Every journey begins with a search. When people start thinking about travel, they rarely go directly to an airline’s website. Instead, they turn to Google, Skyscanner, or increasingly, ChatGPT. The problem for airlines is that 91% of travellers don’t have a preferred brand in mind when they begin researching. (seoClarity)
The battle for direct bookings is increasingly being fought in search. And now the rules are shifting again with Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO): the practice of ensuring your airline appears in AI-generated answers from tools like Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Copilot and ChatGPT.
This article explores what SEO for airlines looks like today: the fundamentals, the common pitfalls, the success stories, and the emerging role of GEO.
SEO for airlines: the fundamentals still matter
The foundations of SEO are well known: Content, technical optimisation, and site performance. But for airlines they need to be applied with particular care.
Content strategy: more than a booking form
A surprising number of airline sites still behave as though the only job of their digital presence is to process bookings. This leaves a huge gap in the earlier stages of the traveller journey: inspiration, research, and comparison.
Airlines that publish destination guides, FAQs, and route-specific content capture traffic long before a traveller is ready to book.
The benefit is twofold: capturing organic visibility and shaping brand perception. If the first time someone encounters your airline is through useful, authoritative content, they’re more likely to choose you when it comes time to book.
Site architecture: every route deserves a page
One of the most common gaps in airline SEO is thin coverage of routes. OTAs dominate “flights from X to Y” searches because they generate programmatic pages for every conceivable city pair. Airlines too often leave this to a dynamic search widget, which search engines can’t crawl.
The lesson is: publish crawlable landing pages for every route you fly. Virgin Australia did this at scale, creating dynamic but indexable pages across its network. The result? An average rank of 1.3 for non-branded queries and a 27% share of voice (PROS). That share of voice can translate into more direct bookings, proving that route pages are a genuine revenue driver.
Technical optimisation: scaling without breaking
Running an airline website means constantly adding and removing routes, changing schedules, and updating seasonal offers. Without good technical SEO, this creates broken links, orphan pages, and crawl inefficiency.
The essentials are straightforward but non-negotiable:
- XML sitemaps that update dynamically to reflect route changes (Bird).
- 301 redirects for discontinued routes to preserve search equity.
- Hreflang tags so travellers land on the right regional site.
- Server-side rendering for content locked behind JavaScript booking engines.
Airlines that neglect this quickly lose search equity. Those that master it can adapt to the natural churn of their networks without confusing Google or their customers.
Structured data: speaking the language of machines
Search engines increasingly rely on structured data to power rich results and AI-driven answers. Schema markup is the bridge.
"Schema markup (also called structured data) is a type of code you add to your website to help search engines understand your content better.
It makes your content eligible to have search engines like Google show extra details in search results. Like star ratings, prices, and whether a product is in stock."
Avianca provides a case in point. They implemented custom schemas across its route pages, the Colombian carrier now dominates visibility in Latin America, achieving 75% SEO visibility across the region (PROS). This visibility ensures Avianca appears whenever a traveller searches for flights in its markets, edging out both OTAs and rivals.
The turbulence: common SEO pitfalls
Carriers stumble on the same challenges:
- OTA dominance: Search for “cheap flights to Barcelona” and you’ll see OTAs or Google Flights above any airline. Airlines that don’t create rich, intent-focused content will always lose these battles
- Seasonality mismanagement: Routes are often seasonal, but websites don’t reflect this.
- Legacy systems: Slow, clunky booking engines don’t just frustrate users, they tank Core Web Vitals scores, and rankings
- Multilingual inconsistencies: Missing hreflang tags or poor localisation cause duplicate content and irrelevant results
Success stories: what airlines can learn
Fly ALS – A regional SEO turnaround in Kenya
Fly ALS faced a critical situation: a slow, underperforming website, poor hosting, and zero visibility against competitors like AirKenya and SafariLink. The airline needed to build long-term organic presence, particularly across domestic routes, without relying on PPC or social ads.
The intervention began with a technical overhaul: migrating to a better host, speed improvements, and implementing caching and CDN. This “digital rescue” was followed by a strategic content reset: optimizing critical keywords like “Flights to Diani” or “Domestic Flights Kenya,” launching helpful blog articles aligned with E‑E‑A‑T principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Along with implementing FAQs, and breadcrumb schema markup.
Within months, the results were tangible: mobile PageSpeed score jumped from 42 to 91; organic monthly traffic surged from 1,200 to 2,050 (+70%); 12 of 15 targeted keywords ranked in the top 10; direct bookings rose by 28%; bounce rate dropped from 68% to 49%; and Fly ALS began appearing in Google’s AI Overviews, a sign of modern search engines recognising the site as authoritative. (SEO Smart)
A regional aviation company boosts visibility through modern SEO tactics
A growing regional carrier with excellent service was underperforming online. Their website lacked SEO focus, content was sparse, and digital traction beyond their hubs was minimal. The aim: to enhance search authority, climb rankings for key routes, and drive direct bookings.
The strategy combined a full digital audit (technical issues, link profile, UX), on-page optimization (route pages, FAQs, meta tags), strategic content creation (travel guides, passenger tips), targeted outreach for quality backlinks, and PR to convert mentions into authoritative citations.
Within six months, organic traffic grew 60.3%, from around 8,666 to 13,893 monthly visitors. Direct bookings rose sharply, site engagement improved, and the airline began converting search visibility into loyalty and sales (LinkBuildingHQ)
GEO: the new frontier of SEO for airlines
From blue links to answers
The most profound change in travel discovery today is the rise of Generative AI. Google’s AI Overviews now appear on 13% of search results. ChatGPT has 400 million weekly users (Backlinko). Analysts predict that AI-driven traffic could overtake traditional search by 2027 (Foundation Inc).
This is no longer speculative. If a traveller asks, “What’s the best airline to fly London to Sydney?”, they may never see a results page. They’ll see a single AI-generated answer. If your airline isn’t in that answer, you’re invisible.
Why GEO matters for airlines
Airlines already face aggregation in traditional search: OTAs, Google Flights, and metasearch eat much of the visibility. GEO accelerates this trend. The competition shifts from ranking first to being cited at all. In an AI-driven world, the “top result” is often the only result.
How airlines can respond
Because GEO is so new, there isn’t a definitive playbook but patterns are emerging:
- Create structured, answerable content. Publish detailed FAQs about baggage, loyalty, upgrades, and seat features. Use schema markup so AI can parse them. These are exactly the kinds of factual snippets AI systems love to cite
- Optimise for E-E-A-T. Demonstrate expertise and trust. Content written by real airline experts (pilots, customer service leads) is more credible, both to users and to AI models (Backlinko).
- Monitor AI outputs. Test how your airline appears in ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, and Google SGE. Treat it as a new form of “rank tracking”
- Build brand mentions beyond links. AI models rely on co-citations and references, not just backlinks. Encourage PR, media coverage, and community mentions of your airline
- Ensure technical accessibility. Fast-loading, mobile-friendly, crawlable content is more likely to be ingested by AI crawlers
- Experiment with conversational content. Concise, fact-rich paragraphs are more likely to be quoted verbatim by AI (Foundation Inc).
In the coming years, AI assistants will play the role OTAs did a decade ago: controlling the conversation. The question is whether airlines will be part of the answer.
The average airline web portals is not broken. It loads, it sells tickets. It technically does what it's supposed to do.
And yet, the experience feels tiring.
You notice it when you try to do something simple. Change a seat. Find your gate. Understand what happens if a flight is delayed. Suddenly you are scanning long pages, decoding airline terminology, clicking back and forth just to stay oriented.
The problem is not with the features, It is effort effort required in getting from A to B.
Airline portals still expect travellers to think like systems. To understand menus, categories, fare families, ancillaries, rules. But travellers arrive with something much simpler. Intent.
They want to get something done and get on with their journey.
This article posits that airline web portals should stop behaving like navigation systems and start acting as intent-aware decision environments. When UX is designed to reduce effort, adapt to context, and quietly support travellers at each stage of the journey, portals become calmer to use, easier to trust, and far more effective for airlines.
The basics still matter more than airlines think
Before talking about AI or personalisation, it is worth being honest about the fundamentals.
You can see that accessibility standards aren’t yet being applied and portals aren’t optimised for mobile, which results in performance drops. Navigation feels heavier than it needs to be. Search often works, but only if you already know what to ask and how the airline expects you to ask it.
These are not exciting topics, but they shape everything that comes after. If a portal is slow, confusing, or inaccessible, no amount of intelligence layered on top will fix the experience.
At Branchspace, we see this repeatedly. Airlines want to move faster, personalise more, experiment. But the UX foundation is not always ready to support that ambition.
Where portals lose traveller trust
The biggest UX issues are rarely dramatic, they are subtle and cumulative:
- A vague error message that offers no next step
- A long paragraph that hides the one thing the traveller needs to know
- Three different words for the same concept depending on where you are in the journey
- A mobile page that technically works but feels endless
In isolation these are small instances, but they compound to create friction for a user. And friction erodes confidence.
Travellers begin to hesitate, scan more carefully, and spend extra effort just trying to stay oriented. They stop trusting that the portal will help them when things go wrong. Good UX goes beyond delight, it is about reassurance.
Decision-making is the real job of UX
Every airline portal is a decision-making environment:
- Choose a flight
- Choose a fare
- Choose a seat
- Decide whether to rebook or wait
The role of UX is not to present all options equally. It is to reduce the mental work required to choose well.
That is where simple principles matter more than flashy ideas: clear visual hierarchy, familiar patterns, plain language, and progressive disclosure.
When these are done properly, travellers stop analysing the interface and start moving confidently through it.
This is also where intent-led thinking becomes powerful. When portals are designed around tasks rather than pages, complexity begins to fall away naturally.
What changes when you design for intent
When you stop designing for navigation and start designing for intent, the portal behaves differently:
- Shift the focus to intent and the portal begins to respond in new ways
- Search leads the experience rather than sitting in the background
- Logged-in travellers with an upcoming trip see what they can do next, instead of being asked to explore
This is the direction we have been taking with platforms like Triplake by allowing the portal to respond to context, trip stage, loyalty status and behaviour.
Where AI actually helps and where it should stay quiet
AI has a role in airline UX, but it works best when it stays in the background rather than taking centre stage. The strongest AI-driven experiences are often the ones you barely notice, because the interface feels simpler and the path forward feels clearer.
That might mean routing a traveller straight to the right outcome based on a natural language query, or surfacing the most relevant rebooking option when a disruption occurs. In other moments, it is about removing repetition altogether, using known preferences to spare travellers from making the same choices again and again.
At its best, AI offers clarity, supports decisions without trying to make them on the traveller’s behalf. People still want to feel in control of their journey, they just do not want to work so hard to get there.
The portal is becoming a living interface
The most interesting shift we are seeing has very little to do with technology and everything to do with behaviour. Airline portals are gradually moving away from being static websites and towards adaptive interfaces that respond to where a traveller is in their journey.
Before the trip, the portal helps you prepare. On the day of travel, it shifts into a supportive role, surfacing the information that matters most in the moment. Afterwards, it follows up, closing the loop rather than simply ending the experience.
Making this work demands modular design systems, flexible platforms, and teams that think beyond individual pages and flows. It is not an easy change, but it is both achievable and increasingly necessary.
