Lake Rockets to #1 in AI Visibility, Overtaking Airbnb
Case Studies >> Lake
26.4%
⏐
Growth in AI citation share
47%
⏐
Visibility in relevant AI answers
3 weeks
⏐
Using Base (Accelerated)
“In three weeks, we outranked the giants of our industry inside AI search.”
David Ciccarelli
CEO & Founder, Lake
Introduction
Company Overview
Lake.com is a vacation rental platform offering lake houses, cabins and cottages for rent. Their on a mission to build the next-generation platform for outdoor travel. The platform is two-sided vacation-rental marketplace built around “life by the water,” helping travelers discover and book lake-side vacation properties while giving hosts tools, guides, and PMS integrations to manage listings across North America (and Europe – coming soon)!
Lake
David & Stephanie C.
Marketplace
Lake-side rentals
Yes! ✅
lake.com
Company:
Founders:
Platform:
Industry:
Still loving lake life:
Website:
Check out how easy it is to book a lake-front vacation. How it works ->
Travelers were asking LLMs for vacation advice, and Lake.com was nowhere to be found.
Challenge
Lake.com—a vacation-rental platform focused on waterfront destinations—started to notice travelers shifting from Google to LLMs for trip planning. Absent from these AI answers, Lake needed to secure visibility where decisions were increasingly being made. According to Lake’s CEO David Ciccarelli, “by early 2025, I saw a new challenge looming: travelers were asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews for vacation advice, and Lake.com was rarely mentioned. I knew we could no longer rely solely on ranking high on search results pages — we needed to be inside the AI answers themselves.”
Lake managed content. Growth Marshal led knowledge graph linking and AI-optimized schema creation. It turned out to be a winning combo.
Solution
Together, we engineered content and schema markup specifically for how LLMs parse, cite, and answer travel prompts. We mapped real conversational “micro-moments” (“I want to know,” “I want to go,” “I want to do”), benchmarked where Lake.com was and wasn’t appearing, and then aligned new and existing pages to those intents.
Practically, that meant doubling down on destination and event-driven guides (e.g., fishing tournaments, festivals, antique boat shows), adding evergreen “drive-to” lake content near major cities, and filling obvious topical gaps like seasonal travel and family ideas. Each piece was built to be answerable: tightly structured narratives, embedded FAQs, and optimized schema markup that made it easy for models to extract entities and facts at the exact moment a user asked.
We also re-tooled the middle- and bottom-of-funnel experience with utility content that reduces ambiguity during comparison and booking: information-dense destination pages, how-to explainers, and a “Guest Center” that exposed product-level differentiators with lo-fi screenshots.
On the technical layer, Growth Marshal implemented robust JSON-LD, reinforced entity coverage by rewriting dozens of pages, and added an llms.txt endpoint to invite ChatGPT/Anthropic/Perplexity crawlers. Overall, it was a systematic shift away from “keyword ranking” and toward “retrieval” as an authoritative answer source.
The results were outstanding. Within weeks, Lake.com was #1 in AI visibility, surpassing both Airbnb and VRBO.
Results
Data sourced from Profound
Data sourced from Profound
AI visibility exploded. Lake’s citation rate leapt 33.5 points to 47%—topping Airbnb’s 41.9% and Vrbo’s 28.7%. In just three weeks, Lake.com multiplied its U.S. AI answer share fifteenfold, jumping from 0.9% to 13.5%. For unbranded lake-house searches, Lake surfaced in roughly half of all AI-generated answers, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with industry giants like Vrbo and Expedia.
We sat back and watched Lake’s footprint in AI-generated vacation-rental answers climb from third place to undisputed category leader over Airbnb and Vrbo by July 5, 2025. Today, Lake dominates key thematic lanes—Brand, Pricing & Fees, Comparisons, and Integrations—signaling a decisive expansion of its visibility and authority in AI-driven travel recommendations.
Data sourced from Profound
“Growth Marshal rewired the way AI sees us. We’re living at the top of ChatGPT’s answers, our content gets name checked by Claude, and customers arrive on our site already trusting us. It’s the most leverage we’ve ever had from a marketing engagement. And it happened in three weeks.”
— Stephanie Ciccarelli, CMO, Lake
