Monthly rankings of which tour operators get cited and recommended across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview and AI Mode when travellers and luxury advisors ask AI for the best tour companies., research programme across six trip type clusters.
A recurring view of which operators appear across destination and trip specific AI buying journeys.
A traveller planning a luxury safari opens Perplexity and asks: “Which tour operator is most reliable for a high end Africa safari?” A luxury travel advisor searches ChatGPT for “best small group tour operators Japan 2026.” The brands that appear in those answers get the enquiries. The brands that do not are invisible regardless of their product quality or industry tenure.
How we measureEach cluster has its own buyer intent prompt battery reflecting the specific questions travellers and advisors ask when researching that trip type.
Cited does not treat recommendation frequency as an indicator of which brand is best. We find the gap between what customers say and what AI recommends — and measure what that costs in bookings.
A brand appearing consistently in AI answers may have strong structured evidence, a well indexed public profile, or simply more content surface area. A brand absent from AI answers may have equally strong, or stronger, customer evidence that is not yet reaching AI in a structured form. That gap is what Cited investigates.