How United Airlines Uses Generative AI to Boost their SEO

United Airlines is getting tens of thousands of clicks per month from Google - and rising - by using generative AI to summarize their internal search results pages.

Here's an example for the keyword "united economy vs basic economy":

I imagine the basic-economy.html page is what United had prior to the /website-search/ page getting indexed, so by now having two pages ranking for this keyword, they fend off sites like Nerdwallet and Reddit from potentially taking clicks and pushing those searchers to other airlines after reading the content on their pages.

In total, United is ranking for about 2,700 keywords on page 1 of Google with this. Although most of the keywords are branded (containing "United", "UA", etc.), which they'd rank for anyway without their /website-search/ pages being indexed, having these pages allows them to take up more real estate on Google to control the conversation instead of letting others define them.

Here's what United is doing specifically

They're using a generative AI service called Coveo to summarize their search results, adding a block of text at the top of the page. As the video on Coveo's website states, "Coveo uses a mix of semantic search to retrieve the most relevant snippets from the document below and then passes that to a LLM to generate an easy to understand answer."

If you look at the Network tab of Developer Tools while the page loads, you'll see an event stream from Coveo with the genAI answer.

This page gets indexed and ranks for "united airlines polaris".

United includes the /website-search/ page in its XML sitemap, but just the root of the page. There's no additional entries with search terms. I'm not sure how exactly Google is finding all their pages with search terms. United doesn't list the location of their XML sitemap in their robots.txt file and I only found sitemap.xml by guessing its location. There may be more XML sitemaps they have.

<url>
<loc>https://www.united.com/en/us/website-search</loc>
</url>        

Should you start using generative AI to summarize your search results too?

In 2007, Matt Cutts, Google's then head of search quality, in his blog post "Search results within search results", held the view that:

search results that don’t add much value already fall under our quality guidelines (e.g. 'Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.' and 'Avoid 'doorway' pages created just for search engines, or other 'cookie cutter' approaches…'), so Google does take action to reduce the impact of those pages in our index.

Do United's /website-search/ pages add value? I'd say the AI-summarized answer does. They're not "substantially duplicated content" or "cookie cutter" either, although it's possible if similar United search queries result in similar answers, it could be.

Are they doorway pages? Not necessarily. If the AI-summarized answer does answer the question, these pages aren't a doorway to another page.

So as long as AI-summarized answers at the top of your search results pages genuinely add value, I think it's ok. What do you think? Sound off in the comments.