Metasearch engine

So for my prior marketplace, it was just search, right? But people always think of search as like organic search and then SEO, or sorry, SEM.

But if you go down, start with SEO, then you have SEM, then you have Google, MatPak, right? And then you'll have Metasearch, then you have App Store search, and then you have AEO, then you get G, like you can just keep going on and on, but what most people do is they go super wide, but they only go an inch deep, and then they're competing with everybody else, right? And so what we did was we basically turned off all marketing spend in my prior company, and went super deep on that one channel, and that's what allowed us to grow from like, seed series company to a series B company.

Eventually it starts like you go so deep, you get everything and you have to do what I call like marketing hygiene across the ARPU scale where you're going to like, you have to do organic stuff and you do more in-person stuff.

But knowing where you're at on the scale to start is where I think a lot of people screw up, right? Because they either try doing it all or they're starting on the left when they should be starting on the right.

That's why Kayak exists, in order to help people that see an overwhelming amount of options to get it down to clearly these are the ones that fit the times I want to travel, these fit my budget, and then to get options that you've selected or that Kayak have selected based on your filtering and your questions.

I think that's quite unique about Metasearch and what Kayak does.

I don't disagree with you.

There's a lot of sites out there that have the same content, but there's incentives everywhere to push you in certain directions.

And yeah, I like Metasearch, and I really believe Metasearch serves an evergreen consumer need for neutral comparison.

Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

That's what they're using it for.

You'd mentioned before assistants are routing people to meta search and not replacing it.

What's going on here?

As someone who's worked in the travel industry for many, many years, there was always an element of nervousness.

Still, I don't believe that.

But that was the fear.

And actually, what we're finding is that certainly just through the conversations that we analyzed, the AI is that they're actually recommending meta search brands through.

So again, it's kind of like it's not here to replace, but it's actually directing consumers through to them, which is really surprising, and not something we expected to see at all.