AI search for tour operators: how to get recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google

What AI search means for a tour operator

AI search is a traveller asking an assistant, rather than a search box, what to do. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews read the web and reply with a short answer naming a few operators. If you are not named, the traveller may never reach your website: zero-click search at its sharpest.

GEO (generative engine optimisation) is the work of getting cited in those answers. AEO (answer engine optimisation) is shaping content so a machine can lift a direct answer from it. For an operator they are one job.

Arival's 2026 Experiences Traveler study, which I covered in How to Get Your Experiences Recommended by AI, found that 53% of travellers use AI for destination research and 33% use it specifically to discover things to do. In Getting Found in the AI Age, I cited Arival research showing nearly half of travellers who plan with AI rely on ChatGPT, 30% use Gemini and 22% use the AI summaries inside Google Search.

This guide expands those Arival articles and my post on how AI search is rewriting the rules for tour operators, and sits under my guide to AI for tour operators.

How ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews choose experiences

Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how each assistant ranks sources. They do publish how they find pages; the rest is my read from testing with operators.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google's guidance on AI features and your website says there are no extra requirements or special optimisations for AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google also describes "query fan-out", running related searches across subtopics to build one answer, so a question about a family food tour can pull from your dietary, accessibility and meeting-point details.

ChatGPT search

OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Blocking GPTBot is a separate decision: that crawler is for model training, not search.

Perplexity

Perplexity says its PerplexityBot crawler exists to surface and link websites in its results. It lists the sources behind its answers, so search your tour type and city and see who it cites.

What they have in common

As I set out in Getting Found in the AI Age, assistants build recommendations from sources they already trust (websites, review platforms, OTA listings, press, Reddit and forums) and favour businesses that are cited often and consistently. Three questions decide whether you make the shortlist:

• Can it find you? Crawlable, indexed pages and listings.
• Can it read you? Plain facts: what the tour is, where, how long, who it suits and what is included.
• Does it trust you? Recent reviews, independent mentions and facts that match everywhere.

SEO vs GEO: what changes and what does not

GEO does not replace SEO: most of what makes a page rank also makes it quotable. What changes is what counts as a win, and how much work happens off your website.

Niche operators have the edge here. As SEO specialist Rory Gillett put it in my Arival article, "Trying to be everything to everyone makes you invisible in AI search."

Reviews and OTA listings: the trust layer

Much of what an assistant knows about your tour comes from pages you do not own.

Reviews. Volume matters, but so do review velocity and replies: a profile that has gone quiet looks like a business that may have stopped trading. In How to Get Your Experiences Recommended by AI, I noted that products with 15 or more reviews earn roughly 10 times the bookings of those with none. My review strategy guide and my Arival Operator Guide to Unlocking Growth with Reviews go deeper.

OTA listings. Language models favour authoritative, frequently cited sources, which, as I argued in Getting Found in the AI Age, gives Viator and GetYourGuide a structural advantage; Tripadvisor and Google reviews add independent trust signals. Treat each listing as an AI visibility asset: complete, current and matching your own site. A guest who finds you on an OTA can still book direct next time, as my direct bookings guide explains.

Google. Complete your Business Profile and connect to Google Things to Do, which is built on structured data and, in my view, one of the clearer routes into Google's AI.

Product pages an assistant can quote

Brochure copy is close to invisible in AI search: "an unforgettable experience" answers nothing. Lead each product page with category and place, then every hard fact a guest needs to decide. As I wrote in How to Get Your Experiences Recommended by AI, a listing a machine cannot read cleanly is unlikely to be recommended. This prompt rebuilds one without inventing anything:

Rewrite this tour listing so an AI assistant can quote it accurately. Open with one sentence stating the tour type, city, duration, group size, price and who it suits. Then list highlights, inclusions, exclusions, meeting point, accessibility and cancellation policy. Use only facts from the text below and write MISSING where a fact is absent. [Paste your listing here]

FAQ pages: answer the question before it is asked

Assistants answer questions, so publish answers. Put an FAQ on every experience page covering what guests ask before booking: cancellations, weather, accessibility, dietary needs, children and the meeting point.

• Use your guests' words. Pull questions from your inbox, WhatsApp, guide notes and reviews.
• Answer in the first sentence. "Yes, the route is step-free" beats a paragraph of context.

A good first exercise from my Arival guide: for each of your top three experiences, list the five or six things guests most often ask before booking. On markup, Google stopped showing FAQ rich results from 7 May 2026, according to its documentation updates. That ends the snippet, not the value: assistants still read the answers on the page, with or without FAQ schema.

Schema markup: label your facts

Schema markup is code that labels each fact on a page for machines: this is the price, this is the rating, this is the business. For operators the most relevant types are TouristTrip, LocalBusiness, Event and Review. Booking systems such as FareHarbor, Bokun and Rezdy add some automatically; check it anyway.

Google says no special schema is needed for its AI features, and that structured data should match the visible text. So treat schema as labelling, not a ranking trick. Check pages with the Schema Markup Validator and Google's Rich Results Test, and fix any price or rating that differs from the page.

Keep your facts identical everywhere

Assistants cross-check. If your website, Viator listing and Google profile disagree on duration, price or meeting point, you look less reliable than an operator whose details match. Keep one master fact sheet and copy from it everywhere. If you have built a second brain for your tour company, those facts already live in one file.

Do you need an llms.txt file?

llms.txt is a proposal, published by Jeremy Howard on llmstxt.org in September 2024, for a Markdown file that gives AI tools a short summary of your site and links to its key pages. It is not an agreed standard, and Google's documentation updates say these files are not needed for Google Search and will not help or hurt rankings, though keeping one for other services is fine.

My view: cheap insurance, not a lever. Add one once the basics are done, with your business name, a one-paragraph summary and links to tours, FAQ and policies. You can see this site's at /llms.txt.

How to measure AI search visibility

No single dashboard covers this yet, so combine signals:

• Prompt audits. Each quarter, ask the main assistants your guests' questions in a fresh session and record who is named and what is cited.
• Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing's AI Performance report, launched in public preview in February 2026, shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partner integrations, plus the grounding queries behind them.
• Microsoft Clarity. Free, with AI visibility features that track when your content is cited and which AI bots crawl your site.
• Google Search Console. AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic sits inside your overall Web search figures, so watch question-style queries.
• Analytics and booking forms. Look for referrals from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai, and add an AI option to "how did you hear about us?"

Reuse the same prompts so results stay comparable:

What are the best [tour type] in [city]?
Which [tour type] in [city] suits [families / older travellers]?
Is [your company name] good for [tour type] in [city]?
What should I know before booking [your tour name]?

AI search checklist for tour operators

1. Run a baseline prompt audit and save the answers.
2. Make sure robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot and Bingbot.
3. Check indexing in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
4. Complete your Google Business Profile and connect to Google Things to Do.
5. Rewrite top product pages to lead with category, place and hard facts.
6. Add a direct-answer FAQ to every experience page.
7. Validate schema against the visible page.
8. Align your website, OTAs, Google and Tripadvisor with one fact sheet.
9. Request a review after every tour and reply to every review.
10. Earn mentions in local press, DMO pages and forums, and publish one useful guide per destination.
11. Add an llms.txt file.
12. Repeat the audit quarterly and track citations in Bing and Clarity.

Next, watch agents that book tours for travellers, a shift I flagged in Getting Found in the AI Age: live availability then becomes part of visibility. See AI agents for tour operators, my tour operator marketing guide and AI tools for tour operators. For a workshop or keynote, see speaking or read more about me.

Sources: Getting Found in the AI Age: A Guide for Operators (Arival), How to Get Your Experiences Recommended by AI (Arival), Operator Guide to Unlocking Growth with Reviews (Arival), AI features and your website (Google Search Central), Latest Google Search documentation updates (Google Search Central), Overview of OpenAI crawlers (OpenAI), Perplexity crawlers (Perplexity), The /llms.txt file (llmstxt.org), Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing Webmaster Blog), Microsoft Clarity.