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As search queries become longer, multimodal, and deeply contextual, understanding search intent is critical to navigating increasingly complex consumer journeys. This complexity offers an unprecedented expansion of intent signals. To capture these signals at scale, marketers must shift from manual, legacy processes to AI-driven architectures.
For GetYourGuide, a global travel experience platform, the AI-driven search ecosystem helps it match traveler intent to its inventory of over 200,000 experiences. CMO Emil Martinsek shared how his team has embraced the AI era of search to find new growth, rethink marketer roles, and bring their travel expertise to curious adventurers.
With AI-driven search, intent is all you need
Travel decision-making no longer follows a linear funnel. Today’s super-empowered consumer navigates an ecosystem of endless choices, where the consideration phase is marked by rapid exploration and high cognitive load — moments where AI can uniquely intervene.
“As we see queries evolving and the ways people use search changing, our focus is on intent,” Martinsek explained. “What is the customer’s specific intent, and how do we satisfy it with the right combination of keyword, landing page, and creative?”
GetYourGuide relies on AI to capture shifting query patterns that manual management would miss.
This focus enables GetYourGuide to segment travelers based on real-time search intent signals rather than static demographics. “An audience is a cohort with a specific intent, preference, or constraint,” Martinsek says. “We then align our feeds, landing pages, and content structure to provide tools like AI Max for Search or Performance Max with the rich data they need to locate and convert those high-value segments.”
Unlocking long-tail keywords with AI-powered ads
To scale global demand and turn intent into growth, GetYourGuide relies on AI to capture shifting query patterns that manual management would miss. “We’ve seen AI Max for Search help us explore and discover new queries. Particularly in the long tail, where our 2 million campaigns come into play, we’ve seen a lot of opportunity to consolidate. If we had to generate every keyword for a chat-led world, it would be impossible.”
In an AI Max world, Google can see the intent in real time and connect the audience with the right landing page.
Exploring long-tail keywords is driving real business results for GetYourGuide. “When we look at baseline and AI Max for Search, a lot of our experiments have shown double-digit improvements,” Martinsek said. “And what we found was, when you added the Search Bidding Exploration, we saw massive increases in clicks. Our previous account and bidding structure wasn’t capturing all the demand pockets that were relevant for us.”
Hidden in that long tail are often surprising nuggets. “One real query that we saw come up was a song lyric that trended on social media mentioning Hawaii. Someone searched for that, and they actually clicked through,” Martinsek shared. “We would never create a keyword on that, but in an AI Max world, Google can see the intent in real time and connect the audience with the right landing page for what they’re looking for.”
Making marketers into architects and scientists
This shift elevates the marketer’s role from routine configuration to strategic design and creative experimentation. “Marketers become architects of solution spaces,” Martinsek explains. “Our search architects focus on account structures, portfolio management, and strategically collapsing the long tail as AI dynamics shift.”
And for marketers not focused on the planning and design of the systems, Martinsek wants them to act like scientists, testing hypotheses. “Then you have marketers who are experimenters, who are actively working with an LLM to generate new copy examples to throw into a test and experiment.” While experimentation has long been part of all digital marketing, Martinsek sees AI turbocharging everything, making the testing, feedback, analysis, and response loop tighter.
What shifting AI opportunities mean for leadership and finance
What does this mean for marketing leaders? “I don’t think the highest-level roles change. My head of search has the same challenge: ‘How do I get more value out of search at the same ROI?’” Martinsek said. At all levels, the goal of marketing, to drive profitable growth, remains the same. AI provides new ways to do that.
When the CMO is an AI architect, leadership and finance see them as a growth engine.
When it comes to how AI influences conversations with finance, Martinsek sees it as a continuation of a fundamental theme. “The foundation of search marketing is still looking for performance along the marginal curve. If you increase your spend by a dollar, what do you get back on that marginal curve?” Martinsek said. “All AI has done is create new ways to collect and understand signals that can inform that same conversation. The conversation still says, ‘How can you find me the most growth along that marginal curve?’” When the CMO is an AI architect, leadership and finance see them as a growth engine.
Ultimately, deploying AI products like AI Max for Search is about finding new growth and shifting conversations with the CFO, from static target ROAS toward dynamically testing marginal efficiency curves. That requires building the organizational and budgetary agility to find and pursue those demand pockets, wherever the data leads. Martinsek said, “We performance marketers, at the end of the day, are ROI-driven.” But it is AI-driven systems that are freeing his team to do what they do best: connect curious adventurers with the world’s most unforgettable experiences.
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