Rebuilding a hotel group's website for Google and AI answers
A Pan-Asian midscale hotel group, with hotels in markets across East and Southeast Asia, needed to move a website with messy URLs and pages rendered in the browser onto a new structure, while keeping the search visibility it had built. After two months of preparation we migrated the site in early June 2026, redesigned every page type, rebuilt the content system behind it and launched destination and travel content. By September, Bing's AI answers cited the site 15.7 times as often per day as in May, and Google AI feature impressions and non branded clicks per day had both more than doubled.
A growing hotel group on a site that held it back
Old URLs that had grown messy over time, pages rendered in the visitor's browser, and page titles that did not follow how travellers search. Crawlers that do not run JavaScript, which includes many AI crawlers, see little of a page built that way.
Travellers search for a destination, things to do and the deals on offer before they choose a hotel. The site's travel content sat on old URLs outside a clear structure, and it had no country and city pages or promotion pages built for those searches.
Keeping rankings through the move would not be enough. The new site had to be readable by AI crawlers from the first day and give AI assistants destination answers worth citing.
SEO and AEO interventions
Two months of preparation, then one migration in early June 2026. The structure, the templates and the content system changed together, and new destination and travel content was built on the new site.
Moved the site onto a new structure
See how we did it
We mapped the old URLs to their place in the new structure with permanent redirects and rebuilt the XML sitemaps. Rendering moved from the visitor's browser to the server, so pages now arrive as complete HTML that search and AI crawlers can read without running JavaScript.
Country, city and hotel pages carry Hotel structured data. Page titles were regrouped into clusters by search intent, based on the kind of result Google shows for each type of search.
Live since early June 2026Redesigned every page type
See how we did it
We redesigned the layout of every page type on the site: the hotel pages and the destination, promotion and travel content pages around them.
Live since early June 2026Rebuilt the content system behind the site
See how we did it
We rebuilt the site's internal content management system as part of the same migration.
Live since early June 2026Built content for travel searches and AI answers
See how we did it
We launched country and city pages, promotion pages built around bank card offers, and a hidden gems travel content series about things to do near each hotel.
Live, growing after the migrationCited far more often in AI answers
Bing's AI Performance report counts how often Bing's AI answers cite the site. From May, the month before the migration, to September, three months after, daily citations rose to 15.7 times their May level and the number of pages cited each day grew 129%.
In Google, impressions in the generative AI features report rose 115% per day from late May, before the migration, to September. Since the report began, the page with the most of those impressions has been a seasonal travel guide that the migration moved into the new structure, with about a third of them.
More clicks from Google after the migration
We sustained traffic through the migration and kept the loss to a minimum: in June, the migration month, Google clicks per day stayed within 1% of May. By September, three months after the migration, clicks per day were up 64% on May and impressions up 121%.
Search results for queries that did not name the brand grew the most: non branded clicks rose 116% and non branded impressions 133%.
Sources and periods: before means May 2026, the last full month before the migration in early June 2026; after means September 2026, three months after. Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report, citations and cited pages per day. Google Search Console generative AI features report, impressions per day; the report starts on 18 May 2026, so its before period is 18 to 31 May. Google Search Console web search across the whole domain; non branded means all clicks and impressions except those from queries that name the brand, including queries Google does not disclose. All figures are daily averages, so periods of different lengths compare fairly. Client name withheld. All figures are shown as percentages, indexes and ratios to protect client data.