How Digitalhound rebuilt a dormant travel website and took it from effectively zero measurable AI visibility to 32,400 citations in Bing in three months. Without a single paid media campaign.
Talk to Us About Your Site →GetCarHire.com was not a new domain starting from scratch. It was an established travel website that had accumulated content and architecture over time. Its existing platform limited how effectively the site could be developed for the changing search environment.
The temptation would have been to produce more pages. We took the opposite approach. Before asking what we could add, we asked a more important question: what deserves to exist?
If it exists, it must be of genuine use.
We migrated the site from Xara to WordPress and used the migration as an opportunity to reassess rather than simply reproduce. Content was reviewed, pruned and refined. The platform became a foundation rather than a constraint.
Instead of treating pages as isolated keyword opportunities, we built interconnected destination ecosystems. Commercial hub pages anchored by deep supporting content covering real journeys, driving conditions and destination experiences.
We looked beyond what travellers typed into Google and focused on what they were actually trying to accomplish. That shift changed the content we produced and how we structured it for both human readers and AI systems.
Every important destination received original visual assets: route maps, verified drive time graphics, airport gateway guides and difficulty-graded touring guides. Designed to make complex information easier to use, save and share.
We asked one question about every piece of content: would this still deserve to exist if Google did not reward it? That test shaped everything, including verified route details, drive times and practical warnings that no AI could generate from generic data.
We optimised not just for rankings but for whether AI systems would choose to cite the site. That meant information density, entity clarity and the kind of authoritative specificity that makes a source worth referencing.
As the rebuilt website expanded, its visibility began changing. New pages surfaced prominently in Google, some directly beneath AI Overviews. Commercial pages began appearing alongside significantly larger travel brands.
Xara to WordPress migration completed. Full content audit, pruning and architecture rebuild. First destination ecosystems developed with commercial hubs and supporting content.
New informational pages surfacing prominently in Google. First appearances alongside AI Overviews. Bing AI citation footprint begins growing across multiple destination ecosystems.
Citation footprint verified at 32,400 via Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance. Commercial pages surfacing alongside major travel brands. Google AI Overview appearances confirmed across multiple search intents.
Source: Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance · Microsoft Copilots and Partners
Digitalhound cannot see inside Google's or Microsoft's algorithms, and we will not pretend otherwise. Nor can we attribute 32,400 citations to one schema implementation, one content format or one optimisation technique.
The website changed substantially during this period. Its platform changed. Its architecture changed. Its content changed. Its usefulness changed. Its original assets expanded. Our interpretation is that the cumulative effect made GetCarHire.com a substantially better source of information for both travellers and the systems trying to answer their questions.
The objective is not to manufacture AI citations. It is to become a source worth citing.
That became the test for everything we published on GetCarHire.com. Genuinely useful content often begins where conventional keyword targeting ends. The objective was not simply to describe destinations. It was to remove uncertainty.
That meant verified drive times, route geography, road conditions, appropriate vehicle choices, airport gateways, seasonal considerations and practical warnings. On the White Mountains Scenic Drive, for example, we explicitly explain that visitors cannot drive through the Samaria Gorge. It is a 16km one way walk with onward transport logistics. That information exists because a traveller could reasonably misunderstand the journey. It is useful whether an algorithm rewards it or not.
One of the conclusions we have drawn from the GetCarHire project is that the increasingly common claim that SEO is dead misunderstands what is happening. Organic rankings still matter. We know because GetCarHire.com's organic rankings have improved alongside its AI visibility.
But rankings are no longer the entire search surface. A business can now appear in traditional organic results, within or alongside AI Overviews, as a cited source, inside conversational search experiences, and through platforms where the answer may be assembled before the customer ever visits a conventional results page.
For businesses, that introduces another measurement question. Not simply: where do we rank? But: when AI answers our customer's question, are we one of the sources it trusts enough to reference? We call that Citation Share.
That does not mean abandoning everything that worked before. It means understanding that technical SEO, content strategy, information architecture, brand authority and AI visibility increasingly need to work as one system.
GetCarHire.com is one example of what can happen when that philosophy is put into practice. The site is still a developing project and three months of evidence does not justify declaring victory. But the trajectory is difficult to ignore.
Is your business visible in the answers that increasingly sit between the search and the click?
Generative AI can produce enormous quantities of competent generic content. The more content AI can originate itself, the more valuable the things it cannot originate become: real experience, original information, verified facts and practical judgement.
Not where you rank. Whether AI names your business when someone asks a question you should be answering. GetCarHire.com now has a measurable Citation Share footprint in Bing. That number was zero three months ago.
When we started working with Digitalhound we had zero AI search citations. Within 3 months we had over 32,400 citations in Bing alone. I had no idea that was even possible.
Book a free 30-minute conversation. We will look at your current AI search visibility, tell you honestly what we see and give you a clear sense of what it would take to change it. No sales pitch. No pressure. Just a straight conversation.