How to check whether AI recommends your travel brand, and what your score means

Everything in these posts comes back to one first move: knowing where you actually stand. You cannot improve your AI visibility, or even know whether you need to, until you have seen how the assistants describe and recommend you today. The good news is that you can get a real sense of this yourself, in an afternoon. Here is how to do it properly, and how to make sense of what you find.

Do it in the right order

The most common mistake is to search your own brand name. That tells you almost nothing, because an assistant asked directly about you will usually find you. Your customers are not searching your name, though. They are searching for what you offer, before they know you exist. That is the search that matters, and the one you need to check.

So work in this order.

First, write down the real questions. Put yourself in your customer's position at the moment they are looking for a business like yours but have not chosen one. Write ten of the actual questions they would ask. "Best small hotels in this town for couples." "Who runs food tours in this area." "Where should I stay near this landmark for a quiet trip." "Best operator for a family trip to this region." Specific, natural, the way a real person types or speaks to an assistant.

Then ask each assistant, one question at a time. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and put your questions to each. Ask them exactly as a customer would, without mentioning your name. Do it in each assistant separately, because, as covered earlier, they draw on different sources and will often give different answers.

Then record what you see, which is where the real insight is.

What to look for

For each question, in each assistant, note three things.

Do you appear at all? This is coverage. Are you named in the answer, or is it only other brands? If you are absent from the questions that lead to bookings, that is the single most important thing to know.

Who appears instead of you? This is your real competitive picture, and it is often surprising. The brands the assistants name for your key questions are your true competitors for this channel, and they may not be the ones you think. Note who comes up repeatedly.

Is what is said about you accurate? When you do appear, read the description closely. Is it correct? Up to date? Does it position you well, or does it undersell you or get something wrong? An inaccurate mention can be worse than none, because it actively misinforms a potential customer.

How to make sense of it

Once you have gone through your questions, patterns emerge, and they map directly onto what to do.

If you rarely appear: your issue is coverage. The assistants do not have enough clear, findable, credible information about you to include you. The work is to build that presence and clarity so you become an option at all.

If you appear but the information is wrong: your issue is accuracy, and it is the most urgent to fix, because it is costing you bookings right now and is usually quick to correct at the source.

If you appear but always after competitors, or described blandly: your issue is framing. You are known but not positioned as the right choice. The work is to make it clear and provable why you are the right fit for a particular kind of traveller.

If you appear well in one assistant but not others: your issue is uneven presence. You have strength to build on, but gaps in the assistants you are weak in, which is common and often an easy win.

A rough "score" is simply how often you appear, accurately and well-framed, across your important questions and the main assistants. The closer that is to "always", the stronger your position. The further from it, the more opportunity you have, and the more your competitors are currently taking that you are not.

The limits of doing it by hand

Checking yourself is genuinely worth doing, and it will tell you a lot. It has two limits worth knowing, though.

The first is consistency. Assistants vary their answers by location, device, phrasing and over time, so a handful of manual checks is a snapshot, not a reliable measure. To see your true, stable position you need to check systematically.

The second is the Google AI answers. The two AI surfaces inside Google Search reach the most travellers of all, and you cannot meaningfully check them by hand, they need specialist tooling. So a manual check, however careful, is missing the biggest surface.

The shortcut

If you would rather not spend the afternoon, or you want the full, reliable picture including the Google surfaces you cannot check yourself, that is exactly what the free AI Visibility Check is for. It runs your brand through the major assistants against the real questions that drive bookings in your market, and gives you the coverage, accuracy and competitor picture in one place, without the manual effort.

Either way, do the check. Knowing where you stand is the move that makes everything else possible, and right now, most of your competitors have never made it.

Run your free AI Visibility Check →