The Shadow Load: Who Pays for Agentic Travel Search?

Agentic search consumes online travel agency infrastructure at scale without the booking signal that historically justified the serving cost. A single property detail page costs an agent four to twelve thousand input tokens to parse, with three to seven properties typically consumed per comparative query. The cost falls on the model provider in inference, on the OTA in serving, and on the user in latency. No party recovers value through the conventional booking funnel. This paper defines the agentic shadow load, examines the inversion of finder and found in agent-mediated search, and proposes a paired diagnostic and remediation architecture. The AIVO Meridian PIM diagnostic, scored across RCS, PSOS, and CSR, identifies where product evidence is illegible to agents under conversational pressure. brand.context, a signed JSONLD evidence layer, restores legibility and reduces token cost by an order of magnitude. Together they constitute the operational practice of Agentic Brand Control.