Beyond Google: where travelers discover outdoor activities in 2026
Google is losing ground. Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily enough that the numbers tell a clear story. Searches in January and February 2026 dropped 1.2% compared to the same months in 2025. And 2025 itself saw a 6.8% decline from 2024. That adds up to roughly an 8% drop in two years.
If you run a rafting company, a fishing guide service, or any kind of outdoor recreation business, you’ve probably been asking “how do I rank higher on Google” for years. The better question now: where are my future customers actually looking, and am I there.
They’re looking everywhere. TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Each of these has taken a real share of how people find and book outdoor activities. Google still matters. But treating it as your only channel is a bet that gets worse every quarter.
Tiktok changed how trip planning starts
The numbers on TikTok and travel are hard to argue with. 77% of TikTok users say the platform influenced their last trip purchase. Not awareness. Not interest. The actual decision to book.
About 52.5 million people in the U.S. have traveled to a new destination after seeing it on TikTok. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, only 46% start searches on Google anymore. 21% go to TikTok first. For local searches and recommendations, over 40% of Gen Z prefers TikTok to Google entirely.
The behavior on TikTok doesn’t look like a Google search. People don’t type a query and compare ten blue links. They scroll. A 15-second clip of someone hitting a wave on the Ocoee catches their eye, they save it, and they circle back days later when they’re planning a weekend. Travel videos on TikTok get saved at 40 times the rate they get commented on. That save button is the new bookmark.
The speed from discovery to booking is compressed, too. 59% of TikTok users who book a trip after finding it on TikTok do so within one week. Someone sees your river, your trail, your lodge, and they’re pulling out a credit card days later.
If you aren’t producing short video and posting it on TikTok, you’re invisible to a large and growing segment of trip planners. You don’t need a production crew. You need a phone in a waterproof case and someone willing to press record during the best 15 seconds of each trip.
The content that works on TikTok isn’t what you’d put in an ad. It’s the unpolished stuff. A guide helping a first-timer into a kayak. The look on someone’s face when they hook a fish. A time-lapse of fog burning off a river at 7am. People scroll past anything that feels like a commercial. They stop for anything that feels real.
Youtube is a search engine that happens to play video
Most outdoor business owners think of YouTube as a place for polished long-form content they’ll never have time to produce. That’s not quite right.
YouTube has 3.7 million travel channels. Travel content pulled in 593 billion views in the first half of 2025, with 64% quarter-over-quarter growth. For context, that’s more views in six months than most written travel content gets in a decade. People are watching travel video at a scale that makes blog readership look small.
YouTube also matters for AI search in ways most operators don’t realize. When AI tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity generate answers about outdoor activities and destinations, they increasingly cite YouTube content. YouTube’s citation share in AI search went from 31.2% in October 2025 to 45.9% by February 2026. That’s visibility on YouTube and a path into AI-generated answers across platforms.
YouTube Shorts, the platform’s short-video format, works well for discovery. Short travel videos of 15 seconds or less get roughly four times more views than longer content. If you’re already filming clips during trips, those same clips can go on both YouTube Shorts and TikTok.
So film short clips of your trips. Upload them with keyword-rich titles and descriptions. A title like “What a half-day raft trip on the Nantahala actually looks like” gets found by people searching YouTube and may get cited by AI tools answering questions about Nantahala rafting. Our post on video content and SEO for outdoor businesses breaks down how this works in more detail.
Reddit is where people go when they don’t trust marketing
Reddit has quietly become one of the most trusted sources for travel recommendations. People append “reddit” to their Google searches because they want opinions from actual humans, not sales copy. “Best rafting in Colorado reddit” is a search query that real people type every week.
That trust has spilled into AI search. In January 2026, Reddit held the top spot for social citation share in AI search at 31.1%, before YouTube overtook it the following month. When someone asks Perplexity or ChatGPT for recommendations, threads from relevant subreddits frequently appear in the answer.
This doesn’t mean you should flood Reddit with self-promotion. That will get you banned and hurt your reputation. It means your past and current guests are probably already talking about you on Reddit, and those conversations feed both human readers and AI systems.
Search “your town + your activity + reddit” and see what comes up. You might find a thread from last summer where someone asked about the best outfitter in your area. Maybe a past guest recommended you by name. Maybe they recommended a competitor. Either way, those threads show up when AI tools generate recommendations, and they show up when the next person searches the same question.
If you want to get involved directly, contribute useful local knowledge. Answer questions about river conditions, trail difficulty, what to pack for a specific season. Be helpful first. Your business name in your profile does the work. Encouraging guests to share their experiences online, including on Reddit, gives your business a presence in the one place people go specifically to cut through the marketing.
AI tools are becoming the new travel agents
About 40% of travelers globally already use AI tools for trip planning. Not casual browsing. Actual planning: comparing destinations, building itineraries, finding activities, checking prices. And travel is one of the top categories people use AI search for, which makes sense if you think about it. Trip planning is exactly the kind of complicated, multi-step research that AI tools are good at.
Perplexity launched a dedicated travel hub with hotel booking through TripAdvisor and Selfbook. When someone asks “what are the best guided fishing trips near Bozeman,” Perplexity pulls from the top 30 search results, weighs review sites and local sources, and generates a direct answer. If your website, Google Business Profile, and TripAdvisor listing are solid, you can show up in that answer.
Google AI Overviews are changing how people interact with travel search results, too. Queries are getting longer and more conversational. Someone who used to type “rafting Asheville” now types “what’s the best family rafting trip near Asheville for kids under 10.” AI Overviews pull answers from top-ranking pages. If your site doesn’t answer those specific, longer questions, you won’t be part of the response.
ChatGPT works differently from Google’s AI Overviews. It pulls from Bing’s index, Google Business Profile data, and review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Perplexity does something similar, weighting local sources and reviews heavily. Bottom line: you need to be present and consistent across multiple platforms. A rafting company with a complete Google Business Profile, strong TripAdvisor reviews, and detailed trip pages on its own site is far more likely to surface in AI answers than one with only a good website.
The operators who’ve been doing solid SEO work are better positioned than they realize. AI tools pull from existing web content. Your well-structured trip pages, your FAQ sections, your guest reviews on Google and TripAdvisor, your YouTube videos. All of it feeds the systems that generate AI answers. Our post on AI search and outdoor businesses goes deeper on how to optimize for this.
Instagram reels still matter, especially for an older audience
Instagram isn’t new to anyone. But Reels has changed the platform’s role in travel discovery.
Reels now reaches over two billion monthly users and accounts for roughly half of all time spent on Instagram. 70% of Instagram users say they use the platform to discover products and services. Outfitters using Reels report discovery and booking results that compete with paid advertising.
For outdoor businesses, Reels works similarly to TikTok: short, visual clips of real trips get saved and shared. The difference is audience. Instagram skews slightly older and broader than TikTok, which means you reach people who might not be on TikTok at all. A fishing guide posting 30-second Reels of guests landing trout on the South Platte is building a library of content that works as both marketing and social proof.
And the same clips you shoot for TikTok and YouTube Shorts work on Instagram Reels. One recording session, three platforms, three chances to reach someone planning a trip to your area.
Same-day booking is rising because of mobile discovery
Same-day bookings accounted for 10% of all outdoor activity bookings in 2025, up from previous years. And the reason is everything above: mobile-first, social-first discovery.
Someone scrolling TikTok at a coffee shop in Gatlinburg sees a clip of whitewater rafting ten miles away. They tap the profile, find a booking link, and reserve a spot for that afternoon. Discovery to booking in minutes, on a phone, through a platform that isn’t Google.
If your booking process isn’t set up for this kind of snap decision, you’re losing these customers. Your website needs to load fast on mobile. Your booking flow can’t require more than a few taps. Your social profiles need a direct link to your booking page, not your homepage.
Think about what happens when someone lands on your site from TikTok on their phone. If they have to pinch and zoom, or if the booking widget takes six seconds to load, or if you send them to a separate third-party page that asks them to create an account, they’re gone. They’ll book with whoever’s link worked fastest. We covered why mobile-first design matters for outdoor businesses if you want to audit your own setup.
Where this leaves you
The way people discover outdoor activities has fragmented. Google is still the biggest single channel, but it’s not the only one that matters, and its share is shrinking. If your entire marketing strategy depends on Google, you’re leaving customers on the table. More each year.
Younger travelers find you on TikTok and Instagram. People doing deeper research watch YouTube and read Reddit. AI tools pull from all of these, plus your website and review profiles, to generate the recommendations that increasingly replace the first page of search results.
You don’t need to master every platform at once. But you do need to stop treating marketing as “our website plus Google.” Here’s a reasonable starting point:
- Film short clips during trips and post them on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.
- Keep your Google Business Profile and TripAdvisor listing complete and current.
- Write specific, question-answering content on your website that AI tools can pull from and cite.
- Encourage guests to share their experiences on review platforms and social media, including Reddit.
If you need a starting point for what to write on your site, our post on what to blog about for outdoor businesses walks through the process from scratch.
People are out there right now planning trips to your area. They’re asking ChatGPT, scrolling TikTok, reading Reddit threads. Some of them will book with you this season, and some will book with a competitor. The difference, more and more, is which business shows up where those people are looking.
None of this requires a large budget. A phone that shoots video. A willingness to post regularly. A website that answers specific questions. Review profiles that are complete and current. That’s the baseline now. Google is still part of it, but it’s no longer the whole thing.
