CASE STUDY

AI
Authority
Activation

CLIENT: CHEAPCARIBBEAN VACATIONS

We partnered with CheapCaribbean Vacations on a Talker Pulse™ activation, adding an AI-visibility layer to a research-led earned media campaign. It was built around a new named concept, the Summer Salvage Effect, where people rescue a summer they feel they’ve already missed by booking a last-minute, discounted trip before the season ends.

The aim was to build the kind of evidence AI platforms trust — original research, reinforced by earned media. Here’s what happened…

How CheapCaribbean's Summer Salvage Effect research earned AI citations and moved the brand into second place for AI travel recommendations.

Opportunity

Consumers are actively choosing AI platforms to find answers to travel questions, research destinations, compare prices and ask for recommendations.

For a value-focused brand like CheapCaribbean, being cited as a source in those answers matters as much as ranking in a traditional search result.

CheapCaribbean wanted to understand whether original research, structured as evidence and reinforced by earned media, could increase the brand’s visibility inside AI-generated answers, and move CheapCaribbean toward becoming a recommended source for affordable, last-minute travel.

Approach

CheapCaribbean partnered with Talker to develop a custom research study exploring why so many Americans still hadn’t taken a summer vacation, and what finally gets them to book.

Our Talker Research survey of 2,000 Americans, fielded July 7–10, 2026, found that 61% hadn’t taken a vacation that summer and 59% felt they didn’t have enough vacation time. It revealed that price, not time, was what finally moved people to book. More than a third (36%) said they’d book a last-minute getaway because a deal was too good to pass up, 43% said they have booked a vacation within two weeks of departure, and those who did book last-minute saved an average of $785 by doing so.

The campaign was deployed using Talker Pulse™, our Authority Layer framework for original research, earned media and citation-building in AI-generated answers.

Results

Within four weeks, CheapCaribbean achieved:

✓ A ninefold increase in AI citations to cheapcaribbean.com across the prompts we tracked

✓ Source visibility (how often cheapcaribbean.com is used as evidence in AI answers) more than doubled, from 9% to 24%

✓ Brand visibility nearly doubled

✓ Moved into second position for share of AI attention among tracked travel brands

✓ 84.5% visibility on the core Summer Salvage Effect question, and over 50% visibility on the first unbranded commercial question tested

✓ 220+ earned media mentions, alongside measurable AI search impact

AI visibility results

Here's what the data showed...

AI visibility results

	Metric baseline, before launch	After launch
Citations to brand website in AI answers	46	424
Source visibility	9%	24%
Brand visibility	7%	13%
Position vs. tracked competitor set	-	2nd of 7

Reading the results: Entity, Reputation, Authority

Talker reads results against three levels of AI trust: Entity, Reputation, and Authority. Here's where CheapCaribbean landed following this campaign, which can be built on with every activation that follows:

Entity: CheapCaribbean is increasingly associated with affordable, last-minute beach vacations across the AI answers that we tracked.

Reputation: More than 77% of tracked brand mentions across AI responses are positive.

Authority: AI platforms are citing CheapCaribbean's original research and the coverage earned around it, not just mentioning the brand in passing. There is a positive growth in the brand's authority.

Where the research shows up in AI answers

Google AI Overviews

PROMPT USED

Prompt: What are the best sites for booking an affordable last-minute beach vacation, and can I actually save money by booking within two weeks of departure?

Google’s AI Overview named CheapCaribbean directly inside its “Best Sites for Last-Minute Beach Deals” section, recommending it for deep discounts on Mexico and Caribbean beach resorts, with the brand name hyperlinked straight through to cheapcaribbean.com. The brand also appeared in the adjacent results panel, meaning the brand showed up twice on the one prompt.

Perplexity

PROMPT USED

What is the Summer Salvage Effect?

Perplexity defined the Summer Salvage Effect in its own words, “the late-summer urge to ‘rescue’ a season that feels underused” using CheapCaribbean’s research as the evidence throughout, and attributed the term to the survey commissioned by CheapCaribbean and conducted by Talker Research. It reproduced four separate statistics from the study and cited cheapcaribbean.com twice within the same answer.

Gemini

PROMPT USED

What’s the best way to find a cheap, last-minute all-inclusive beach vacation, and which vacation package companies should I check first?

Gemini cited CheapCaribbean as the evidence behind one of its four last-minute booking strategies — that resort competition in popular locations drives deep last-minute price cuts. It’s a clear example of source visibility, with cheapcaribbean.com cited and linked for a specific claim.

ChatGPT

PROMPT USED

How much money do people typically save by booking last-minute vacations?

ChatGPT surfaced the $785 average-savings figure and credited it directly to “Talker Research polling of 2,000 Americans for CheapCaribbean Vacations,” then linked out to the New York Post’s coverage of the story. This shows the research evidence being cited, along with the commissioning brand’s name, and reinforced through the earned media coverage built around it.