AI search visibility: Adobe and Heathrow take on the AI-first travel journey
Adobe and Heathrow Airport have extended their partnership, putting Adobe’s agentic AI and customer-experience orchestration technology at the centre of the airport’s digital transformation. Heathrow — which handles about 84.5 million passengers a year — will run a new website on Adobe CX Enterprise, and will use one of its components, Adobe Brand Visibility, to keep its content discoverable and accurate in AI-powered search such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity AI.
The release names no contract value or term. It is, in effect, a flagship reference: a high-profile travel brand adopting two of Adobe’s newest products at once. The more interesting story is the problem those products address — the migration of discovery from search engines to AI answers, and what that does to a brand’s relationship with its customers.
What the deal covers
Heathrow’s website, which draws more than 50 million visitors a year, will run on Adobe CX Enterprise, an end-to-end agentic AI system for customer-experience orchestration. Within it, Adobe Experience Manager will manage and deliver the airport’s content, and Adobe Brand Visibility will track and improve how that content appears across AI platforms.
The stated goal is consistency: the same reliable, accurate Heathrow information whether a passenger visits the website or asks an AI assistant a question. “Working with Adobe, we are able to make sure that passengers get the right information whether they are on our website or querying via an LLM,” said Stephen Glenfield, Heathrow’s head of digital. Nathan Hancock, Adobe’s vice president for the UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa, framed it around a shift in behaviour: content must now be “visible and accurate in a world where AI is increasingly the first stop on the travel journey.”
Why AI search visibility is the story
For two decades, brands optimised for search engines: they competed for rankings, and they measured success in clicks and sessions. AI assistants break that model. A traveller who asks ChatGPT or Gemini how to reach central London from Heathrow may never visit the airport’s website — they get an answer, and the brand either appears in it or does not. The shift is structural, not cosmetic. Search engines ranked pages and sent traffic; AI assistants synthesise an answer and often send none. That changes what a brand must optimise: not a page’s position, but whether its facts are the ones the model repeats. AI search visibility, in other words, is less about being found and more about being the source a model trusts.
That is the gap Brand Visibility targets. Adobe describes the product as a generative-engine-optimisation (GEO) tool, or answer-engine optimisation, that measures when, where and how often a brand is mentioned in AI answers, benchmarks it against competitors, and recommends content and technical fixes to raise its citation share. It tracks sentiment and position, and it links visibility to referral traffic and conversions.
The stakes are commercial. Adobe’s own research claims that AI traffic to United States retail sites rose 269% year over year as of March 2026, that one in four consumers now use AI platforms as a primary source of information for travel decisions, and that customers arriving via agentic search convert at higher rates. Adobe also forecasts a decline in brands’ organic search traffic by 2028. These are company figures, not independent findings, but they point in a consistent direction: discovery is moving, and brands that are not in the answers lose the first moment of consideration.
Who Adobe is here
Adobe launched CX Enterprise at its Summit conference in April 2026, calling it an end-to-end agentic AI system that unifies AI agents, agent skills and Model Context Protocol endpoints under a governance layer. It reports more than 20,000 brands on its platform, and it has rebranded its customer-experience business as “customer experience orchestration” — a signal that it intends to own the orchestration narrative as marketing and CRM converge.
Brand Visibility, launched in June 2026, is where the AI-search story lives. It combines Adobe’s LLM Optimizer with the AI-visibility data of Semrush, which Adobe acquired, drawing on a database of nearly 300 million AI search prompts. Adobe moved quickly after closing the Semrush deal to fold its search intelligence into the product — an acquisition that also removed an independent provider from the market and made Adobe both a vendor and a data source for AI-search measurement.
Heathrow as a flagship reference
Heathrow is a well-chosen reference because travel is the sharpest case. Passengers plan journeys, compare options and ask for directions — exactly the high-intent queries that AI assistants increasingly answer directly. An airport has a large, information-heavy website and a brand that must be accurate on accessibility, transport, terminals and services; a hallucinated or outdated answer is a service failure as much as a marketing one. For an airport, the content in question is unusually consequential. Accessibility programmes, terminal transfers, baggage rules and transport links are the details passengers most often ask an assistant to summarise, and an error there carries a cost. That makes Heathrow a demanding test case for AI search visibility: the goal is not only a higher citation share but a correct answer, delivered before the passenger reaches the terminal.
Adobe says it has worked with Heathrow for more than a decade, which makes the extension less a new win than a deepening of an existing relationship — the kind of reference a vendor uses to show that its newest products run in production at scale. For Heathrow, the appeal is control over how a channel it does not own represents it.
The measurement problem
The open question for AI search visibility is whether it can be measured in a way that justifies the spend. Traditional SEO had a currency — rankings, clicks, conversions. GEO offers a new set of metrics: mentions, citations, sentiment, position and a composite visibility score. But these measure presence in AI answers, not revenue, and the link between the two is not yet well established. A brand can earn frequent citations and still lose the booking.
There is a second risk: the decoupling of visibility from traffic. If AI assistants answer questions without sending users to the website, a brand may be highly visible and influential while its analytics show fewer visits — a “zero-click” world in which the metrics that once proved marketing value stop working. Adobe’s pitch is that it can connect the two, tying AI visibility to referral traffic and downstream conversions; whether that holds at scale is what Heathrow and others will test.
A converging market
Adobe is not alone. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Sitecore and Optimizely all sell customer-experience platforms that are adding agentic features, and analysts see Adobe, Salesforce and ServiceNow converging on the same territory — customer engagement — from different starting points. In AI search, SEO incumbents and a wave of GEO startups compete to measure and improve visibility, though Adobe’s ownership of Semrush gives it both a tool and the underlying data.
The data layer is the contested ground. Adobe’s acquisition of Semrush gave it a large prompt and search corpus to power AI search visibility measurement, but it also concentrated a key data source inside one vendor — a point competitors and regulators may scrutinise as the category matures, and a question for brands weighing whether to trust a single vendor’s score for their own visibility. The competitive question is whether AI-search visibility becomes a durable product category or a feature absorbed into larger platforms. Adobe is betting on the former, and Heathrow is the proof point it will cite.
What to watch
For Adobe, the test is whether Brand Visibility converts from a novel metric into a line item that marketers renew. For Heathrow, it is whether the new site and AI-search work translate into better passenger outcomes — fewer wrong answers, smoother journeys — rather than simply higher visibility scores. Moreover, or the wider market, the question is whether AI assistants become a channel brands can reliably influence, or a black box that resists optimisation. And, for brands in travel and beyond, the practical test is whether AI search visibility becomes a budget line with a defensible return, or simply a cost of doing business in a channel they cannot control. The first wave of deployments, Heathrow among them, will supply the answer.
What the announcement does and doesn’t establish
It establishes a flagship customer, a set of named products and a clear strategic rationale. It does not establish any contract value, term or measured outcome, and it does not prove that AI-search visibility delivers a return. Moreover, t is a reference deal in a category that has not settled how to judge results.
The honest summary is that Adobe has paired its agentic CX platform with a travel brand at the exact moment AI became the first stop in the journey — a smart pairing of product and proof point. Whether AI search visibility becomes a durable marketing discipline, or a metric that flatters without paying, is the question Heathrow will help answer.
Editor’s Note: This article draws on the company’s announcement and public product materials, plus independent press coverage of Adobe‘s CX Enterprise and Brand Visibility launches. Several statistics cited are Adobe‘s own research and are attributed as such; the partnership’s value and term are not disclosed, and no outcomes have been independently verified. No interview was conducted. See the source list in the publication package.