Taking cultural ecology as the carrier of tourism resources, it fully embodies the significance of the synergistic development of cultural tourism ecology for the innovation of the cultural tourism model. The article establishes a cultural tourism ecological synergy model by integrating cultural ecology and cultural tourism under the guidance of the theory of the life cycle of tourist places and industrial innovation. Taking the nine provinces of the Yellow River as the research object, its cultural tourism data are collected and pre-processed, cultural tourism keywords are extracted by the TextRank algorithm, and the LDA model is established to obtain cultural tourism themes. The Skip-gram model was combined with the GCN network to establish a cultural tourism emotional image perception model, and the Moran index and nearest-neighbor index were introduced to analyze the spatial structure and regional evolution of cultural tourism attractions. The keywords of cultural tourism are mainly embodied in ecology and culture, which all appear more than 1,000 times, and the percentage of tourists’ most concerned cultural tourism themes is 22.15%, and most of the nearest neighbor indices of the spatial structure of the attractions at different levels are less than 1, which is cohesive. The Moran index of tourists’ footprints in 2022 is 0.106, the footprint coverage rate is 0.26 percentage points higher than that in 2012, and tourists’ positive emotional evaluation of cultural tourism destinations reaches 80%. Based on cultural ecology, realizing the synergistic development of cultural tourism and ecology is the way to innovate cultural tourism.