The clicks went to AI Overviews. The OTA equity story reprices around the booking.
TL;DR [show]
Through 2025, AI Overviews cut the organic clicks below them roughly in half, while the OTAs that sell the booking kept growing and the businesses that sell the click shrank. Operator read: the share of revenue that depends on an organic click is the variable OTA equity stories now price; every pitch deck that doesn't model it is mispricing the discount rate. Three architectural choices that survive it.
By the end of 2025, the measurement on Google AI Overviews and Google's AI travel-planning surfaces had converged on one number: an Overview takes about half the organic clicks below it. Pew Research found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of searches with an AI summary against 15% without; Seer Interactive's panel had organic click-through on Overview queries falling from 1.76% to 0.61% between June 2024 and September 2025. The money did not move the same way. Booking grew third-quarter room nights 8% and Expedia 11%, while Brand Tripadvisor, the business that sells the research click, saw revenue fall 8% and segment adjusted EBITDA fall from $87 million to $59 million.
The trade press read the click loss as an OTA problem. Click-dependence, the share of revenue paid for by an organic visit, is the variable OTA equity stories now price. Hold that frame in view. Everything that follows traces back to it.
What's actually shifted is the discount rate. An equity story whose revenue depends on clicks that a competing surface now answers has to price that dependence into the discount rate. Putting it in the growth model understates it. The intercept is not a temporary headwind that growth-rate normalization will overcome. It is a steady-state structural feature of the traffic environment. Pre-2024 OTA equity models priced organic-traffic-growth as a contributor to revenue growth. Post-2025 OTA equity models have to price organic-traffic-growth as shrinking wherever an Overview sits above the result, and weight each revenue line by how much of it that traffic pays for.
Every OTA pitch deck written in 2025-2026 that does not explicitly model click-dependence is mispricing the discount rate. The mispricing flows through to terminal-value calculations and to growth-stage capital allocation decisions. By Q2 2026 the analyst class should begin to split the category along that line in its models; by Q4 2026 it should be standard.
Trace the click loss back to the architectural choices that survive it. The first is preferred-checkout-rail status. The OTA whose checkout flow is the AI's preferred handoff for booking-completion captures rents in the post-discovery layer. The AI does the discovery; the OTA does the conversion. The architecture requires deep API integration with the major AI surfaces (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude), preferential booking-completion-time metrics, and reliability guarantees the AI can model into its handoff decision. Booking has elements of this architecture. Google has already named its candidates: in November it said it is working with Booking.com, Expedia, Marriott, IHG, Choice and Wyndham to let travelers finish flight and hotel bookings inside AI Mode. The OTAs whose checkout reliability is below the AI-modelable threshold are not preferred-rail candidates and absorb the full click loss as competitive disadvantage.
Trace the click loss back again and recommendation-source positioning surfaces. The OTA that licenses its inventory to AI surfaces through structured APIs, with appropriate metadata and pricing-feed access, captures recommendation-source rents. The AI references the OTA's data as the canonical source for the category. The OTA captures distribution rents at the API layer rather than at the consumer-facing layer. Expedia has been moving in this direction with Vrbo and other inventory licensing arrangements. The OTAs without structured-inventory-licensing strategies are the OTAs whose data is being scraped or referenced without rents being captured.
Trace the click loss once more and non-organic-traffic distribution surfaces. Direct-relationship loyalty programs, branded-app installed bases, partnership-class distribution (credit-card co-brands, airline loyalty integrations), and B2B-corporate-travel platforms each provide distribution channels that bypass the AI Overviews intercept. Booking puts its direct room-night mix in the mid-fifties and rising, with marketing down to 4.7% of gross bookings from 5.0%. The OTA that builds these channels at scale is the OTA whose growth model survives the click loss. The OTA that depends on organic-traffic for the majority of distribution is the OTA whose growth shrinks with it, which is what Tripadvisor's November reorganization into an experiences-led, AI-enabled company, with at least $85 million in cost cuts, is responding to.
The same pattern recurs across categories where AI surfaces are intercepting organic-search traffic. E-commerce platforms (Amazon's various sub-categories, Shopify-class merchant exposure), financial-services platforms (insurance-comparison, mortgage-comparison), and content-aggregation platforms (recipe sites, review sites, news-aggregator sites) each have their own version of the click loss. The size varies by category and by AI-surface deployment depth. The structural shape is consistent.
What's the operator-class question for any platform whose growth model depends on organic-search traffic? How much of its revenue depends on an organic click, how fast that share is shrinking, and which of the three architectural choices the platform is positioning for. The default, running the pre-Overview growth model, is operating-incoherent and increasingly hard to defend in front of analyst-class audiences who have started to split the category by click-dependence.
What survives all of this is that the 2025 split between click and booking is one of the cleaner mid-2020s structural-shift markers, the OTA category's response to it is the leading indicator for adjacent categories' responses, and the operator-grade discipline is to make the architectural choice explicit in the equity story rather than to default to the pre-Overview growth model. Operators with explicit architectural choices have negotiable equity stories. Operators without them are absorbing the discount-rate repricing without compensating architectural commitments.
The clicks went to AI Overviews. The equity story reprices around the booking. The architectural choices that survive the click loss are the choices the operator class is making in 2026, or absorbing the consequences of not making in 2027.
—TJ