Generative AI assistants have quietly become part of the travel research toolkit. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are no longer novelties. For a growing share of travelers, they’re the first stop before Google even gets a look in. Whether you run a boutique inn, manage a DMO, or market a ski resort, understanding how these tools decide what to recommend is no longer optional.
Unlike traditional search engines, which lean heavily on links, large language models care more about how often and in what context your property or destination gets mentioned across the sources they were trained on. The more your hotel, restaurant or destination is talked about online, the better your odds of showing up when a traveler asks an AI assistant where to stay or what to do.
Rand Fishkin of SparkToro put together a nine-minute explainer on exactly this question : how a brand ends up in the answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and similar tools. It’s worth the watch. Drawing on that thinking, here are three moves that can help your property or destination get named when travelers turn to generative AI for recommendations.
1. Figure Out Which Sources the Model Is Likely Drawing From
The starting point is understanding which sites are actually feeding these models. Large, well-established sources (major travel media, influential community platforms, respected guidebooks) stand a much better chance of making it into training data than a niche regional blog with a small following.
Fishkin’s example is a good illustration: he asks ChatGPT for restaurant recommendations in Seattle. If you’re a fine-dining restaurant, how do you land among the two or three names the model actually surfaces? Step one is knowing which sites already mention you, or should be.
One useful trick is to ask a model like ChatGPT directly how likely it is that a given website was part of its training data. That answer won’t be gospel, but it’s a solid signal for where to prioritize link-building efforts and which travel-media partnerships are worth chasing.
2. Focus on Mentions and Context, Not Just Volume
Once you’ve mapped the sources that matter, the next job is shaping how your property is mentioned within them. Language models pay close attention to specific word sequences, so searching your own name in quotation marks to find exact-phrase mentions is a genuinely useful diagnostic.
The goal is to get your hotel, restaurant or destination mentioned in the right context, which raises the odds of it surfacing in an AI-generated answer. That can mean media outreach to earn citations in existing travel articles, or publishing your own well-crafted content on the platforms these models already draw from.
Fishkin’s video flags an interesting wrinkle: luxury hotels like the Four Seasons show up when someone searches for “fine dining in Seattle”, even though a hotel isn’t a restaurant. The assumption is that the same clientele frequents both, which says a lot about how loosely these models interpret context, and why understanding search intent matters as much as the literal query.
3. Use Marketing Tools to Spot the Opportunities
SparkToro can help identify which sites your target travelers actually visit, which you can then cross-check with ChatGPT to gauge their odds of being part of the training data. BuzzSumo is another useful tool. It flags new content published on topics relevant to your property, so you can move quickly on opportunities to get mentioned while they’re still fresh.
Once the key sources are mapped, it’s time to act: reach out about guest posts, contributed content or mentions within existing articles, and keep investing in your own high-quality content that these platforms are likely to pick up and cite.
Because in the end, this all circles back to fundamentals that SEO practitioners have known for years — publish quality content, use the right keywords, and keep refreshing what’s already live on your site and channels.
To sum up, three things to keep in mind if you want better visibility in AI assistants:
- Understand how these models work and identify the sources most likely to feed them
- Focus on earning brand mentions in relevant, credible contexts
- Use marketing tools to spot opportunities and stay active on the PR and content front
Get this right, and you’ll meaningfully improve how visible your property or destination is — not just to travelers searching Google, but to the growing number who now ask an AI assistant instead. In a landscape increasingly shaped by AI, that’s quickly becoming table stakes for staying relevant.
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