Getting Found on AI Search & Trip Planners

When someone asks an AI assistant "what's a good surf school near Tamarindo" or "find me a well-reviewed seafood restaurant on the coast," the assistant has to decide, from everything it can access, which businesses to actually mention. That's a new kind of visibility question — related to classic SEO, but not identical to it.

How AI systems actually decide what to recommend

Broadly, these systems lean on a mix of: structured data about a business (schema markup, business descriptions, categories), the same web content that ranks in classic search, and — for tools built specifically around travel or local recommendations — direct data feeds and review platforms. A business that's well-structured and well-documented in these sources has a real advantage; one that's thin or inconsistent is easy to skip over.

What actually helps

• Structured content. Clear, well-organised information about what you do, who it's for, and where — not buried in a single vague paragraph.
• Schema markup. Machine-readable data (Organization, Service, LocalBusiness, FAQPage) that tells both search engines and AI systems what your page actually contains.
• An llms.txt file. A simple, emerging standard that gives AI crawlers a clean, direct summary of your business — we maintain one for Steady Drift itself.
• A consistent, accurate Google Business Profile. Many AI tools draw on the same underlying local-business data that powers Google Maps.
• Genuine, current reviews. Sentiment and recency both appear to matter to systems trying to make a real recommendation, not just list options.

What doesn't help

Keyword stuffing, hidden text, or trying to "trick" an AI crawler doesn't work the way some outdated SEO tactics used to, and it risks the opposite of the intended effect. The systems making these recommendations are specifically trying to filter out exactly that kind of manipulation. The honest path — clear, accurate, well-structured information — is also the effective one.

Why this matters more for location-based businesses

Trip planning and "find me a place to X" queries are a natural fit for AI assistants, which makes this especially relevant for hospitality, tourism, and other location-based businesses — the exact category where a customer is often planning ahead, in an unfamiliar area, and leaning on an assistant to shortlist options before they ever open a map.

How we approach it

This isn't a replacement for classic local SEO — it's a complementary layer built on the same foundation: an accurate Google Business Profile, a well-structured website, and genuine reviews. Our own $67 Digital Presence Audit checks AI platform presence as one of its six research areas, and we build every website with the schema and structure this requires from the start. See AI Readiness & Implementation for more.