Lake Rockets to #1 in AI Visibility for Vacation Rentals, Overtaking Airbnb

In just 21 days, Lake surged 15× in AI answer citations, dethroning Airbnb and Vrbo. Learn how our semantic-search strategy made LLMs choose Lake over billion-dollar competitors. 🚀

“Growth Marshal didn’t just move the needle — they turned it into a dial and cranked it to eleven. In three weeks we outranked the giants of our industry inside AI search.”

— David Ciccarelli, CEO, Lake

The Challenge

By early 2025, Lake.com—a vacation-rental platform focused on waterfront destinations—saw travelers shifting from Google to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude for trip planning. Absent from these AI answers, Lake needed to secure visibility where decisions were increasingly being made.

The Strategy

We built a multi-stage AI search plan targeting the entire traveler journey:

  • Research Stage: Developed semantically rich, entity-dense editorial guides (“Best Lakes for Canoeing,” “Best National Parks for Stargazing”) with LLM-optimized structured data for AI retrieval.

  • Comparison Stage: Created detailed, entity-heavy destination pages and utility content (“Hot Springs Vacation Rentals,” “Understanding the Booking Process”), embedding FAQs and schema to win comparative queries.

  • Post-Booking Stage: Produced hyper-local, structured experience guides (“Events in Gatlinburg,” “Anakeesta vs Ober Mountain”) to capture itinerary planning searches.

Behind every asset: dense entity relationships, optimized prompt surfaces, and AI-friendly schema markup.

The Results

  • AI visibility surged 33.5 points to 47%, topping Airbnb (41.9%) and Vrbo (28.7%).

  • U.S. AI citation share grew from 0.9% to 13.5% in three weeks.

  • For unbranded lake-house queries, Lake appeared in 50% of AI answers, outranking Vrbo and Expedia.

Google Search Console for Lake.com showing 5x increase in traffic

TryProfound Visibility Scores for Lake.com Increase Week-Over-Week

TryProfound Visibility Score Ranks Lake.com #1

TryProfound Shows Lake.com Taking Top Spot in Answer Engine Visibility

What Worked

  • Strong knowledge-graph and trust-signal foundation.

  • Intent-driven content roadmap aligned with real user prompts.

  • Semantic density and entity proximity baked into every page.

  • LLM-optimized structured data, including schema markup, FAQ JSON-LD, and a dedicated llms.txt endpoint.

Within weeks, AI crawlers were hitting Lake.com over 7,000 times per week—cementing it as a top-cited travel brand in AI search.

“Kurt 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