Here’s how you can replicate its three core pillars
The peak summer season is kicking off, and every brand is starting the race to stand out from its competitors. What they don’t realize is that the ones who will truly come out on top are those who started much earlier.
It’s not about one-off creativity, but about the gradual accumulation of authority. Skyscanner’s case is especially illustrative because, year after year, it manages to rank for highly competitive searches related to summer—particularly travel. This dominance isn’t driven solely by brand awareness, but by a content structure supported by editorial links acquired months in advance.
We already pointed this out in our Annual Study on link building, PR, and media, where we gathered what we expect to be the major trends for 2026: Link building has stopped being a brand-awareness tool and has become a sales driver. To make it work, it is essential to plan, schedule, and approach the entire year as a structured path toward achieving your strategic objectives.
The logic behind seasonal link building: why everything starts earlier
Search engine algorithms do not respond to immediate dynamics. Indexing, evaluation, and authority consolidation all take time. That’s why a link building strategy that starts in June is unlikely to have an impact in July or August.
Brands that dominate summer SERPs typically begin building links in the first quarters of the year. This allows them to enter the peak season with a solid authority base, already crawled content, and consolidated relevance signals.
From a strategic perspective, this means understanding link building not as a tactical action, but as an accumulative process. Each link acquired in relevant media acts as a vote of confidence that strengthens a page’s ability to rank. When these links are concentrated around seasonal topics, the effect is amplified.
Link building strategies that are making the difference in summer
1. Focusing on informational traffic
Content matters more than ever. And it’s no longer about simply standing out with a link within a piece of content or ensuring the indexability of the article where you appear, but about becoming the “source of truth” for the user. The goal is to create texts that answer complex questions in a logical way, making it easy for AI to extract the exact snippet needed to build its generated response.
Skyscanner distributes its organic traffic by intent, as shown by data from Ahrefs, highlighting the dominant weight of informational traffic over transactional traffic. This is no coincidence: it reflects a link building strategy focused on ranking inspiration and discovery content (guides, rankings, recommendations), which are the types that attract the most natural links.
These pieces of content act as entry points in the early stages of the funnel (“where to travel in summer”), accumulating backlinks from media outlets and blogs. That traffic is then later channeled toward transactional pages.
From a link building perspective, their value lies in the fact that these contents function as evergreen assets. They are easily updated year after year, can be linked to across a wide range of media, and—most importantly—signal to users that they can find high-quality information with them.
Skyscanner has reached the top position for multiple keywords, such as “Madrid Liverpool,” “flight search engine,” or “Thai AirAsia,” as well as climbing rankings for broader terms like “Indonesia.” These keywords might be secondary for other projects, but they are essential for theirs. Users search for their specific destination, their route from origin city to destination city, or the airline they want to fly with—and Skyscanner provides the answer. The performance of these keywords highlights an anchor strategy that is well aligned with search intent.
However, this is not the result of over-optimization. Although in 2026 exact-match keywords account for up to 52% of usage, sustained growth depends on diversification. Skyscanner combines exact-match anchors with branded terms, URLs, and generic keywords.
Maintaining roughly 48% of the profile in these latter categories helps avoid artificial patterns and reinforces the naturalness of the link profile.
Leadership in rankings is not based on repeating keywords, but on strategically distributing relevance without compromising the link profile.
Ranking positions of the organic keywords for which www.skyscanner.es
appears
3. Building authority to appear in LLMs
Skyscanner does not directly optimize for LLMs, but it does execute a strategy that benefits them: generating content and consistent mentions in sources that these models consider trustworthy.
A clear example is its recurring coverage in media and content such as “best cheap summer destinations” or “how to find cheap flights.” Skyscanner appears cited or implicitly referenced in articles from leading outlets like YouTube travel vloggers, or media such as Viajeros Piratas or WeRoad, without the need for a link:
The key point about these strategies is not just their individual execution, but how they are combined. The brands that dominate in summer typically integrate several of these tactics within a single plan, creating synergies between content, distribution, and link acquisition.
From an operational standpoint, this requires not only planning, but also knowing how to choose the right media to help you achieve your objectives and recover your investment, making it possible to repeat the strategy in the future.
For any objective and any type of project, Growwer has a media outlet that fits your needs and your strategy. Within our catalog of more than 40K media, we offer platforms with dofollow links, nofollow links, unlinked citations, and high-value link insertions, among others.
With the Growwer Chrome extension, you can check whether a media outlet is available on Growwer to publish an article and manage the order instantly. You can also request the ones you’re interested in that we don’t currently have.
Google News panel showing news stories that rank for these keywords in media outlets available on Growwer
This is where Growwer becomes your best ally
If you don’t have time to manage all of this, our managed service takes care of the entire process: media selection, negotiation, content writing, and publication of content optimized for your vertical. No lock-in, no hidden costs, a dedicated SEO expert, and full transparency over every decision. Campaigns starting from €500.
