Gorbilet — tourism niche audit, 289 brand citations and 35 percent branded share

• In 2026 we audited 210 queries across the river-tours niche on 9 AI engines.
• We measured 8,861 total citations across the niche — a busy answer layer.
• Gorbilet held 289 citations at baseline, 100 brand mentions, 35 percent share of its own footprint.
• 94.6 percent of niche citations sit on operator sites, not on third-party media or video platforms.
• Strategy shift: deep operator content as primary, Yandex Zen as secondary amplification.

Tourism in this segment proves that channel mix changes the playbook. In B2B SaaS the answer layer is dominated by Medium, Reddit, and YouTube. In premium real estate it is Engelvoelkers, Property Finder, and Medium. In tourism river-tours, 94.6 percent of citations sit on operator websites themselves — almost the inverse of the SaaS pattern.

A generic "publish on Medium and Reddit" strategy would underperform here. The brand site is the answer layer.

The niche audit covered 210 queries across the river-tours topic on nine AI engines. The picture:

• 8,861 total citations across the niche.
• Gorbilet held 289 of them at baseline — meaningful share already.
• 100 branded mentions and 35 percent branded share inside the brand's own footprint.
• 94.6% of all niche citations sat on operator websites, not on third-party media.

That single number rewrites the strategy. Deep, structured operator-site content becomes the highest-leverage move; off-site media becomes secondary.

1. Selected 8 pilot topics from the 210-query map using an explicit scoring formula (citation gap × commercial intent × content feasibility).
2. Shipped operator-site depth content — route-by-route breakdowns, comparison guides, booking FAQs, season-by-season breakdowns, and ticket-type explainers. Each chunk-ready for retrieval extraction.
3. Treated Yandex Zen as secondary rather than primary — useful for amplification, not for owning the answer layer.
4. Measured weekly against the same 210-query map to see lift on the topics where Gorbilet has the most owned-site authority.

Three lessons that rewrite how an operator-side tourism brand should approach AI visibility:

1. Run the niche audit before writing anything. The 94.6 percent figure could not have been guessed — and it rewrote the channel mix entirely.
2. Depth beats off-site distribution when the niche favours operator domains. Route-by-route breakdowns earn citations a single Medium post never will.
3. 35 percent branded share is the floor, not the ceiling. Once non-branded category queries enter the playbook, the share has room to grow without cannibalising itself.

This is a live niche with a defined baseline, an operating thesis based on the 94.6 percent figure, and a published 8-topic pilot plan. Track lift on the pilot topics over the next quarter to validate that operator-site depth produces the same result the audit suggests.

Full case study: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gorbilet-ai-search-visibility-audit-river-tours-pilot-shevchenko-mpbsf