Adobe, a digital experience software company, has found visits referred by AI assistants to U.S. travel sites converted just 1% below non-AI traffic in July, compared with nearly 50% below non-AI traffic a year earlier. Its Digital Insights analysis also recorded an almost 120% year-over-year rise in AI-referred travel visits.
The same analysis put AI travel traffic 1,822% above October 2024, when Adobe began tracking the channel. AI-referred visitors had an above 20% higher engagement rate, spent 67% longer on travel sites and had a 42% lower bounce rate than non-AI visitors. In a companion survey of more than 5,000 U.S. consumers, 95% of respondents who used AI tools said they considered AI responses as trustworthy as traditional search.
Adobe said the analysis draws on direct online transactions and cited a dataset covering more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites.
Salesforce notes similar AI referral growth
Salesforce, a cloud software company, separately found rising AI-chat referrals alongside gaps in customer-data unification. Its traffic analysis found AI-chat referrals rising between 150% and 428% year over year across the quarters measured, while a separate survey found only 27% of commerce organizations had fully unified customer data. Its findings on AI shopping and merchant data gaps cover a broader commerce market and are not directly comparable with Adobe’s travel data.
Scoring AI readability across travel sectors
Adobe also paired its travel-referral data with results from its AI Content Visibility Checker, a diagnostic that scores how much webpage content AI systems can read. Hotel homepages averaged over 70%, followed by cruise lines at 70%, car rental services at 64% and airlines at 42%. Cruise itinerary and ship pages scored 76%, while airline route and fare pages averaged 59%. Adobe did not disclose how many travel sites or pages were included in those benchmarks.
How the visibility checker evaluates pages
The checker uses Adobe’s own methodology. Adobe says the extension first tries to fetch a page as ChatGPT’s web crawler would. If that fails, it uses the initial HTML before JavaScript runs as a proxy for what most agents can access, according to Adobe’s explanation of the checker. The free checker is powered by Adobe Brand Visibility, the company’s product for measuring visibility in AI search.
Across homepages, product pages, corporate blogs and other retail content, apparel scored 76%, electronics 70% and cosmetics 68%, compared with 59% for grocery. Adobe said more consistent structured product content and stronger owned and earned content contributed to the higher scores for apparel, electronics and cosmetics.