The rise of AI search tools threatened Kiwi.com and Delante’s traditional SEO partnership. Doubting the value of classic link building, Kiwi.com considered ending the collaboration. Instead, Delante’s Kasia Śliwa pivoted the project by proposing an AI Authority Link Building test in an isolated market.
We launched a three-month AI Authority Link Building test in Bulgaria to ensure a clean environment for measuring impact. The campaign built Kiwi.com’s authority across AI-accessible sources using premium publications, contextual links, and multi-LLM monitoring. The goal was to see if this strategy could improve visibility in both AI-generated answers and traditional Google rankings.
The cooperation focused on building external authority and supporting organic visibility through link building.
Then AI started changing the way users search for travel information. People were no longer relying only on Google. Instead, they began asking for recommendations, comparisons, and travel-related answers from platforms such as:
Inside Kiwi.com, this led to internal discussions about the future of the off-site process. If search behavior was changing, classic link building had to prove that it could still create value.
The cooperation was at risk of being discontinued. Instead of treating AI as a reason to stop, Kasia Śliwa from Delante proposed a new direction: testing AI Authority Link Building on a clean, isolated market.
Bulgaria was selected because Kiwi.com was not running other SEO or marketing activities there during the experiment. This gave us a cleaner environment to measure the impact of the off-site and AI authority strategy.
The campaign focused on building Kiwi.com’s authority across sources that AI tools could find, understand and cite. We combined premium external publications, contextual links, semantic relevance and multi-LLM monitoring.
The goal was simple: check whether AI Authority Link Building could increase Kiwi.com’s visibility in AI-generated answers and support Google rankings at the same time.
Kiwi.com is a global travel-tech company and online travel agency specializing in flight search, cheap flights and travel combinations. The company was founded in 2012 and rebranded from Skypicker to Kiwi.com in 2016.
As part of our cooperation, we supported Kiwi.com on the Bulgarian market, testing whether AI Authority Link Building could improve visibility in AI-generated answers and support traditional organic rankings.
The timeline below illustrates the key stages of our cooperation with Kiwi.com. It outlines the journey from classic off-site SEO activities, through a turning point driven by the growing importance of AI search, to the successful implementation of the AI Authority Link Building strategy.
The 3-month test on the Bulgarian market delivered clear improvements in both AI visibility and traditional SEO performance.
Selected strategic keywords with search volumes up to 33,100 monthly searches moved from no visible ranking to TOP 5 and TOP 10 positions.
What made the test especially valuable was the clean setup: there were no onsite changes and no other SEO or marketing campaigns on the Bulgarian market during the test. This made the impact of the off-site and AI authority strategy easier to observe.
One of the strongest findings was not only that Kiwi.com appeared more often in AI-generated answers, but also how it appeared. In several AI interfaces, competitors were mentioned as plain text, while Kiwi.com appeared with clickable links.
For a travel brand, this is important. A recommendation in AI creates awareness, but a recommendation with a clickable path to the website is much closer to business value.
The key question was not whether AI would replace SEO. The real question was whether we could use off-site SEO mechanics to build authority in AI search as well. Bulgaria gave us a clean environment to test this, and the results showed that AI Authority Link Building can support both LLM visibility and Google rankings.
For Kiwi.com, AI could have been a reason to end the existing off-site cooperation. Instead, it became a reason to test a new approach.
The Bulgarian market proved that external authority can influence not only Google rankings, but also how AI tools understand, mention, cite and link to a brand.
For international brands, this is the key takeaway: visibility is no longer limited to search engine results pages. It now includes generative answers, AI assistants and LLM-based recommendations.
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