How Rail Europe Transformed Its Search Strategy With AI Readiness

While the Rail Europe team had built a solid SEO foundation over time, there was an opportunity to elevate the strategy to keep pace with the evolving AI search landscape. The team operated within a few structural constraints,including a lack of enterprise-level crawling tools and a custom CMS that didn’t facilitate website improvements at scale.. As a result, implementing changes often required engineering support, creating an opportunity to streamline workflows and enable faster experimentation and optimization.

At the same time, Rail Europe operated a large and ambitious website, with hundreds of thousands of journey pages, each dedicated to a specific train route to capture exactly what leisure and business travelers alike were searching. 

The team had clear objectives: to build AI Readiness to grow organic impact while click opportunities were shrinking, and thus, ensure Rail Europe would remain visible in the AI search ecosystem.

To tackle these challenges, Rail Europe partnered with Botify Advantage, a team of search experts who became an extension of the internal team. Working closely with Rail Europe’s product and development teams, they introduced a new AI Readiness methodology and framework to grow organic search across both traditional and AI platforms. They also leveraged the Botify platform to deliver actionable insights and implement optimizations at scale.

At the center of the new strategy was a full customer journey approach, built around how search engines and AI systems interact with a site: from discovering pages to understanding them to showing them to travelers, and ultimately driving bookings.

This model reframed both reporting and prioritization, shifting how the team worked. Instead of creating more and more pages, they focused on making their most important pages easier for search engines to find, understand, and prioritize. This marked a long-term strategic shift: 

• From volume-led SEO to value-led SEO 
• From traffic-only KPIs to structural visibility, crawl efficiency, and long-term resilience

The work focused on building an even stronger technical foundation while preparing the site for the opportunities created by AI-driven search. 

Optimizing Search Engines’ Site Experiences

One of the team’s key focus areas was to improve how search engines crawled and understood the site. The goal was simple: help search engines spend less time on unimportant pages and more time on the ones driving bookings. To achieve this, they: 

• Fixed broken or unnecessary redirects that were slowing things down
• Removed “dead ends” that wasted search engine attention
• Simplified how pages are connected to each other
• Made sure important sections (like train routes) were easy to access

Optimizing Internal Linking 

The Advantage team also redesigned Internal linking and content structure. They leveraged Botify’s PageWorkers to deploy optimizations at scale, without needing Rail Europe’s dev teams’ support. 

With improved content structure and internal linking, they can now optimize thousands of pages at once, creating a broader network of inlinks between key page types (countries, journeys, passes, and stations) and making it easier for search engines and AI bots to focus on the pages that matter most. 

Prioritizing the Right Content 

The team reorganized sitemaps by page type to better signal content priorities to search engines.

Instead of including every page, the team moved to a curated sitemap strategy:

• High-value pages were strongly linked and included in sitemaps 
• Low-value pages were removed from sitemaps and received minimal internal linking

This approach significantly improved crawl efficiency and indexing quality.

AI and Bing Optimization

As part of preparing Rail Europe for the AI search landscape, the team expanded structured data across the platform and conducted a comprehensive AI readiness audit. A key focus was bot governance: making sure the right crawlers—especially fast-emerging AI bots—had efficient access to the site's most valuable content.

By refining bot governance rules to prioritize AI crawlers like GPT, Rail Europe unlocked a new visibility channel—traffic from ChatGPT doubled. The team also introduced controls to reduce crawl waste from Bing, keeping crawler attention focused on the pages that matter most.