End of the Roadmap? How AI Is Rewiring Travel Journalism

By Craig Stoltz

What I’m writing about here is not necessarily new — in fact, some will say it’s just a tl;dr version of “AI is killing travel writing.” Fair point. 

But for worse or better I do study and write about this stuff regularly, and have some professional background. (I worked in AI for the federal government until Elon Musk set me free.) And a few recent developments have come together to create what I see as a pivotal moment in travel journalism that I’d like to share. 

Travel Writing and the Toppled Landscape of “Discovery”

Travel writing has long inspired and informed readers about trips they want to take. Sure, there’s great armchair travel writing and pure narrative work that simply  transports you places, that delivers reading pleasure with no expectation that the reader will travel there themselves. I love reading that stuff. It’s what got me into this racket. It's what I aspire to write, and feel lucky when an assignment allows the elbow room to give it a try.

But a lot of what we professional travel writers produce, and what DMOs and other sponsors of our travel expect, is that our work will more directly motivate people to take the trips we write about, and provide some (at least implicit) practical advice. Our work is central to what the industry calls the “discovery” and “exploration” phases of travel planning. (There are multiple models for traveler customer journeys; this early planning stage is often called, poetically, “dreaming.”)

Some very recent developments suggest this is about to change in a way that — depending on how dark your glasses are — either eliminates or fundamentally changes the bulk of what travel journalists produce. 

It Starts, Inevitably, with Google 

Google recently introduced “AI Mode.” It’s now on everybody’s search page. You don’t have to download anything or visit another site. This is why the current moment is such a big deal. You don’t have to be an early adopter type who “gets” ChatGPT and is all hep to this high technology thing and whatnot. All you have to do is Google and be curious enough to click “AI Mode” one time. Your use of the web will likely change permanently. Google reports sweeping adoption of AI Mode across most types of users. 

How AI Interfaces Make People Act Differently

What you see in Google’s AI mode looks a lot like ChatGPT — a tiny box that invites text inputs. This presentation leads users to behave differently than they do with a search field. 

Travelers ask Google things like “best places to eat Detroit.” Food and travel journalists and their publisher overlords have been producing stories designed to serve those searchers for years. The system has worked for all parties, if just barely.

Now, when they see an AI input box, users do things like this: 

Early research shows that typical AI travel queries, after users figure things out a bit, fall into two groups: 

• Where the destination is known: “My girlfriends and I are going to Nashville for a weekend in July. We want to stay downtown, so we can walk or Uber to music and great restaurants, but can't spend too much. We want to eat great southern BBQ. Need plan for Fri night, Sat, and Sun morn.”

• Where the destination is unknown: “Friends outdoors week w/in 2 hrs Pittsburgh. Stay in cabin. Some mountain biking, no fishing. Where should we go?”

Google in AI Mode — or ChatGPT, or Perplexity Travel (check it out, recently launched) or any of the chatbot front ends that Expedia, Kayak, and others have recently introduced — will quickly spit out draft itineraries that can be fine-tuned with additional queries. (These itineraries are, of course, derived partly from reporting we've done, but that's a topic for another time.)

So: In the before times, people turned to travel writing they found via Google searches for the discovery and planning phases of travel. 

But in the near future — with Google AI Mode having such a big footprint, and major travel platforms offering similar services — our work is getting squeezed out of the discovery and planning processes. This part of the customer journey is happening on an AI interface. 

It’s true that links to stories appear alongside or within AI responses, but early research shows people are much less likely to click into those stories than they were when the stories appeared as links in search results. Users simply continue to query the chatbot until they get the information they need (that's why they're called “chatbots”).

Okay, So What?

DMOs, hospitality chains, and others with significant resources will learn to game the new systems so their material appears in AI answers. They are feverishly working on this. 

But the publishers we work for, whose businesses have been fine-tuned to support travelers’ discovery and planning? 

• Will they evolve from assigning stories that are SEO-oriented to those designed to speak to common AI queries, which are much more complex, nuanced, and idiosyncratic?
  • What would those stories look like?  Will they be crafted to address “personas” and “intent” — what chatbots infer when they cobble together their answers — rather than keywords?
  • Is changing the type of story this way a fool’s errand, or a genius move?
  • How would this benefit them economically?
  • Or will they keep doing what they’ve been doing, and…????
• Will legacy print publishers, a significant part of whose revenue derives from digital, find a way to thrive?
  • They are most likely to cut licensing deals with AI companies, giving them a critical new revenue stream.
• What happens to the economic model of digital-only sites that have depended on Google search to send them traffic that they monetize with ads?
  • I think we all know sites we write for that are struggling due to these pressures, and we probably all know sites that have folded.
  • With less clout and cache than legacy publishers, will they be able to cut licensing deals with AI companies?
  • Whose traffic will somehow not drop with this change, and why? Great minds are trying to figure this out. 
• Will advertisers and site sponsors still support publishers whose traffic has dropped significantly?
• Will print guidebooks and their digital presentations still play a role in discovery and planning — and have a sustainable economic model when AI becomes the default trip planning modality, which may be, like, Thursday?
• What fresh travel content will feed the AI models going forward if travel writing publishers shrink and disappear?
  • Will it be sponsored content created by the DMOs and optimized for AI search? 
  • Will it be material only from the legacy print publishers who can survive, including trade press?
  • Will local independent and special interest tourism digital publications survive on lean budgets, producing information the AI monster slurps up?
  • Will Independent newsletters like those on Substack play a role in this new ecosystem?
• What will happen to DMO programs that support travel writers with the expectation that we’ll publish stories in outlets with substantial (or neatly targeted) audiences?
  • Will they instead fund sponsored content designed to appear in AI overviews?
• To the chase: What happens to the writers of content for the publications, blogs, and other digital media that formerly inspired and directed travelers?
  • Can we find a role somewhere in this new discovery/planning machine? 
  • Or are we ankylosauruses who get slammed by this AI asteroid and can hope only to leave attractive fossils in the mud?

My answer to all of the above: “Beats me.” But I think it’s important to be aware of the changing context we’re operating in, for better or worse. 

“For better…” you ask? 

Every technological change seals some doors, opens others, and creates weird new tunnels and funky glowing things that might be beautiful windows and might be sizzling isotopes. We should try to be aware of all that, even as the way we currently operate continues to be disrupted.

I find cool new ways to use AI every week. (Try it for writing headlines and metadata. You'll never go back.) It makes me a better researcher; it improves my writing. We should all use AI with curiousity, guile, and care. We should keep doing great work.

But it’s wise to keep an eye on the sky. You never know if that asteroid is coming slowly, rushing right at your forehead — or about to get knocked off course by something you didn’t even know was there.  

Additional reporting on the topic from Axios, gloomier than the above: https://www.axios.com/2025/06/02/ai-browsers-open-web 

Image generated using Google Gemini (AI image generator), July 2025.