Centium AI Founder Michael Rueckert presented the keynote Search in the Age of AI at the Ski Resort AI Bootcamp hosted by Ski Area Management.
Centium AI Founder Michael Rueckert presented Search in the Age of AI: Marketing to Generative Engines as the keynote segment of the Ski Resort AI Bootcamp on February 24, 2026, a virtual webinar co-hosted by Ski Area Management and Eternity that drew nearly 100 ski industry marketing and operations leaders.
Ski Area Management, known across the industry as SAM, is the leading trade publication for ski area operators across North America, reaching general managers, marketing directors, and operations leaders at the resorts that shape the industry. Eternity is a digital agency focused on the travel and hospitality sector. Together the two hosts assembled a technical bootcamp on how AI is changing search, booking, and guest experience in the ski industry.
Rueckert presented alongside Ski Area Management Publisher Olivia Rowan and Eternity Founder Mike Lannen. Lannen opened the bootcamp with a segment on agentic booking and the AI guest journey. Rueckert followed with the keynote measurement and strategy segment, delivering a full Centium AI presentation and live demo to the audience of resort marketers.
The presentation walked ski industry marketers through the shift from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the emerging discipline of marketing to AI models. Rueckert introduced a six-pillar framework for brands entering this space: leave a large digital footprint, manage your reputation, get others to talk about you, be where AI is looking, sell AI with evidence, and prioritize recency.
The keynote drew on original Centium AI research. The platform has processed more than one million AI citations across 250,000 prompts for over 150 brands, surfacing citation patterns most marketers have never seen. For ski resorts, OnTheSnow leads the AI citation source mix at 47.5 percent of references. For hotels, TripAdvisor dominates at 56.1 percent. Each major model behaves differently: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity each cite different sources and weight factors uniquely, which means a brand cannot rely on optimizing for one model to win across all five.
Rueckert also presented recent Adobe Analytics data showing AI referral traffic converts 31 percent higher than other sources, with the AI referral channel nearly doubling year-over-year by January 2026. For ski resort operators measuring marketing spend against booked stays, that conversion gap is the business case for treating AI visibility as a performance channel.
To ground the framework in action, Rueckert ran a live AI visibility dashboard build for Mt. Abram in Maine, executing 600 prompts across five large language models in real time for the audience. He then walked through the Snowbasin Resort case study, where Centium AI's methodology produced an 88 percent increase in AI visibility for Utah ski resort searches and a 967 percent increase in national AI visibility, driven primarily by amplifying earned media into AI citation sources.
The ski industry is starting to understand that AI models are becoming the new front door for travel decisions, and Centium's data shows exactly where brands stand in that conversation.
An archived recording of the Ski Resort AI Bootcamp is available to Ski Area Management subscribers. Additional Centium AI work will be featured in SAM's upcoming summer research on ski resort activities.
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