Case Study
Crystal Coast

AI-First Content Strategy to Establish Authority in Google’s AI Overviews

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The Challenge

The Crystal Coast DMO aims to attract travelers and measures success by website click-outs to local businesses. Their primary challenge was a lack of regional recognition among travelers exploring North Carolina and the broader southern US.

The Solution

To improve visibility in Google’s AI Overviews, we shifted from traditional SEO to an AI-first content strategy focused on creating material that AI systems could easily interpret, classify, and surface. The work centered on three core components:

  • Topical Depth
  • Feeding the AI
  • Personal Alignment

The Result

The campaign achieved ALL of its key objectives: our new content drove incremental click-outs by way of unprecedented AI and Organic visibility. The Crystal Coast outshined larger, more popular regions, including the state of North Carolina!

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Overview

The Crystal Coast - Southern Outer Banks® is an 85-mile stretch of beaches known as the Southern Outer Banks. The collection of beaches and towns offers a unique blend of history, family fun, water sports, and natural areas.

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The Challenge

The Crystal Coast DMO aims to attract travelers and measures success by website click-outs to local businesses. Their primary challenge was a lack of regional recognition among travelers exploring North Carolina and the broader southern US.

To overcome this, their strategy shifted to engage travelers earlier in their planning process, where Google’s AI Overviews are influential. The goal was to establish the Crystal Coast as the definitive AI-recognized authority for North Carolina coastal tourism. This required a move from traditional SEO to a strategy focused on machine understanding and citation.

The key performance indicator was sustained visibility in AI Overviews for high-value searches. This approach aimed to solidify their presence, ensuring the Crystal Coast is a top consideration for visitors.

The Solution

To improve visibility in Google’s AI Overviews, we shifted from traditional SEO to an AI-first content strategy focused on creating material that AI systems could easily interpret, classify, and surface. The work centered on three core components:

TOPICAL DEPTH

We expanded coverage across a wide range of hyper specific local activities relevant to each holiday period. Instead of producing broad “holiday guides,” we identified and documented the precise activities visitors could do during that holiday—from specific attractions and dining options to local businesses and seasonal offerings.
This helped establish local topical expertise, giving AI systems a deeper and more complete understanding of what’s available in the region.

STRUCTURED DATA OPTIMIZATION

For each holiday, we mapped relevant activities to the traveler types most likely to seek them out. Examples include labeling:

  • A boardwalk café as a pet-friendly lunch option
  • Surf schools as family-friendly
  • Waterfront dining as couples-oriented

This structure helps AI models associate activities with the traveler personas they’re currently assisting, improving the chances that Crystal Coast content is selected when an AI’s context window suggests a specific traveler profile.

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FEEDING THE AI

We rebuilt content using an answer-first structure, presenting key information immediately and supporting it with clear hierarchy and clean formatting. This made it easier for AI systems to scan, extract, and reference the content in Overviews. We also ensured the technical SEO baseline was in place so AI crawlers could reliably access and evaluate the content—necessary groundwork for the AI-first strategy to function correctly.

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Implementation

Our implementation utilized a proprietary three-phase AI-optimization workflow:

1

Correlative Analysis for AI

For each target phrase, we analyzed the top 100 search results against more than 990 potential ranking factors and focused on those that correlated with Page 1 and Top 3 rankings. Top priority was given to those factors that promote AI Overview inclusion, most notably questions in content, headings, FAQs, and associated content.

2

AI-Powered Content Strategy

We used AI to interpret this correlational data and generate content outlines with AI-consumption-specific ecommendations, incorporating optimal semantic structures and entity relationships calibrated for AI understanding and citation probability.

3

Custom-Trained AI Content Generation

We utilized a custom-trained AI, fine tuned to reflect Crystal Coast’s brand voice, to generate the final content while incorporating the hyper-specific local details that AI systems prioritize for citations.

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Creative & Innovative

The campaign’s creativity lies in its foundational paradigm shift! Instead of treating AI as just another ranking algorithm, we treated it as the primary audience. The creative leap was to design content for a non-human entity to influence the human end-user. This required inventing a new methodology from scratch for an emerging and undocumented search feature, demonstrating true industry leadership.

Note: This was done in 2024, just as AI overviews were first emerging and beginning to take over upper-funnel searches common to the travel industry.

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Overcoming Key Hurdles

Challenge

Developing an upper-funnel content strategy for the new AI Overview ecosystem with no established best practices or historical data.

Solution

We built our own framework for measuring AI citation success, developing new methodologies based on emerging patterns and our proprietary correlational analysis.

Challenge

Creating content, without a significant content development budget, that was both hyper-specific for AI systems and engaging for human readers.

Solution

This balance was achieved through extensive experimentation and the use of our custom-trained AI, which was fine tuned to ensure the content provided genuine value to travelers while meeting the specificity required for AI recognition.

Challenge

Establishing authority across multiple seasonal and holiday search contexts simultaneously.

Solution

We created comprehensive coverage of experiences throughout the year, with each piece of content designed specifically to achieve AI Overview inclusion for its seasonal query.

The Result

The campaign achieved ALL of its key objectives: our new content drove incremental click-outs by way of unprecedented AI and Organic visibility. The Crystal Coast outshined larger, more popular regions, including the state of North Carolina!

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AI OVERVIEW DOMINANCE

  • The strategy achieved consistent presence across Google’s AI Overviews for 8+ different high-value seasonal and holiday searches.
  • This presence was sustained, with content published months ago continuing to be featured, proving the long term value of the AI-first strategy.
  • Featured queries include: “North Carolina beaches,” “Christmas vacation North Carolina,” “4th of July vacation North Carolina,” “Memorial Day vacation North Carolina,” and “North Carolina spring break vacation”.

METRICS ENHANCED BY AI STRATEGY

  • “Must-Visit Coastal Towns in North Carolina” generated 13,152 new visitors (between November 1, 2024, and June 1, 2025), achieved the #1 ranking, and produced 356 business listing clicks.
  • “Best Scuba Diving North Carolina” attracted 2,999 new visitors (since April 29, 2024) and ranked #2 for its target keyword.
  • Articles achieved exceptional business click conversion rates of 13.08% and 26.47%, far exceeding industry averages.
  • Our content consistently outranks major established competitors, including the official Visit North Carolina website.

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This campaign pioneers the future of AI-era marketing. It marks a strategic shift from traditional SEO to optimizing for AI understanding. We developed a new methodology for Google’s latest feature, proving a smaller organization can outrank larger authorities with a smarter, AI-first approach.

This success is not just a win for our client; it provides a proven, replicable framework for an entire industry navigating the evolution of AI-powered travel discovery. The campaign is innovative, highly effective, and demonstrates a clear path forward in the age of AI.

Reimagine what your business can achieve with SEO and Paid Media strategies from Propellic.

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