Q2 2025 Destination Website Performance: Navigating Shifting Search Behaviors and the New Rules of Visibility
The way travelers find information online is evolving — and quickly. In Q2 2025, the impacts of AI Overviews, shifting user behavior, and emerging traffic sources continued to reshape the digital discovery landscape for destination marketers.
Recent research from Pew confirms what many DMOs are already experiencing: even top-ranking content is seeing reduced click-through as Google surfaces more AI-generated responses in the SERP. According to Pew, when an AI Overview appears, users are nearly 50% less likely to click on a traditional search result — and only 1% click on links within the AI panel.
Ahrefs reached a similar conclusion in their findings earlier this year: the #1 organic result saw its click-through rate drop by 34.5% YoY when AI Overviews appeared — a dramatic shift that reinforces a new reality. Google is still surfacing content, but increasingly answering questions before a user ever visits your site.
Expanding upon similar analysis completed for Q1 2025, Tempest’s Q2 benchmarking across nearly 80 destinations confirms these changes in behavior. The analysis once again includes a balance of destination organizations who work with Tempest's Growth Marketing team for ongoing content, SEO and paid media support, as well as destinations who do not.
Our findings? While organic session growth has softened, engagement remains strong, high-quality content continues to drive visibility, and a new wave of LLM-driven discovery is beginning to take shape.
1. Organic Traffic Growth Has Slowed, or Turned Negative
After showing signs of softening in Q1, organic session growth dipped further in Q2. Across all DMOs analyzed, organic sessions declined –5% YoY on average for the quarter, a significant shift from Q1’s +6% organic growth average.
These trends affirm what Pew and Ahrefs outlined: AI Overviews are reducing traditional click-through, even for content that performs well. But that doesn’t negate the value of great content — it’s what earns AI citations, powers visibility in overviews, and anchors your authority in search ecosystems.
2. Organic Traffic Still Delivers the Strongest Engagement, As Destinations Ramp Up Paid Investment
Though fewer users may be clicking from organic search, those who do remain deeply engaged. In Q2, organic engagement rates averaged 71% for Growth Marketing clients and 69% for Non-Growth Marketing clients — both far exceeding the sitewide average of 56%.
While sitewide engagement rate across all traffic sources showed a downward trend from Q1 (60%), it was varied significantly across websites and channels. This can likely be attributed to destinations offsetting organic losses with an increased focus in paid channels, whose percentage share of total site visits grew to 62% over the previous quarter (a 306% increase). By nature, paid sessions tend to drive lower engagement rates than organic or direct sources. This mix shift appears to be contributing to softer engagement performance overall, even as top content still draws high-value interactions.
3. LLM Traffic Is Still Small, but Growing Fast
While organic discovery has become more volatile, LLM platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are showing early — and steep — growth curves:
- Q2 saw a +146% quarter-over-quarter increase in LLM sessions across all destinations studied
- Average Engagement Rate for LLM traffic held steady at 66%, second only to organic traffic
While still a small fraction of total traffic (less than 1% on average through Q2), LLM referrals are increasingly contributing meaningful, high-intent engagement — and signal where user behavior and general content discovery is heading.
TIP: Want to track LLM traffic in GA4? Create a copy of your standard Traffic Acquisition report, set the default dimension to Session source/medium, and then filter the new report using an exact match of the below regex script:
^.*ai|.*\.openai.*|.*copilot.*|.*chatgpt.*|.*gemini.*|.*gpt.*|.*neeva.*|.*writesonic.*|.*nimble.*|.*outrider.*|.*perplexity.*|.*google.*bard.*|.*bard.*google.*|.*bard.*|.*edgeservices.*|.*astastic.*|.*copy.ai.*|.*bnngpt.*|.*gemini.*google.*$
4. AI Is Reshaping Paid Performance, Too
AI Overviews aren’t just reshaping organic traffic, they’re influencing paid performance as well. For Growth Marketing clients working with Tempest for PPC support, average CPCs rose 4% YoY and 25% over Q1, a reversal of last year’s downward trend and a signal of heightened competition for visibility.
Despite this, CTR improved in both Q1 and Q2 compared to the prior year, with Q2 CTR up 7% over Q1 — suggesting stronger creative performance or improved targeting. Engagement rates also rose modestly (+2%) in Q2, aligning with global trends of fewer, but more intentional, clicks.
While partner referrals and conversion rates from PPC traffic dipped slightly from Q1 to Q2, both remained higher than the same time last year — suggesting the Q2 decline may be an anomaly rather than a new pattern.
Final Thoughts: Evolving Strategies for an AI-Driven Search Environment
The rules of search are changing, but the role of content is not disappearing. In fact, it’s evolving.
Today, great content does more than drive sessions. It earns AI citations, feeds machine-generated answers, and sustains engagement when a user does visit. That’s why SEO and content strategies must now expand to prioritize visibility across both traditional search and emerging LLM platforms.
Our tips?
- Focus on experience-rich, authoritative content that expands your destination’s presence across LLM reasoning models, like Google’s “Query Fan-Out” — a spectrum of related searches used to surface and summarize information to answer user queries.
- Make sure your content matches search intent at every stage of the traveler journey. Structure pages and assets with semantic clarity to align with how both search engines and AI systems interpret context, meaning, and relationships between topics.
- Strengthen visibility across trusted communities like Reddit, TikTok, and other social media services. These channels not only influence user perception but also increase the likelihood that your brand is referenced by AI systems.
While many for-profit brands are facing pressure to stay relevant and drive ROI in a narrowing SERP landscape, destination organizations are in a unique position. This is the moment to double down on website content to tell stories, highlight local expertise, and power discovery in a way that few others can.
At Tempest, we’re here to help. Our Growth Marketing team partners with destinations to develop adaptive organic and paid strategies focused on long-term visibility, strong engagement, and lasting content value — wherever the next wave of discovery leads.
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