AiEO

As a leading marketing agency for Canadian travel and tourism organizations, UpHouse needed a new strategy to attract new business through AI, moving from zero visibility to becoming a top-cited recommendation for prospective clients searching for marketing partners through AI tools.

Company Overview

In addition to creating AiEO, UpHouse is an award-winning marketing, public relations and talent agency that partners with in-house teams to elevate brands and deliver measurable impact. We are also a strategic marketing partner to travel and tourism brands that want to grow through standout positioning, creative storytelling and performance-driven strategy. We combine strategy, creative and content with public relations and AI visibility to help clients reach their audiences and grow. As a Certified B Corporation and CQCC Certified Diverse Supplier, UpHouse prioritizes inclusive practices and community-minded work.

The Challenge

In October 2025, UpHouse had a serious visibility issue in one of its most valuable verticals. Despite clear expertise in the travel and tourism category, UpHouse had 0% AI visibility in searches from our target clients. It meant that when travel and tourism marketers asked AI tools questions like :

• “What is the best destination marketing agency ?”
• “Who can help us build a tourism marketing strategy ?”
• “Which marketing agency specializes in travel and tourism ?”

UpHouse did not appear. Not as a citation. Not as a quote. Not as a recommended provider.

Unlike traditional SEO, this was not just about ranking. In AI-generated answers, brands are recommended only when AI tools can confidently understand and trust what the brand offers and can cite supporting content. UpHouse needed to create a new version of visibility.

The Solution

UpHouse applied the new AiEO Engine to its own marketing program in a two-part solution.

1. AiEO Engine Marketing Hub

UpHouse established the AiEO Engine inside a content-rich micro-site (UpHouse Marketing Hub ). It captured and answered the real questions travel and tourism buyers ask in AI tools.

The Marketing Hub became the central location of AI-optimized content aligned to UpHouse’s travel and tourism offering and credibility.

This hub now functions as a living content foundation, built to strengthen AI trust signals over time.

2. AiEO Optimize for Industry Page Foundations

After the Engine went live, AiEO identified a critical performance gap. Even with strong foundation articles and consistent publishing, the results were limited.

Why?

Because UpHouse’s key service and industry webpages still needed improvements to become a stronger foundation for AI citation and recommendation.

AiEO Optimize was introduced to overhaul the core industry offering pages and ensure UpHouse had the clarity, structure, and trust signals required for AI tools to confidently recommend the brand.

The Strategy

AiEO Engine is powerful, and it performs better when paired with page optimization that makes the business easy for AI tools to understand.

The work followed a staged strategy.

Stage 0: Benchmark Baseline Visibility

October 2025: UpHouse started at 0% visibility for travel and tourism AI discovery. This baseline was confirmed across AI tools through AiEO’s testing system and validated with external tools.

Stage 1: Launch AiEO Engine and Publish Foundation Content

November 2025 AiEO established :

• the AiEO Engine and its foundational content with a recurring publishing cadence
• a content hub structure designed to support AI citation behavior

This moved UpHouse from 0% visibility to 1.7% AI visibility.

It proved the AiEO Engine was working, but it also revealed the constraint. The Marketing Hub content needed a stronger core website foundation to anchor it.

Stage 2: Optimize Industry Pages to Become the AI Citation Foundation

December 2025 AiEO Optimize focused on:

• rebuilding website page structures to improve AI readability and citation confidence
• clarifying UpHouse’s travel and tourism value proposition
• strengthening trust signals so UpHouse could be recommended, not just mentioned

This is where the outcome changed dramatically. The AiEO Engine provided depth and consistency. AiEO Optimize provided clarity and credibility. Together, they created compounding results.

The Results

AI Visibility Results for Travel and Tourism Queries

Once the industry webpages were optimized, the UpHouse Marketing Hub content had the right foundation to be cited and referenced. AI tools began quoting UpHouse more frequently, citing UpHouse content more consistently, and recommending UpHouse more often.

By December 2025, UpHouse became the #2 most commonly recommended provider for travel and tourism marketing agency searches.

Inbound Impact

In December alone, UpHouse received four new inbound discovery requests. Before implementing AiEO Optimize and Engine, UpHouse received sporadic, infrequent and less-qualified inbound leads (roughly 1 inbound request every second month). This early impact suggests AiEO outperforms traditional SEO and paid acquisition benchmarks for the same audience.

We knew AI was changing discovery, but we did not realize we were missing from the conversation entirely. Once we paired the AiEO Engine with Optimize, it felt like UpHouse became the obvious answer for travel and tourism marketing.

Alex V | UpHouse CEO

Looking Ahead: The Future

UpHouse’s results represent what is possible when a brand commits to boosting its visibility in the places where buyers are making more and more decisions.

In the future, more travel and tourism decision-makers will use AI tools as their primary research layer. They will ask for recommended agencies, strategy partners and marketing support without ever reviewing a traditional list of websites.

Brands that win in this environment will be the ones that AI tools understand, trust and consistently cite.

For UpHouse, the next phase is about compounding the gains:

• Expanding the output on their AiEO content engine
• Continuing to optimize industry pages as gaps in visibility show up
• Improving the consistency of AI citations across all on-site resources

The outcome is clear. AiEO did not just improve visibility. It changed the inbound trajectory of the business.