Dear Robot: How Travel Is (and Isn’t) Talking to AI

Travel brands say they want AI to find them. Their websites often tell AI something else, or nothing at all. That’s the finding of Skift’s review of robots.txt files for 50 major travel sites. These files tell automated programs, or crawlers, whether they’re welcome, and only 10 of the 50 explicitly addressed AI crawlers. The rest lumped them in with every other bot or left them to default settings. The gap matters more as AI becomes a way travelers shop. In July, Adobe reported that AI visits to travel sites surged 119% year over year. But there’s a “major bottleneck,” according to Adobe analyst Vivek Pandya. “Significant portions of U.S. travel and retail sites remain unreadable to machines, restricting their presence across AI search results,” he wrote in a blog post. “When an LLM cannot easily read brand content (such as amenities, pricing, or availability),” Pandya added, “potential revenue is being left on the table.”