AI assistants are already sending visitors who book. The work that pays off today is being easy for machines to find and read. Letting them pay can wait.
It is already in the traffic
VISIT measured it on one customer’s site over one quarter: 490,029 sessions in total. Visitors from AI assistants made up 2.1% of the traffic but produced about 4% of the revenue. They converted at 7.8%, against 3.93% for everything else. They booked more often, in slightly smaller baskets. And that only counts the assistants that identify themselves, so the real share is higher.
The demand is moving faster than most businesses. Nets by Nexi found that 79% of Swedes use AI assistants, and 48% say they have used one to book or buy something in the last month. Booking.com sees the share of guests planning travel with AI rising to 63% this year, with the strongest interest in activities, restaurants and experiences. In the United States, Google’s AI mode has been booking hotels since 27 August 2026.
Two halves of the funnel, two different instructions
The clearest lesson of the Summit was that the top and the bottom of the funnel need opposite approaches right now.
At the top, being discovered and chosen, there is a lot to do, and all of it is content and structure. Crawlers need to get through. Prices and availability need to sit in the page, not inside a widget a machine cannot read. Facts need to match everywhere. Over time, an agent should be able to ask your booking engine a question and get live availability back.
At the bottom, the payment itself, there is little to build yet. In Europe, an AI agent cannot yet complete a purchase on its own, and the digital euro has moved to 2029. When the rails arrive, they will come through the booking platforms rather than through each operator building their own. The VISIT web team made the most level-headed point of the week: letting a machine make the final transaction is a question of trust more than technology, and trust takes years.
Measure it like a channel
Most businesses could not say how much of their revenue comes from AI assistants, because that traffic disappears into referral or direct in their reports. Making it a channel of its own, and watching whether assistants send guests to you or to an OTA, is the first step to knowing whether the work above is paying off.
What to do
- Report AI assistants as a channel of their own in your analytics.
- Work up the ladder: readable first, then structured, then queryable.
- Check that your prices and availability are visible to a machine, not hidden in a widget.
- Leave agent checkout to your booking platform, and spend the time on content instead.
Heard in: Agentic Commerce (Thibault Miclo and CJ Holmén, VISIT) · Payments Today and Tomorrow (Patrik Müller, Nets by Nexi) · Your Website in the Age of AI (Elliot Csikasz and Elias Jadidi, VISIT) · Winning the Nordic Guest (Christina Jacobsen, Booking.com)