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The AI of It All: How ICND is Shaping the Future of Vacation Rental Marketing

The AI Of It All… 

Conference season is in full swing, and it’s been incredible to see so many of our amazing clients at industry events hosted by our partners around the world. These gatherings bring the vacation rental community together to share strategies, brainstorm, and dig into the cutting-edge ideas shaping our future. And of course, one topic is dominating conversations everywhere: AI.

So, what is ICND doing with AI right now? We’ve got a lot in the works (some things we’re not quite ready to share yet), but here are a few key initiatives:

• Breaking down the formulas. We’re working hard to understand the best ways to rank in AI-driven search results and how to keep growing in an evolving internet landscape.
  
• AI Bot Security. We’ve spent countless hours working on a way to keep your website protected while still making sure you’re visible on AI platforms.    
  
• Hands-on adoption. Our entire team actively uses AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to support client work.
  
• Continuous learning. We’re attending seminars, joining webinars, and participating in industry-wide discussions to stay ahead.
  
• Listening to you. We want to hear your pain points and ideas on how AI can help your business thrive.
  

 

Let’s Break It Down And Expand

AI Bots & Crawling: Security Meets Opportunity
AI isn’t just about generative content, it’s also about their bots crawling your site and scraping the information so they can answer users’ questions.

Here’s how we handle it:

• Good bots crawl freely. We allow verified AI crawlers and search engine bots to access our clients’ sites.
• Bad actors get blocked. Hackers often spoof user agents (pretending to be tools like SEMrush or Screaming Frog), which is why those sometimes run into issues. Protecting uptime and user experience comes first.
• Our security team is always on. We have an amazing group leading the march on how to protect your website from “bad apples”. Our goal is to keep your site secure while still being fully indexable for AI and search.  

 

AI Overviews: The New Reality in Google

Google’s AI Overviews are changing how organic results look. They’re pulling in more informational content (things to do, ski tickets, etc.), leading to more zero-click searches where users get their answers directly in Google.

What’s important to know:

• AI Overviews aren’t showing for transactional or commercial intent searches (like booking vacation rentals). Across multiple studies, informational queries dominate AI Overview triggers sometimes accounting for 80-90%+ of the queries where an AIO appears.
• The impact is mostly on informational content.
  
• This is part of what’s being called the “Crocodile Effect” where AI eats up engagement.

 

AI Overviews are evolving fast and impacting CTR on Google SERP's. 

 

Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping how organic traffic behaves, especially for informational content like “things to do,” guides, or ski lift tickets. This phenomenon, often called the Crocodile Effect, describes how AI summaries can pull visibility away from certain pages while leaving transactional or commercial queries largely unaffected.

At ICND, we’re taking a data-driven approach to understand this shift. We developed a Looker Studio report specifically designed to track all AI-driven traffic for our clients. This lets us monitor how AI searches are impacting sites in real time.

Through this reporting, we’ve seen AI-generated traffic double month over month for some clients, primarily landing on narrow, highly specific pages like individual blogs or property pages. These insights show exactly which pages are capturing attention in AI-driven search results and why.

 

By reviewing this information we can translate it into actionable strategies: optimizing content, adjusting site structure, and creating pages that perform well both for traditional SEO and AI-powered search. It’s all about understanding the new landscape so our clients can adapt, compete, and thrive.

 

SEO Best Practices: Still the Foundation

While AI is changing the landscape, it’s worth stating loud and clear:
traditional SEO best practices still matter.

Google still ranks based on:

• Relevant content that matches user intent.
• User engagement with that content (are they bouncing back to the search, or does your page solve the query?).
• EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which is Google’s framework for evaluating whether your content is high-quality and credible enough to rank.

That second piece ties directly into how well your site merchandises your inventory, are your properties attractive, priced right, and easy to book? AI may change the tools, but the fundamentals of SEO are alive and well.

 

Peeling Back the Onion

At ICND, we’re not just chasing buzzwords, we’re peeling back the onion to see what actually moves the needle and what’s just noise. This means testing how AI Overviews interact with different types of content, looking at sessions instead of users in GA4, and monitoring how various bots crawl our sites.

We’re actively building solutions to stay ahead of the curve:

• LLMs (Large Language Models): Training and fine-tuning models on vacation rental–specific data to improve AI-driven visibility.
• FAQ Schema: Adding structured markup so Google and AI tools pull the right answers from our clients’ sites.
• Longform Content: Creating in-depth pages that answer complex queries, increase engagement, and demonstrate authority.
• Highly Optimized SRPs: Fine-tuning search results pages to balance merchandising (rates, amenities, availability) with SEO signals for both organic and AI-driven performance.
  
  

Strong SEO sends the right signals to AI bots, helping your site compete effectively in both organic search and AI-driven results. The goal? We aim to not just adapt to the shifts in search and AI, but to get ahead of them. Our goal is to ensure our clients maintain a highly visible and competitive edge as the digital landscape evolves.

We have a significant head start. Although AI-driven traffic is increasing exponentially, it still represents a relatively small portion of overall website visitors. This unique window of opportunity allows us to strategically deconstruct and rebuild our SEO and content strategies, ensuring they are optimized for both human and AI-driven search engines.

And we want to hear from you: What’s your biggest AI pain point? Where do you see opportunity? Let’s keep the conversation going because in this landscape, collaboration and shared learning are how we all rise.

We’re eager to continue the discovery and take a proactive approach as new trends and data unfold. The sky really is the limit right now, and we’re not lowering the bar anytime soon.

Our goal is to keep growing alongside the evolving shifts in user behavior. This isn’t the first time the wheel has been reinvented, and it certainly won’t be the last. Who knows, maybe in 10 years we’ll be marketing quick trips to Mars, competing for ad space on the moon, or optimizing campaigns for a martian audience. If there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that in vacation rental digital marketing the only constant is change. From shifting search algorithms to the rise of AI and evolving guest expectations, staying ahead means adapting quickly and embracing the ride!

Author: Jill Highsmith McGee