The Ultimate Guide to GEO (AI Search Optimisation) for Tour Operators

By Blake: ex-Rezdy (product marketing, SEO lead), co-founder of Kong, and SEO/GEO consultant to enterprise tech brands.

Travellers are planning trips inside ChatGPT now. They're asking Gemini for "the best ATV tour in Queenstown" and Perplexity for "cooking classes in Barcelona worth doing." And this isn't fringe behaviour anymore: Phocuswright's latest research found that 56% of travellers used AI for at least one trip in the past year. That's more than double the year before, and the fastest behavioural shift they've tracked in a decade. It's converting, too: McKinsey found that visitors arriving at travel sites from an AI source bounce 45% less than average. These are travellers who arrive already half-decided.

So naturally, a whole new industry has appeared overnight to sell you the answer to one question: how do I show up in there?

They call it GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimisation. It's the biggest buzzword in digital marketing right now, and if you run a tour or activity business, someone has probably already tried to sell you some GEO snake oil package. My goal with this article is to help you tell the snake oil from the real thing before you spend money on it.

Before I tell you why most of it is a trap, here's why my take is worth your time. I spent six years at Rezdy as a product marketing manager, leading their SEO for a good part of that run, so tours and activities search is home turf for me. These days I'm building Kong, a booking platform for operators, bootstrapped by choice: no investors telling us how to price the product or which regions to chase for their ROI. To fund it, I run SEO and GEO for enterprise tech clients. One already had a solid SEO agency before I arrived, but we still grew their organic leads by 80% in 12 months, right through all the mixed signals about AI, GEO and where search is going.

That's where this take comes from. A playbook built through years of SEO and GEO work across multiple industries, and I'm giving it away:

Just do good SEO.

That's literally it. Or, to give you the slightly longer version: the answer isn't GEO or "AI Search Optimisation". It's supercharging your SEO strategy with AI. Let me explain why, because the reason matters, and it will save you real money.

The hacks are a rerun of a movie that ends badly

Most of what's being sold as GEO right now looks like this: publish stacks of "Best X in Y" listicles, buy exact-match domains like best-snorkelling-tours-in-bali.com, and stuff pages with phrases AI models supposedly love.

The worst part? It actually works. For now. I've watched small businesses outrank far larger establishments in AI answers with exactly these strategies. Keyword being "for now."

If you were around for early SEO, this should feel familiar. It's black hat SEO with a new haircut.

Keyword stuffing worked too, right up until 2006, when Google deleted BMW's entire German website from its search index for exactly this kind of trick. A household-name brand, zeroed out overnight. Every loophole era in search ends the same way: the platform closes it, and the businesses that built on the loophole disappear with it.

The AI platforms are already tightening how they choose sources. When the GEO equivalent of that BMW moment comes (and it will), you don't want your bookings depending on a tactic that just died.

AI assistants mostly read the same internet Google does

Here's something the GEO sales pitch skips: when ChatGPT or Perplexity answers "best food tour in Mexico City," it usually runs a live web search behind the scenes and summarises what it finds. And what it finds is heavily shaped by traditional search rankings.

If your tour doesn't rank in normal search results, you're largely invisible to AI assistants too. There is no secret AI back door that skips the boring work. Ranking well in traditional search is the entry ticket to AI answers.

My pick to win the AI consumer race doesn't even have a "GEO surface"

This is the part almost nobody is talking about, and you can verify it yourself if you (or your web person) can see your website's visitor logs.

Every time you type a prompt, the AI engine runs a search on the back end using software "bots" that go out and read websites, and each bot identifies itself by name. In your logs you'll find ChatGPT-User. PerplexityBot. ClaudeBot. All reading your site.

You know which one you'll never find? A Gemini bot. It doesn't exist.

Google's Gemini doesn't crawl the web separately. It reads Google's existing search index, the one built by the same Googlebot that has been visiting your website for 25 years. Optimising for Gemini and optimising for Google Search are the same job.

Why does that matter so much? Because while Claude has already won the enterprise space, I think Gemini will win the AI consumer race.

ChatGPT is Skype

Don't get me wrong: ChatGPT is a real channel today, with over a billion monthly users. If it's sending you enquiries, take them. But long term, my money's on Google, and the reason is a pattern we've seen before.

Remember Skype? Massive first-mover advantage. The brand became a verb. "Skype me." It looked unbeatable. ChatGPT is in the same position: people say "ask Chat" the way they used to say "Skype me." And yet its share of the AI assistant market has already slid from roughly 87% to under 50% in about 18 months (Sensor Tower, State of AI 2026).

Skype didn't lose to a better product. It lost to distribution. FaceTime shipped pre-installed on every iPhone. Google Meet came bundled with every Gmail account. Skype had the brand; they had the pipes.

Now look at today's pipes. Google owns the biggest software distribution on earth: billions of search users who will simply use whatever AI is placed in front of them. Apple owns the biggest premium hardware distribution. And at its developer conference in June, Apple confirmed that the rebuilt Siri shipping with iOS 27 runs on a custom Google Gemini model. That's the assistant that reads straight from Google's index, heading to an installed base of 1.4 billion iPhones, in every traveller's pocket.

Distribution won the last platform war. It just picked its side in this one.

Is there any real GEO work worth doing? Yes, a little

I'm not saying there's nothing AI-specific worth implementing. There is a sweet spot, and it's the technical layer: structured data, schema markup, clean page organisation. The things that make your content easy for machines to read and quote.

But understand what these do. They're amplifiers, not substitutes. Schema markup on a genuinely useful tour page makes it more likely to be surfaced and cited by AI assistants. Schema markup on a thin, unhelpful page does nothing. You've just made it easier for the machines to confirm your content isn't worth recommending. If the content is useful, structured data makes it look more useful. If it isn't, no markup will save it.

The good news: this layer doesn't take long. A competent developer can add tour, product, review and FAQ schema to a typical operator site in days, not months. Do it once, keep it maintained, and then put the rest of your energy where it has always belonged: the fundamentals below.

So what should a tour operator actually do?

If the winning assistant reads from Google's index, then the work that wins AI search is the same unglamorous work we've been doing in SEO all along: building good content, earning good reviews, and getting backlinks from reputable sites. Concretely:

1. Get your Google Business Profile in order. Complete, accurate, categorised correctly, photos updated, posts active. For "near me" and destination queries, this is the single highest-leverage asset you own, in Maps, in Search, and in AI answers built from both. It's also a perfect place to use the Claude + Semrush combo I'll cover in the next section: ask it to find the most relevant keywords for your profile and where your listing is under-optimised, or go further and have Claude run the entire optimisation process. We used exactly this strategy to take an operator from position 8 to position 1 in their local results. (Our full Google Business Profile and local SEO guide walks through it.)
2. Get your tours on Google Things to Do. This is the big one for our industry, and it flows directly from everything above. Things to Do is Google's own tours-and-activities module: your products, prices, ratings and booking links, structured in Google's own data, surfacing in Search, Maps and Google's AI answers. Remember the thesis: Gemini reads Google's data, and this is Google's data about your tours. Basic listings are free, you connect through your booking platform, and industry research suggests more than half of small operators still aren't using it.
3. Keep earning reviews, everywhere. AI assistants lean heavily on review signals and third-party mentions when recommending "the best" anything. Volume, recency and replies all matter. (Here's how to get more Google reviews.)
4. Answer real traveller questions on your own site. Not AI-generated filler, but actual pages that answer what guests ask you every day: what to bring, is it safe for kids, what happens if it rains, how fit do I need to be. These are exactly the questions travellers now type into assistants.
5. Get mentioned on sites Google already trusts. Your tourism board, destination blogs, local news, industry sites like this one. AI models recommend businesses they see recommended elsewhere, and every one of those mentions is a backlink working for you in traditional search too.
6. Add the technical layer once. Structured data and schema markup, as above. A short project, not an ongoing money pit.
7. Don't block the bots. Ask your web person to confirm that Googlebot (and the AI crawlers, if you want that traffic) aren't blocked in your site settings. It happens more often than you'd think.
8. Skip anything pitched as an AI hack. If a tactic would have been called black hat SEO in 2010, it's GEO snake oil in 2026: a liability, not a strategy.

If you want the wider picture on how this fits with every other way to grow, we've mapped it in how to get more bookings for your tour business.

The real playbook: supercharge your SEO with AI

This is the concept I want you to leave with. AI can't hack search for you, but it can help you build your SEO faster than ever before. Every item on the list above just got dramatically quicker. Three examples from my own workflow:

Keyword research is now a conversation. Tools like Semrush have launched MCP connectors that plug directly into Claude. Once connected, you can literally ask: "Run keyword research for my kayak tours, find the best-performing keywords with low difficulty, and recommend content I could build around them." Work that used to require a specialist and an afternoon of spreadsheet wrangling now takes minutes, and you can interrogate the results in plain English until you understand them. This is also the combo I mentioned for your Google Business Profile: point it at your listing, ask which keywords your categories, description and posts should be built around, and let Claude run the optimisation from there. That's the exact process behind the position 8 to position 1 result above.

Content creation, done the right way. A big myth doing the rounds: "Google penalises AI content." It doesn't. Google penalises bad content: AI slop, the generic filler anyone could generate in thirty seconds. The distinction matters, because you have something no AI and no competitor has: genuine insight. You run the tours. You know which viewpoint the guides save for last, what guests always get wrong about the weather, which question every family asks before booking. Feed that insight into the AI, ask it how best to structure it, then work with it to shape a genuinely unique piece. You get the best of both worlds: your expertise, delivered with the structure and readability that both humans and search engines reward.

Even your website pages. Tools like Claude Design can now generate web pages at a shockingly good level. You still need the vision, and you need to direct it: tell it what to change, what feels wrong, what your brand actually looks like. But an operator with taste and no coding ability can now build good-looking, SEO-optimised pages in hours. That was weeks of agency back-and-forth before AI. (If you don't have a site yet, start with how to build a website for your tour business.)

The pattern across all three: AI amplifies what you bring to it. Bring real knowledge of your tours and your guests, and it multiplies your output. Bring nothing, and it generates the same slop as everyone else's nothing.

None of this is new. That's the point. The businesses that quietly built real search visibility over the past decade are already winning AI search without spending a dollar on GEO. The only thing that's changed is that building that visibility has never been faster.

SEO didn't die. It got a rebrand. The winning move isn't GEO. It's supercharging your SEO with AI.

And here's the irony: in a world where AI changes by the week, the biggest swing you can take is betting on traditional SEO.

That's where all my money is.

Frequently asked questions

What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?

GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimisation, is the practice of trying to get your business surfaced and cited inside AI answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI. It is the biggest buzzword in digital marketing right now. Most of what is currently sold as GEO is old black hat SEO with a new haircut: listicle spam, exact-match domains and phrase-stuffing that works for now but ends the way every search loophole ends, with the platform closing it.

Is GEO worth paying for as a tour operator?

Mostly no. If a GEO tactic would have been called black hat SEO in 2010, it is snake oil in 2026 and a liability, not a strategy. The one part worth doing is the technical layer: structured data, schema markup and clean page organisation, which a developer can add in days. Everything else labelled GEO is just good SEO, and your money is better spent there.

Does optimising for Google also optimise for AI search?

Largely yes. Most AI assistants run a live web search behind the scenes and summarise what they find, and what they find is heavily shaped by traditional search rankings. Google's Gemini goes further: it does not crawl the web separately, it reads Google's existing search index. If your tour does not rank in normal search, you are largely invisible to AI assistants too. Ranking well in traditional search is the entry ticket to AI answers.

How do I get my tour recommended by ChatGPT or Gemini?

Do the same unglamorous SEO work that wins normal search: get your Google Business Profile in order, get your tours on Google Things to Do, keep earning reviews everywhere, answer real traveller questions on your own site, get mentioned on sites Google already trusts, add the technical schema layer once, and do not block the crawlers. Skip anything pitched as an AI hack.

Does Google penalise AI-written content?

No. Google penalises bad content, the generic AI slop anyone could generate in thirty seconds, not AI content as such. The way to use AI well is to feed it genuine insight only you have, such as what guests always get wrong about the weather or which question every family asks before booking, then work with it to shape a unique, well-structured piece. You get your expertise delivered with the readability both humans and search engines reward.

What should a tour operator actually do to show up in AI search?

Just do good SEO, supercharged with AI. Because the winning assistants read from Google's index, the work that wins AI search is the same work that wins SEO: build good content, earn good reviews, and get backlinks from reputable sites. Use AI to do all of it faster, from keyword research to content to building web pages. The winning move is not GEO, it is supercharging your SEO with AI.