Big Brands Dominate AI Search but Leave Openings for Smaller Sites

For a long time, the fear in the SEO community has been that AI search will simply act as a megaphone for the biggest players. The logic is simple: AI models are trained on massive datasets, and the entities with the most mentions and the highest authority are the ones the AI trusts most. If you are a smaller publisher, it feels like you are fighting a battle against an algorithm that is biased toward the famous. A useful companion note is Trust Is Still an Issue, because it looks at a nearby part of the same system.

However, recent data suggests that while the giants do hold the most ground, they do not own the entire map. There is a specific kind of value that AI search still struggles to synthesize from corporate brochures and brand homepages, and that is where the opportunity lies for those of us who operate on a smaller scale.

The Grip of Brand Authority in AI Results

Research from BrightEdge highlights a clear trend in the travel sector: the biggest names are dominating the rankings across both ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. This is not particularly surprising when you consider how consumer behavior works. We tend to gravitate toward what is familiar. Advertising is built on the premise that visibility leads to trust, and trust leads to loyalty. When an AI provides a recommendation, it often mirrors this societal bias by surfacing the most well known entities.

The data shows that the leaders vary depending on the specific niche of travel, but the dominance is consistent. For example, American Airlines, Expedia, and Royal Caribbean lead their respective categories on both major AI platforms. Interestingly, the "winner" can shift depending on which AI you ask. In the hotel sector, Hilton takes the lead in Google AI Overviews with a 28.3% share, while Marriott leads in ChatGPT at 29.4%.

The gap in visibility can be stark. Expedia's presence in Google AI Overviews is 2.2 times that of Kayak, with a 31.3% share compared to 14.4%. When you move over to ChatGPT, that gap narrows slightly to 1.4 times, but the trend remains the same. In the airline space, American Airlines maintains a lead over United by 6.1 points on Google AI Overviews and 9.1 points on ChatGPT.

This dominance is most aggressive when the user has a clear "booking intent." Booking platforms appear in 78% of budget related answers in Google AI Overviews, and 38% of booking intent prompts specifically name a booking platform. This suggests that when a user is ready to spend money, the AI defaults to the safest, most established corporate options.

The tradeoff here is between efficiency and discovery. For the user, the AI is providing a "safe" answer. For the small business, it means trying to compete on "booking intent" keywords is likely a losing game. If you are competing on the basis of scale or price, the AI will almost always favor the brand with the larger digital footprint. The decision for a smaller site is to stop trying to out brand the giants and instead find the queries where brand authority is less relevant than specific, human insight.

The Gap Created by Human Subjectivity

The most encouraging part of the BrightEdge research is the discovery of a weakness in the big brand stronghold. While corporations dominate the "transactional" side of search, they struggle with "inspiration" queries. These are the questions that require a level of human experience, subjectivity, and nuance that a corporate entity simply cannot provide.

When users ask for inspiration, the AI results shift. There is a noticeable increase in the visibility of user generated content and platforms that prioritize human experience. Sites like Reddit, YouTube, and AAA become far more prominent. This happens because inspiration is inherently subjective. A user isn't looking for the "most popular" hotel in a city; they are looking for the "vibe" of a neighborhood or a hidden gem that doesn't appear in a corporate brochure.

This creates a significant opening for travel bloggers, niche publishers, and smaller sites. Big brands typically focus their content strategy on conversion and brand awareness, not on the messy, subjective details of a real human experience. They don't write about the frustration of a specific train transfer or the exact feeling of a rainy afternoon in a specific village because that doesn't scale. But that is exactly what users are looking for when they seek inspiration.

The data indicates that only 9% of tracked Google AI Overviews prompts fall into the booking intent category. The vast majority of queries are focused on inspiration and comparison. This means the "battleground" is actually much larger than the small slice of the market where big brands are invincible.

The practical interpretation here is that the "Experience" part of E-E-A-T is not just a guideline, but a competitive moat. If you can provide a perspective that is uniquely human and subjective, you are offering something that a corporate entity cannot automate or buy. The tradeoff is that inspiration content often has lower immediate conversion rates than booking content. However, it captures the user at the top of the funnel, before the AI steers them toward a big brand.

For any smaller site, the strategic move is to lean into the subjective. Instead of writing a "Best Hotels in Paris" guide that reads like a directory, write about "The most overrated tourist spots in Paris and where to go instead." The former is a corporate battle; the latter is a human conversation. AI search is currently rewarding the latter in inspiration based queries because it is the only way to provide a truly helpful answer to a subjective question.

Big Brands Lead Their Sectors

What people choose has generally been biased toward whatever is the most well known. That's the idea behind advertising, that the more well known a product is, the likelier it is to be chosen by a consumer, and if the consumer is delighted. The practical read is that brand signals need to be consistent enough for both people and AI systems to form a stable view of the company, its expertise, and its trust signals.

The risk is usually hidden in the execution layer. A page can look fine to a human and still fail for an automated visitor if the form, call to action, rendering path, or confirmation step is not accessible enough for the agent to complete the task.

Inspiration Questions: Human Subjectivity

Adding further complexity to understanding the AI results is that the results containing user generated content (UGC) and content with a human experience quality to it tend to rank better for queries that are related to inspiration. There. For search teams, the important part is not the headline movement by itself. It is whether the shift changes which communities, forums, video surfaces, or publisher pages now satisfy the query better than the old ranking pattern.

Introduction New research from BrightEdge shows that top brands in travel categories dominate the rankings in both ChatGPT and AI Overviews. What's interesting is that while the BrightEdge data shows that the same brands are dominating. For search teams, the important part is not the headline movement by itself. It is whether the shift changes which communities, forums, video surfaces, or publisher pages now satisfy the query better than the old ranking pattern. This connects with How Travel Brands Can Earn AI Recommendations when the same signal needs a clearer operating decision. The same pattern also shows up in AI Recommendation Sets Leave Some Brands Out, where the practical question is how the signal becomes visible.