Cycladic Spaces: from zero to quoted by AI in 16 months

The short version

Cycladic Spaces went from nothing to 62,200 Google clicks and 4.1 million impressions in 16 months. Along the way it became a site that ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's own AI answers actually quote when people ask about Greece.

Where we started

Cycladic Spaces launched in July 2025 as an independent site about Greece for Aussie travellers. We had no audience, no backlinks (links from other websites, which Google treats like votes of confidence) and zero ad budget.

Greek travel is also a crowded room. We were up against tourism boards, booking giants and publishers who've been around for years. With a Domain Rating of 5 we had no reputation to lean on, so every ranking had to be earned by the content itself.

What we did

We did the keyword research and crunched the stats, like you'd expect. But the plan was always content first: answer what Australians genuinely ask about Greece, in a voice a generic travel site can't fake.

• We write like Greek Australians, because we are. AUD budgets, Aussie travel logistics and family roots in the Ionian Islands go into every piece.
• We answer the question straight away. Google and AI tools pull from the first clear answer on a page, so we put it up top. That's how our guides on where not to stay in Athens, trip costs from Australia and Greece's tourist tax became top performers.
• We don't push the overcrowded islands. Skipping the Santorini and Mykonos treadmill gives the site a real point of view, and readers trust it more because of it.
• We built a diaspora hub. Greeks Abroad covers citizenship by descent, inheritance, tax and Greek bureaucracy, which Greek Australians search for all year round.
• We built for AI search from day one. Clear headings, direct answers and FAQ sections make every page easy for AI tools to quote.

Our not-so-secret weapon is TikTok. Plenty of the topics that drove the most clicks didn't come from keyword tools at all. We watch a lot of TikTok (purely for research, obviously) and pull angles from whatever is taking off.

Pig Island is the perfect example. The swimming pigs of Atokos were all over TikTok before anyone was writing about them properly, so we jumped on it, and "pig island greece" is now our single biggest search term with more than 1,500 clicks. Watching TikTok helps us spot trends before they show up in keyword data and find the outliers nobody else has covered yet.

The results

Monthly clicks went from 108 in August 2025 to 10,715 in July 2026, roughly a hundred times more in under a year.

Across everything we show up for, our average position is 6.1, so we're sitting on page one. We hold top-three spots for searches like the Greek tourist tax, Greece's pig island and what to buy at a Greek pharmacy. Traffic follows the travel calendar, peaking from June to September when Aussies are planning and taking their European summer trips.

Showing up in AI answers

AI tools have quoted Cycladic Spaces in 407 answers across 48 pages, and Google showed us inside its AI features 258,000 times in the last three months.

Most of the quoting happens in Google's AI Overviews (the AI summary that sits above the normal results) and AI Mode (Google's chatbot-style search). Over the past three months, 113 of our pages turned up in Google's AI features. The biggest hitters were where not to stay in Athens, Greek beauty products to buy in Greece and whether you can flush toilet paper in Greece (yes, people really want to know).

Beating the off-season

Travel searches fall off a cliff after the European summer, but our Greeks Abroad pages barely flinched.

A site that's all trip planning loses most of its traffic every off-season, so we built Greeks Abroad around questions Greek Australians ask all year, like citizenship by descent, inheritance and Greek tax. It only launched in March 2026 and it's still small, about 6% of October's clicks, but it's the steadiest part of the site and where most of our new publishing is going.

What this means for your brand

If a site with a Domain Rating of 5 can get quoted by AI and hit 10,000-plus clicks a month, imagine what the same approach could do for a travel or hospitality brand that already has some clout.

That Content Agency is Tina Benias, an AI search and content specialist with about ten years of writing under her belt across Australia, the US, the UK and Europe. You deal with her directly, and the person planning your strategy is the same person writing it. You won't get passed off to a junior or an account manager.

• She's worked the other side of the front desk. Tina has been assistant manager of a small hotel and villa manager for 15 villas in Greece, done marketing for the W Hotel in Costa Rica and worked with the JW Marriott in Venice.
• You get big-brand standards without big-agency prices. She writes to the standards of Microsoft, Afterpay and Airwallex.
• She knows travel inside out. Her clients include Inspiring Vacations, RoomStay and a handful of hotel groups.
• She uses AI properly. AI helps with the research, a human makes every editorial call, and nothing reads like a robot wrote it.