines
- AI assistants
- Social platforms
- Travel-specific apps and aggregators
- Voice interfaces in cars and homes
A CMO should fund SEO teams to think beyond one platform and toward consistency of meaning.
That means:
- Aligning language and entities across your site, apps, and feeds
- Ensuring destination and product naming is consistent everywhere
- Avoiding platform-specific hacks in favour of durable signals
- Monitoring where your brand is cited or summarised, not just ranked
SEO becomes the discipline that ensures your brand means the same thing everywhere.
Position SEO as the core of your AI retrieval system
The most important mindset shift is this.
SEO is no longer about traffic acquisition. It is about training and supporting the systems that retrieve, summarise, and recommend your brand.
Your website is no longer just a conversion tool. It is:
- A source document for AI answers
- A reference point for trust and authority
- A structured dataset for future experiences you do not yet control
Budget should reflect this by funding:
- Fewer, better pages that clearly represent intent
- Strong editorial standards and factual accuracy
- Clear ownership of content updates and decay
- Collaboration between SEO, data, product, and brand teams
When SEO is treated as information infrastructure, every AI initiative becomes cheaper and more effective.
What to deprioritise in H1 2026
To fund the right work, some things need to move down the list:
- High-volume generic content with no unique insight
- One-off AI content experiments with no integration plan
- Obsessive rank tracking for keywords that no longer drive demand
- Channel silos where SEO, paid, and brand operate independently
These consume budget without strengthening long-term visibility.
Final thought for CMOs
The travel brands that win in 2026 will not be the ones that “do SEO best.”
They will be the ones that:
- Understand how their information is retrieved
- Control how their experiences are explained
- Measure influence, not just clicks
- Use SEO as the connective tissue between humans, machines, and platforms
H1 2026 is the moment to fund SEO like a system, not a tactic.