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The DMO Website Isn’t Dying. It's Job Description Is Changing.

Updated: 1 day ago

The edge of 'we've always done it this way.'
The edge of 'we've always done it this way.'

Why DMOs Need to Stop Thinking Like Website Operators and Start Thinking Like Destination Intelligence Platforms


There’s a conversation happening in our industry right now that I think many people might be getting wrong. Or at least, they’re oversimplifying it.


The hot take goes something like this: "DMO websites are becoming obsolete. AI is going to replace them. Website traffic is a vanity metric." Or something to this extent.


And look, I get the instinct. The data supports some of it. Traffic patterns are shifting. Travelers are increasingly getting answers from AI tools, social platforms, and conversational interfaces before they ever land on visitwhatever.com. According to Sojern’s State of Destination Marketing 2026 report, 51% of DMOs say they’re concerned or actively preparing for AI-driven search disruption. That’s more than half the industry raising their hand and saying, "Yeah, we see what’s coming."


But here’s where I think the conversation goes sideways: the assumption that because the website is becoming less central, it’s becoming less important. Those are two very different things.


The Website Isn’t Dying. The Model Is.

I was watching a recent episode of the Destination Discourse podcast, where Stuart Butler from Visit Myrtle Beach Beach and Adam Stoker from Brand Revolt were doing a session at the South Carolina Governor’s Conference. Toward the end, someone in the audience asked the question that I think is on a lot of people’s minds: "What’s the future of the DMO website?"


Stuart was refreshingly honest. He said his opinion has evolved. A couple of years ago, he would have told you the DMO website would be obsolete in two years. Now he thinks the trajectory is the same, but human adoption of AI is going to be a bit slower than he originally predicted. It’s not a question of if, he said. It’s a question of when.


But it was Adam Stoker’s short-term, medium-term, long-term breakdown that got my attention. To summarize:


Short-term: If your website is primarily general information and a listings driven experience, it’s already facing headwinds. It might be feeding Google searches, but beyond that, it’s probably not moving the needle much.


Medium-term: DMOs need to figure out how to create meaningful, owned content and make their websites sticky enough to actually inspire someone to book. The challenge is that most websites weren't originally designed with that goal in mind.


Long-term: All that content and data becomes a repository that large language models and AI agents pull from to make recommendations. The website stops functioning as a consumer-facing destination and starts functioning as the intelligence layer underneath everything else.


That long-term vision? I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. And I think it’s closer than most people realize.


We’ve Seen This Pattern Before

Before anyone panics, I think it’s worth stepping back and acknowledging something: we’ve watched this exact movie play out multiple times in our industry. I've been in this space for nearly 16 years and have experienced it first hand. The technology changes, the timeline predictions get breathless and dramatic, and then adoption follows a much more human pace than anyone expected.


Think about social media. Around 2012 and 2013, the narrative was that social platforms were going to replace destination websites entirely. Every conference had a session about building your Facebook strategy, and the hot take was that nobody was going to visit your website anymore when they could just follow you on social. That didn't happen, at least not in the way people predicted. But social absolutely changed the role that websites play. It shifted where discovery and inspiration happen, and it forced DMOs to rethink what their website was actually for.


Same story with mobile. By 2014 and 2015, the panic was all about responsive design and mobile-first everything. Google rolled out its mobile-friendly algorithm update and suddenly every conference session was about "Mobilegeddon" and how mobile was going to kill desktop booking practically overnight. It took close to a decade for mobile to become the dominant way people researched and booked travel. But it did happen. And the DMOs that started optimizing early were in a fundamentally better position when the tipping point arrived.


AI is following the same curve, just compressed tighter. The direction is clear. The timeline is going to be longer than the clickbait suggests. But if you’re not preparing now, you’re going to be caught flat-footed when adoption tips. And based on where the technology is today, I think that tipping point is closer than a lot of people in our industry are comfortable admitting.


So the move isn’t to panic. And it’s definitely not to ignore it. The move is to get on the surfboard now, while the wave is still building, so you’re ready to ride it instead of getting pulled under.


This Isn’t New. We Just Weren’t Ready to Hear It.

About three years ago, I gave an industry presentation about DMOs needing to shift their identity and thinking in two fundamental ways: becoming data aggregators and becoming publishers.


The data aggregator piece was about ownership. For years, DMOs have essentially been leasing their marketing audiences. You buy media, you run campaigns through platforms, and when the campaign ends, you don’t own any of that data. The audiences belong to Meta, or Google, or whatever DSP or provider you’re running through. I argued, along with others, that DMOs needed to start collecting and owning their own first-party data, their own destination intelligence, rather than renting it from others.


The publisher piece was about storytelling. DMOs are uniquely positioned to tell their destination’s story at a level of depth and authenticity that AI would have a hard time replicating on its own. The chef who sources from the local farm. The hidden trail that only locals know about. The seasonal event that makes November the best time to visit. That’s not information you get from an algorithm.


That comes from people who live and breathe the destination every day.

When I gave that presentation, I think most people in the room nodded along and thought, "Yeah, that makes sense." But not many knew what to actually do about it. And honestly, the technology wasn’t quite there yet to make it operational.


Now it is. And the urgency has caught up.


What’s Actually Replacing the Website Experience

Here's the thing that I think gets lost in the 'websites are dead' conversation: the human desire to explore, dream, and be inspired isn't going anywhere. That’s primal travel behavior. People are still going to want to browse and discover and get excited about a trip. Planning the trip is sometimes the best part. What’s changing is where and how that happens.


I see a few things converging:


AI-powered conversational experiences. Whether that’s a chatbot on a DMO’s site, content surfacing in ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews, or an AI concierge that deeply knows a destination, the "explore and be inspired" moment is shifting from scrolling to conversation. "I’ve got two kids under 10, we love outdoor stuff, and we’re coming in late October. What should we do?" That interaction is going to serve travelers so much better than browsing through 400 restaurant listings on a website. The 400 listings made sense when the goal was ranking in search results. When the goal is answering a traveler's specific question, they're just noise.


Social platforms as the new inspiration layer. This one’s already happening. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube are where most discovery occurs for younger travelers. As the Watauga Group’s 2026 destination marketing trends report noted, travelers now trust social platforms, user-generated content, and creator-led storytelling more than traditional channels to evaluate a destination. The dreaming happens there, not on the DMO homepage.


Distributed presence over centralized websites. Instead of trying to pull everyone to one URL, the smart play becomes making sure your destination’s story, data, experiences and recommendations show up everywhere travelers already are: in AI answers, social feeds, mapping apps, and booking platforms. Stuart Butler made this exact point in the Destination Discourse session. He said DMOs need to build an "army of content creators" producing first-person, experiential, unique content. Not the top-level stuff that Expedia and Google already know. The individualized stories that cater to a specific traveler with specific interests asking a specific question through an AI agent.


Sojern’s data backs this up. Their report found that 31% of DMOs now expect their website to become a "source of truth" for AI-generated answers rather than a direct consumer destination. That’s probably the right way to think about it. The website doesn’t disappear. It transforms from the place travelers go to the data layer that feeds every place travelers actually are.


The Real Risk: Losing Authority by Playing It Safe

One of the things Stuart said during the Destination Discourse session that really stuck with me was this:

"I think the biggest risk right now is actually not taking a risk, not trying something new because everything’s changing."

He went further and said something I thought was pretty profound. He flipped the old insanity quote. He said the definition of insanity used to be doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Now, he thinks the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting the same result, because everything around us is changing so fast that the status quo is actually the most dangerous position.


I think that applies directly to the website conversation. If your DMO is still measuring success primarily by website traffic and partner referral clicks, you’re measuring the old model. And the longer you keep optimizing for that old model, the further behind you’re going to fall when the shift really accelerates.


As Jason Linder from Ripe pointed out a couple years ago, we’re moving from an age of information to an age of answers. Travelers don’t want to be overwhelmed with all the possibilities. They want a tailored itinerary for their interests, their budget, their travel dates. DMOs that position themselves as the authoritative source feeding those answers will thrive. DMOs that keep build for the old discovery model probably won’t. And look, that model made sense. It's what search engines rewarded and what partners expected. The problem isn't that DMOs built the wrong thing. It's that the goalposts have moved.


But here’s the critical nuance: that authority doesn’t happen automatically. As Linder also noted, if DMOs don’t actively position themselves to maintain their authority, they risk being one of the primary sources AI pulls from while losing all attribution for their content and expertise.


You become the invisible backbone with zero credit. That’s a terrible outcome.


From Website Operators to Destination Intelligence Hubs

So what does this actually look like in practice? I think the shift can be described pretty simply:

DMOs need to go from being website operators to being destination intelligence hubs.

That means a few things.


First, it means owning your data. Not just having analytics dashboards, but building a genuine first-party knowledge base of everything that makes your destination unique. Your events, your hidden gems, your seasonal rhythms, your local voices, your visitor patterns. All of it structured, maintained, and ready to be accessed by AI systems.


Second, it means investing in content that AI can’t easily replicate. The Expedias and the Googles of the world know the top-level facts about your destination. They know your hotel inventory and your major attractions. What they don’t know is what it feels like to be there. They don’t know the stories. Stuart used the example of his sons driving an hour and a half to a mall in Florence, South Carolina because a Chinese restaurant at the food court had gone viral on TikTok for overfilling noodle containers. That’s the kind of experiential, human, slightly weird content that drives real travel decisions. DMOs need to be creating that content constantly.


Third, and this is where I think the biggest operational gap exists, it means having the AI infrastructure to actually activate all of that knowledge. Most DMOs are sitting on incredible destination expertise, but it’s trapped in PDFs, in people’s heads, in scattered website pages, in systems that don’t talk to each other. You need a layer that can take all of that institutional knowledge and make it accessible, both internally for your team’s efficiency and externally as the "source of truth" that AI agents and LLMs pull from when travelers ask questions about your destination.


What This Looks Like on Monday Morning

I think one of the problems with a lot of these conversations about the future of DMO websites is they stay conceptual. So here's what I'd actually be thinking about if I were running a DMO marketing team right now.


One thing I'd do today is go ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini about my destination. Just see what comes back. Is it accurate? Is it your content or someone else's? If the answer is generic or outdated, that tells you something important: your destination intelligence isn't showing up where it needs to be. It's probably the simplest gut check any of us can do right now.


I'd also start thinking about content more like a knowledge base than a blog archive. Most of us publish content and it just sits there getting older. In the world we're talking about, that content probably needs to be maintained, updated, and organized more like a living database. Because when an AI agent pulls your info and it's two years outdated, that's probably worse than not being there at all.


The other thing I'd be looking at is whether my content is structured for machines, not just humans. That doesn't mean making it less readable. It just means making sure your unique local knowledge isn't buried inside a PDF nobody can find or a video with no transcript. Clean data, consistent formatting, schema markup. The basics, but I think most of us haven't done them with AI in mind yet.


And probably most importantly, I'd be prioritizing depth over breadth. Google already knows your hotel inventory. Expedia already has your top 10 attractions.

Every LLM already has that surface-level info. What they don't have is the hyper-local, experiential, first-person content that only your team can create. That's the content that makes your data layer irreplaceable. That's where the real value is.


None of this requires a massive budget or a complete rebuild. It's more about shifting how you think about the content and data you're already producing.


This Is a More Important Role, Not a Smaller One

I want to be clear about something because I think there’s a fear embedded in this conversation. When people hear "the website is becoming less relevant," what they sometimes hear is "DMOs are becoming less relevant." That’s the opposite of what’s happening.


If the future is AI agents helping travelers plan and book trips based on pulling information from authoritative sources, then being that authoritative source for your destination is arguably the most important and defensible position a DMO has ever held. You’re not just running a website anymore. You’re powering every AI-driven travel interaction that involves your destination, across every platform, every device, every language.


That’s a bigger job, not a smaller one. But it requires a fundamentally different set of tools, skills, and infrastructure than what most DMOs have today.

The DMOs that figure this out first aren’t just going to survive the shift. They’re going to own it. And their elected officials, their stakeholders, their communities are going to see the value clearly, because it won’t be measured in website clicks anymore. It’ll be measured in whether travelers actually choose their destination when an AI agent presents the options.


That’s the metric that matters now. And if we’re being honest with each other, most of us aren’t set up to measure it yet. But recognizing that is the first step.


The Bottom Line

As I've said before, what’s changing isn’t what DMOs do. It’s how they do it.

The DMO website isn’t dying. But the era of the website as the centerpiece of destination marketing strategy? That’s wrapping up, probably at a pace that feels slower than the headlines suggest but faster than most of us are preparing for. Just like mobile. Just like social. The pattern is the same. The stakes are higher.

What replaces it isn’t nothing. It’s something bigger: an always-on destination intelligence layer that feeds AI agents, powers conversational experiences, supports social discovery, and maintains the DMO’s role as the authoritative voice of the destination.


Two or three years ago, I called this the shift to "data aggregator and publisher." Today, I’d probably call it the shift to "destination intelligence platform." The words have changed. The idea hasn’t.


The question for every DMO leader right now isn’t whether this shift is happening. It’s whether you’re going to be ahead of it or behind it. On the surfboard riding the wave, or struggling to stay afloat.


I know where I’d rather be.


Sources & References


 
 
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