Zero Click, Zero Booking: How AI Overviews Are Starving Hotels and Wellness Brands Alike

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AI & the Future of BookingHotel Brand Partnerships·26 August 2026·9 min read
Zero Click, Zero Booking: How AI Overviews Are Starving Hotels and Wellness Brands Alike
Ask an AI search engine for the best boutique hotel for a wellness weekend in the Cotswolds, or the best magnesium supplement for sleep, and watch what happens. You get an answer. A confident, well-structured, fully formed answer, delivered before you’ve had the chance to click through to a single website. No visit to the hotel’s own booking engine. No visit to the brand’s own product page. Just an answer, and a swift resolution to a query that used to be worth a customer.

This isn’t a hypothetical, and it isn’t confined to one sector. It’s measurable, and it’s happening right now across two industries that on the surface share very little: luxury hospitality and premium wellness and lifestyle brands. Organic click-through on queries that trigger an AI Overview has fallen 61 per cent since June 2024. Wellness brands saw organic traffic fall by more than a quarter in 2025 alone. And when AI does serve up a recommendation, more often than not it routes the prospective guest, or the prospective customer, not to the hotel or the brand, but to an intermediary standing in between: an OTA, a retailer, a review aggregator. The pattern is near identical across both sectors, and it should worry commercial leaders in both.

So let’s look at what’s actually happening, sector by sector, and why the answer for both may lie in the same place: each other.

The click is disappearing, and it's disappearing everywhere

The data here is no longer thin or speculative. It’s robust, repeated, and consistent across independent sources with no shared commercial interest in the outcome.

Seer Interactive analysed 3,119 informational queries across 42 organisations between June 2024 and September 2025, covering 25.1 million organic impressions. The finding: organic click-through on queries where an AI Overview appears fell 61 per cent, from 1.76 per cent to 0.61 per cent. Paid CTR on those same queries fell 68 per cent. Even queries without an AI Overview lost 41 per cent of their organic CTR year on year, which tells you this isn’t a Google-specific quirk. Users are simply clicking less, full stop, as attention shifts to ChatGPT, Perplexity and conversational search more broadly.

Ahrefs’ December 2025 study of 300,000 keywords found AI Overviews reduced position-one organic CTR by 58 per cent, up sharply from the 34.5 per cent the same team measured just eight months earlier. Pew Research Center went further and looked at actual behaviour: across 68,879 searches from 900 US adults, users clicked a traditional result just 8 per cent of the time when an AI Overview appeared, against 15 per cent when it didn’t. Only around 1 per cent clicked a link inside the Overview itself. A quarter of AI Overview sessions simply ended there. Job done, as far as the user is concerned.

SparkToro’s research puts a number on the scale of it: 68 per cent of US Google searches now end without any click to the open web, rising to roughly 83 per cent when an AI Overview appears. Of every 1,000 searches, perhaps 360 ever result in a click beyond Google’s own page.

HEDNA’s 2026 benchmark found a third of hotel marketers unsure whether zero-click is hurting them – we look at why in our review of the State of Distribution 2026.

None of this is a forecast. It’s what’s already happened.

Two sectors, one structural wound

Here’s where it gets interesting for us specifically. Hospitality and wellness look like entirely different businesses, but they’re being cut by the same blade.

Tank’s October 2025 study of 800 UK companies across sixteen sectors found hospitality the single most affected of them all, with organic traffic growth collapsing from 26.3 per cent to 3.7 per cent year on year across the board. Separately, Fractl found 43 per cent of travel and hospitality marketers reporting traffic drops, second only to tech.

On the wellness side, Semrush’s 2026 traffic study, drawn from billions of visits across more than 50,000 sites, found wellness organic traffic down 25.64 per cent in 2025, with healthcare down 30.09 per cent. As Semrush put it, this shift is most likely attributed to the prevalence of AI Overviews across these sectors.

Interesting caveat, and one worth being honest about: beauty and apparel didn’t follow the same curve. Beauty organic traffic actually grew 19.52 per cent, because visual, product-driven categories still reward browsing and comparison. But beauty’s share of organic in its overall traffic mix fell 15.23 per cent, meaning the channel is being reshuffled rather than gutted. So the parallel holds strongly for wellness and health, and more subtly for beauty. Worth knowing the difference before you build a strategy on it.

Who wins when AI answers the question

This is the part that should really concentrate minds, because it isn’t just about fewer clicks. It’s about who gets the click that remains.

Cloudbeds’ June 2025 study of 810 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, covering 145 properties in six destinations, found OTAs supplied 55.3 per cent of all cited sources behind AI hotel recommendations. LuxDirect’s study of 2,700 queries against 25 luxury London hotels found something even starker: 65.1 per cent of Google AI Mode responses routed the traveller to an OTA booking page rather than the hotel’s own site, rising above 90 per cent for independents without proper direct-booking integration. You can win the recommendation and still lose the booking.

The mirror image exists on the brand side. John Morabito of Stella Rising, speaking at BeautyMatter’s GEO webinar this August, put the figure at roughly 95 per cent: that’s the share of AI beauty citations pulled from third-party sites rather than the brand’s own channels. It isn’t enough to say you’re the best. AI wants third-party validation before it will repeat the claim. A 2026 Beauty AI Visibility Index found ingredient-led brands like The Ordinary and retailer house-brands via Sephora dominating citation share, precisely because their data is structured and machine-readable, and because someone else is already vouching for them.

Swap “OTA” for “retailer” and the mechanism is identical. In both sectors, the intermediary that already has structured data and earned third-party trust is the one AI defaults to, and the brand or hotel with the strongest product can still lose the discovery moment entirely.

Why partnership is the strategic answer, not a marketing nicety

Here’s the pivot, and it’s not a coincidence that I’ve spent twenty years watching this exact dynamic play out from inside international hotel groups, long before AI Overviews existed: when a channel intermediary intercepts direct discovery, the answer was never to out-shout the intermediary. It was to build reach the intermediary couldn’t touch.

That’s exactly what’s now being argued across the wider industry. impact.com’s David Yovanno put it plainly: LLMs don’t invent authority, they aggregate it. They surface what credible creators, publishers and communities are already saying. impact.com’s own December 2025 investment in the GEO firm Evertune is a direct bet that content and creator partnerships are now an AI visibility strategy, not just a revenue channel. Adobe’s data shows generative AI referral traffic to US retail sites surged 4,700 per cent year on year to July 2025, off a small base, but the direction is unmistakable.

Translate that logic to hospitality and wellness, and the strategic case for partnership writes itself. If AI has intercepted a wellness brand’s direct discovery path, the brand can still reach exactly the guest it wants, the affluent, wellness-minded traveller, by being placed inside the spa, the room or the F&B programme of a luxury hotel that AI already trusts and cites. And the hotel, in turn, gains differentiated, citation-worthy content and a stronger claim to authority in exactly the categories AI is now gatekeeping.

This is precisely the mechanism BrandMatch is built around: a marketplace connecting luxury hotels with wellness and lifestyle brand partners, measured against TRevPAG, Total Revenue Per Available Guest, because RevPAR alone was never going to capture the value of a guest experience built on borrowed, trusted reach rather than direct search traffic that’s quietly disappearing.

The challenge

So here’s the question worth sitting with. If you’re a hotelier, when did you last check what percentage of your target queries now trigger an AI Overview before you get a look in? If you’re a brand, do you know whether AI is citing you at all, or citing the retailer standing in front of you?

The honest answer for most commercial leaders in both sectors is: not recently enough, and not with any real confidence.

The fix isn’t to fight the algorithm harder. Structured data helps, first-party booking integrations help, editorial and third-party coverage helps, and all three are worth doing. But none of them replace the deeper strategic shift that’s now unavoidable: borrowing trusted audience reach through the right partnerships, deliberately and measurably, rather than hoping direct discovery recovers on its own.

BrandMatch launches in October 2026 built around exactly that premise. If you’re a luxury hotel or a wellness or lifestyle brand wondering how you regain the reach AI search has quietly taken from you, that’s the conversation worth having now, not after the next traffic report lands on your desk.

Sources

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