This is a featured article as part of a paid partnership with Creatim.

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The Challenge: The Reality of Declining Organic Traffic

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By early 2025, many DMOs were quietly contending with falling traffic to their national portals. AI chatbots and Google’s Search Generative Experience had begun providing answers directly on the results page, reducing the need for users to click through to destination websites. 

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For organisations that had invested heavily in their digital presence, this shift represented a fundamental disruption to how they reached potential visitors. Slovenia’s official portal, slovenia.info, proved a notable case. Defying broader industry patterns, the platform achieved a 9% year-on-year growth in organic traffic during a period when many destination marketing organisations reported mixed results ranging from significant decline to continued growth.

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The Strategy: Don’t Just Feed AI, Own it

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The Slovenian Tourist Board, working with Creatim’s ScoutBuddy platform and a destination-specific CMS, recognised that generic AI tools draw their answers from whichever sources the internet treats as most authoritative. Their response was to engineer slovenia.info to become a primary reference for Slovenian tourism. 

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By doing so, they positioned slovenia.info so that when ChatGPT or Gemini formulates a response about Slovenia, it is more likely to draw from their content. This strategy was built on three interconnected pillars. 

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1. Technical Excellence as a Foundation

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A well-designed website is no longer sufficient on its own. To remain visible in an AI-mediated search environment, slovenia.info was built around three technical priorities. 

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The first priority was Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), ensuring fast load speeds and a mobile-first architecture to allow AI bots to crawl the website efficiently and credit it as an authoritative source. Such technical grounding forms the essential foundation upon which all other visibility depends. 

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The second focused on accessibility, by building to WCAG standards, the STB gained a significant SEO advantage because Google increasingly prioritises accessible and inclusive experience as a ranking signal. Accessibility transformed from a standard compliance requirement into a highly measurable competitive asset. 

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The third focus was content specificity. While generic destination sites compete for broad and high-volume terms, the STB concentrated on creating content for precise long-tail queries. Examples include family-friendly hikes near Lake Bled that AI systems are less likely to answer reliably from generalised training data. Targeting these exact queries successfully captures rich and high-intent traffic that broader content strategies consistently miss. 

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2. Alma: The Destination-Specific Expert

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General-purpose AI tools frequently lack the local nuance that destination marketing demands. Alma, built on the ScoutBuddy platform, bridges that gap by training exclusively on Slovenian tourism data. Over the course of 2025, the system evolved from a hybrid search tool into a fully conversational planning advisor capable of building hour-by-hour itineraries, integrating voice input for mobile users, surfacing real-time parking and transport data and connecting to Outdooractive routes. Such broad capabilities transformed the platform into a highly practical tool for active and logistically minded travellers alike. 

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The true competitive advantage lies in how Alma builds its knowledge base. External AI models typically draw from the open web, whereas Alma operates through genuine collaboration with local partners across the entire Slovenian tourism ecosystem. Deep stakeholder alignment allows the assistant to surface insights on local customs, niche experiences and operational details that generalist models are rarely able to provide. The outcome is expert-level service delivered on-site around the clock. In recognition of these achievements, Alma was named Travel Tech Project of the Year at the Game Changer Awards 2025. 

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3. The “AI-Proof” Content Ecosystem 

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Technical strength establishes a portal's authority, while high-quality content sustains it. The STB’s editorial approach was built around experience-based storytelling featuring interviews with local chefs, sports celebrities and artisans. Such narratives create an emotional connection and a layer of authenticity that AI-generated text tends to struggle with. Material of that nature is not widely found elsewhere online, making it both editorially distinctive and strategically defensible. 

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A destination-specific CMS underpins these efforts by giving the marketing team the flexibility to bypass technical bottlenecks entirely. Campaign landing pages could be launched and real-time event data updated instantly without depending on development resources. In a content environment where freshness matters, such operational agility kept the portal consistently ahead of the static training data drawn upon by AI models. 

Actionable Steps for DMO Heads

1. Conduct a Technical Audit: Assess whether your site is WCAG-compliant and optimised for GEO. These are now baseline requirements for AI visibility, not optional improvements. 
2. Invest in a DMO-Specific CMS: Generic platforms limit your ability to move quickly. A purpose-built CMS gives marketing teams direct control over content and campaign deployment. 
3. Deploy a Collaborative AI Agent: A conversational tool built on local knowledge, developed in close collaboration with tourism partners, can deliver visitor value that general-purpose models often struggle to match, keeping your destination relevant in an AI-mediated planning environment.  

About ScoutBuddy: Developed by Creatim, ScoutBuddy is a destination AI platform that runs on a collaborative data model, local tourism partners contribute hyper-local information directly, building a knowledge base with a depth of local insight that general AI tools rarely hold. It supports seven languages, serves hundreds of simultaneous users and gives LTOs analytics on what visitors are actually asking.