The rapid development of Internet and digital economy has given birth to a new mode of urban competition represented by “internet celebrity city”. Attracting network attention has become an important way of urban marketing and tourism development in the new era. However, the higher the degree of online attention, the more it can drive the growth of urban tourism? This paper matches the Internet search index of 328 prefecture level cities in China from 2011 to 2018 with urban tourism development data. Using the method of instrumental variable estimation, we quantitatively identify the impact of urban online attention on the number of tourists and per capita tourism consumption for the first time. The results show that the network attention significantly increases the flow of tourists off-line. However, the more dependent on tourism development cities, the more attention the network has limited the per capita tourism consumption. Further analysis shows that the rapid concentration of traffic under the online attention significantly increases the public service cost of tourism dependent cities, thus restricting the consumption demand of tourists. In the urban competition in the Internet era, the government needs to focus on solving the problem of mismatch between urban public services and tourist flow agglomeration, and effectively transform the network flow into the quality of urban economic development.