The traditional guest journey, a straightforward path from dreaming and discovery to conversion and experience, is being fundamentally reshaped by AI. Large Language Models (LLMs) are creating a new, non-linear journeys by delivering multimodal, personalized, and conversational experiences right from the discovery phase. This shift is happening quickly, with the ‘hockey-stick’ growth in traffic driven by LLMs showing that AI is set to become a major force in driving web traffic.
Decoding AI’s Impact on the Changing Guest Journey — Source: Milestone Inc.
The guest journey has evolved into an AI-guided conversation. As a result, guests now expect real-time, personalized, and conversational experiences on the websites they visit. Visibility and trust aren’t just about keywords anymore; they’re about being AI-friendly, AI-preferred, and focused on the guest.
In this article, we break down what the new guest journey looks like, how AI is impacting it, and the key priorities for brands as they plan to future-proof their digital presence and marketing strategies for 2026.
An Agentic Economy Fueled by the Rise of the AI Companion
The web is changing from a collection of static websites to an ecosystem of interconnected AI agents. These agents, like search, chat, and booking agents, work together to gather, summarize, and present information to users.
Decoding AI’s Impact on the Changing Guest Journey — Source: Milestone Inc.
Dig Deeper: From search to AI agents: The future of digital experiences
In this new paradigm, AI becomes the guest’s personal companion, providing a fully customized experience based on their unique preferences. Here are some of the standout experiences made possible by AI search:
- Conversational interfaces that enable more natural and intuitive interactions, carrying forward context from previous queries to understand multi-threaded conversations and intent better.
- AI assistance for research and planning, helping searchers gather, collate, and synthesize information from multiple sources. This includes generating cohesive answers, reports, and other formats through query fan out.
- Support for multimodal searches, allowing users to search using text, images, or voice commands, and delivering results in their preferred format.
- Hyper-personalized experiences that tailor content and recommendations based on known user data, past searches, and preferences.
- Automated transactions that can take action on behalf of the guest – such as alerting them when a price drops or a sea-view room becomes available – with the user’s permission.
This shift fosters the emergence of an “agentic economy,” where users expect seamless, continuous experiences as they transition from search platforms to brand websites and beyond.
Dig deeper: How AI agents are revolutionizing digital marketing
In this evolving eco-space, keyword rankings are no longer the leading metric success. Instead, it is about being the source of the answer and visible across channels. This can be achieved through a shift in focus towards delivering AI-readable, AI-preferred and customer-centric content and experiences.
Three Pillars of Success
In order to win in an AI-powered world, brands must re-engineer their digital strategy on three pillars: Data, Workflow Automation, and Journey Orchestration.
Decoding AI’s Impact on the Changing Guest Journey — Source: Milestone Inc.
Pillar 1: Data – High Quality, Reliable, Centralized Data
AI operates on two kinds of memories:
- Long term memory: trained on publicly available information on the web.
- Short term memory: trained on your brand, business information, guest information.
Most businesses struggle with managing AI’s short-term memory and training. The main issue is often fragmented, inaccurate or inconsistent data, which does not give a complete view of the guest journey. Poor-quality data leads to flawed strategies, and bad decisions. The solution? Building a strong data layer to provide AI models with quality short-term memory for better insights.
Unified Data: As SEO evolves into Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), we should start treating all types of Content as Data. Well structured, topically rich and trustworthy content is the fuel AI systems need to interpret and surface your content correctly. This requires a unified strategy: centralize all data, content and digital assets, ensure it is secure, and ensure it is accessible to all channels. These steps are the bedrock of AI visibility, enabling AI crawlers to deliver the direct, clear answers that define the new search landscape.
Website as a Data Hub: Think of your website as a data hub that trains AI. For AI to interpret and amplify your brand correctly, it needs a unified narrative and a consistent personality. Centralizing and optimizing your site’s content ensures your brand is represented accurately and compellingly wherever AI surfaces answers.
Decoding AI’s Impact on the Changing Guest Journey — Source: Milestone Inc.
The elements that need to come together for your website to act as a data hub include:
- Technical SEO Health: Ensuring your site is available, crawlable, and indexable by search engines and AI models. Page experience—including site speed, mobile-friendliness, and overall ease of use—is crucial. Technically is to consistent brand visibility.
Dig deeper: Integrating SEO into omnichannel marketing for seamless engagement - Schema Markup and Real Time Indexing: Implementing schema markup is like providing a glossary for AI. This structured data helps both traditional search engines and LLMs understand the context and specifics of your content. If your platform is integrated with IndexNow, every content update gets pushed real time to partnering sites including ChatGPT.
Dig deeper: How to deploy advanced schema at scale. - Helpful Content: Content needs to be more than just marketing copy and should demonstrate EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). It must solve a searcher’s problems. Content that adds real value is what AI models are trained to prioritize and surface.
Dig deeper: Chunk, cite, clarify, build: A content framework for AI search - Centralized and Optimized Media: Your images and videos and all other assets should be centralized, optimized for performance, and tagged with schema for discovery. This ensures AI can accurately identify and display your visual assets in response to a user’s query.
Dig deeper: Visual content and SEO: How to use images and videos in 2025
Key takeaway: Data is no longer just information about your customers that helps you make business and marketing decisions. It’s also information about your brand and business that AI models can be trained on and LLMs can discover. Accuracy and consistency of this data is key to success in an AI-powered world.
Pillar 2: Workflows—Identifying and Optimizing In-efficiencies and Inconsistency by Automating Workflows at Scale
To automate workflows at scale and create a truly meaningful agentic experience, the first step is identifying inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and broken processes. Next, you need to build a map of interconnected, cross-functional, and omnichannel workflows that span the entire guest journey. This is key to delivering a seamless, integrated experience.
Beyond Process Automation: Workflows are not just limited to automating manual tasks and processes. AI agents can interact with each other to deliver intelligent responses, engaging and personized experiences, at each stage of the guest journey.
Search Experience Optimization (SXO): Getting your content visible in LLMs is just the first step. Visibility alone won’t help if the customer experience falls apart once they land on your site. Workflows need to remove friction and keep the customer journey flowing smoothly, ensuring continued engagement and guiding visitors toward conversions without disrupting the experience. Key elements of an SXO strategy include:
Content Intelligence and Creation
Your strategy should be built on a Content Intelligence Workflow that uncovers high-impact topics by analyzing customer intent, search demand, and competitor strategies. This process actively leverages your existing content, strategically rewriting or enhancing it to align with the guest journey and specific campaign goals.
The key to success is Human-in-the-Loop Automation. The goal is not to replace humans but to achieve scale without sacrificing the unique quality that builds brand trust. In this model, AI handles tedious tasks like generating outlines and first drafts. The human role then evolves from pure creation to strategic curation—focusing on adding unique perspectives, ensuring factual accuracy, and infusing the content with a genuine brand voice. This orchestrated approach is the only way for marketers to rise above the noise of countless tools and content streams.
Intelligent Digital Asset Management (DAM)
In an era of multimodal AI search, visual content is more critical than ever. Traditional methods like file naming and ALT text are no longer enough. An intelligent Digital Asset Management (DAM) workflow is essential and consists of three pillars:
- Centralization: All assets live in a unified DAM, creating a single source of truth.
- Optimization: AI-powered tools like vision APIs and smart tagging schemas make assets discoverable and safe for search.
- Distribution: Assets are deployed from one central location, ensuring brand consistency across all channels.
The Ultimate Goal: AI Interaction Optimization (AIO)
Ultimately, these intelligent workflows do more than just automate tasks – they stitch fragmented digital journeys into seamless, end-to-end experiences. This leads us to the next frontier: AI Interaction Optimization (AIO).
AIO means designing your systems for how guests interact with AI before, during, and after a click. It’s the framework for delivering the truly agentic, personalized, and integrated experiences that modern customers now expect.
Pillar 3: Journey Orchestration – Creating Consistent Experiences Across Channels
The guest journey continues to become less linear and more fragmented. Traffic to websites is already declining and this decline will only increase as models mature and algorithms get refined to deliver more intelligent answers.
Every visitor is becoming precious, and businesses need to do everything they can to engage and convert guests. This is not possible without an effective mapping and orchestration of the guest journey.
Journey Map: For businesses aiming to fully leverage AI to deliver consistent experiences, mapping automation to the guest journey is essential. It’s not just about adding a chatbot to your website; it’s about building an intelligent, end-to-end system that anticipates and responds to visitors’ needs. To do this, you need to segment your audiences effectively and map out typical guest journeys and touchpoints. This is where the “Data” pillar becomes crucial.
Personalized Experiences: Personalization is no longer a luxury; it’s a powerful tool for driving conversions. Searchers expect personalized experiences on the websites they visit, and businesses that deliver these experiences see significant improvement in results. Personalized content can be delivered based on:
- Location: Showing a user in Chicago a promotion for a weekend getaway in a nearby city.
- Channel: Tailoring the website experience for a visitor who came from a social media ad versus a direct search.
- Intent: Displaying content about family-friendly activities to a user who searched for “hotels with a kids’ pool.”
- Historical Customer Data: Offering a returning visitor a special deal on the same type of room they booked last time.
These tailored experiences have been shown to increase conversion rates dramatically–by 50% to over 100%.
Dig deeper: How to boost your marketing revenue with personalization, connectivity and data
Cross-Channel Experiences: The impact of AI-powered search is not only on organic search. Even the next generation of AI-powered paid campaigns will accelerate the journey from discovery to decision.
Decoding AI’s Impact on the Changing Guest Journey — Source: Milestone Inc.
When a user performs a search, whether on a mobile device or desktop, using text, audio, images, or video, LLMs and search engines deliver customized ads based on their device, intent, location, and previous search history.
Your brand and information should be consistently represented across channels. This is only possible with a robust data architecture as outlined in the “Data” bucket above.
Agentic Experiences: Search engines and LLM models are already providing engaging agentic experiences that help users get things done and orchestrate journeys across channels. For a seamless journey your website needs to take this experience forward and can build various agents to cover entire funnel.
- Discovery Agents: AI agents can handle initial inquiries, providing details on property information, concierge services, onsite activities, events, and dining options. They can also serve as trip planners and itinerary builders, helping guests craft their perfect stay.
- Booking Agents: When a guest is ready to book, AI agents can function as booking agents, seamlessly integrating with various booking engines and payment gateways to make the process simple and secure.
- Post-Booking Engagement Agents: The journey doesn’t end at checkout. AI agents can assist with reservation modifications and cancellations, and help with re-engaging customers through personalized promotions, offers, and upsell opportunities.
Key Takeaway: Journey orchestration turns complexity into clarity, helping brands stay relevant, consistent, and competitive by eliminating friction and creating a seamless, engaging experience at each stage of the guest journey, across channels and touchpoints.
The Winning Formula: Visibility + Experience
For a successful strategy moving forward, it needs to achieve three objectives:
- Be Visible: Brands need to cover all channels, including traditional search and LLMs, with consistent messaging. The key strategies to achieve this involve a mix of SEO, GEO, AEO, and AIO.
- Be Engaging: While conversion is the ultimate goal, engaging your audience is the key to getting there. To maximize conversions, go beyond SEO and focus on SXO. Create personalized, engaging experiences and turn your website into an intelligent agent that drives conversions.
- Be Nimble: Test everything, finetune experiences and be nimble to either scale or pivot.
Decoding Your Guest Journey
AI is already the new customer interface, and it is going to be increasingly so in the future. To futureproof your digital presence and marketing strategies, brands must:
- Build a strong foundation based on reliable, unified, centralized and trusted data.
- Deploy agentic workflows that drive real outcomes by combining business goals and customer intent.
- Orchestrate consistent, personalized experiences and a consistent journey across channels and customer touchpoints.
Dig deeper: How to future-proof your digital presence in the era of AI-powered search
Thank you, David Banahan and Tushar Prabhu, for helping me pull this together.
About Milestone Inc
Milestone drives online leads and customer acquisition for over 2,000 companies by seamlessly integrating “Experiences” and “Discovery” into its AI-First Digital Experiences Platform. Milestone’s robust solutions include SEO-First CMS, Schema Platform, Local Listings, Events Calendar Software, Analytics Platform, AI Content Studio, AI Agents Platform, and Performance Marketing services. Serving the hospitality businesses of all sizes, from Chains and Management companies to Independent Hotels & Resorts, Milestone enables businesses to achieve sustained online growth. Milestone is recognized as one of the highest-rated martech platforms, with accolades from Forrester, G2, US Search, the Adrian Awards, and more. Learn more at www.milestoneinternet.com.
Gaurav Varma
Senior Director of Marketing
+1 408 200 6949
Milestone Inc.
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