Thank you so much for joining today’s webinar. My name is Janette Roush. I am the SVP of Innovation and the Chief AI Officer for Brand USA. And today, we are talking about AI for small tourism businesses and how you can get found by international travelers with AI tools.
So if you’re not familiar with Brand USA, we are the destination marketing organization for the United States, and our mission is to drive the economic benefits of international visitors to the United States. We’re focused exclusively on international inbound visitation. And our vision for AI in the industry is to lead global destination marketing into the AI era by using intelligent systems to connect the world to the stories, people, and places of the United States. So we want to make discovery personal, inspiration effortless, and travel decisions frictionless.
How I bring that to life is through three tranches of work. The first is operational excellence: how are we using AI at Brand USA to do our jobs better? The second piece is industry empowerment, and that’s why we are doing this webinar today — that’s why the Agents of Change monthly AI webinar series exists. We want to make it easy for businesses that benefit from the tourism economy to understand how to work better with AI. We know that we are not going to outspend other destinations when it comes to attracting international visitors, so everybody needs the opportunity to use these tools to do our work better and faster. The third piece is traveler experience enhancement: how are we using AI tools to actually make the United States more discoverable and more bookable for visitors?
What we are covering today is four topics: how travelers abroad are using AI to plan their trips, the free moves you can make this month to show up in AI answers, keeping your business details accurate in the tools travelers trust, and some tips for telling a useful AI vendor from one who’s selling hype. You’ll notice what’s not on this list is ways for you as a small business to actually use AI in your work — ping me after the webinar if that’s a topic that would be useful, because I think it deserves its own separate webinar. Today we’re focusing on the external piece: AI discoverability and working with AI on your website.
There should be plenty of time at the end for Q&A, so put your questions in the chat and I’ll hold them until we get there. One question everyone always asks: will there be a recording, and do you get a copy of the deck? Yes to both — you’ll be able to download a PDF of the exact deck I’m walking through, we’ll email you a copy of the recording, and it will be live on our website within a few days of the webinar concluding.
So, let’s launch into how international travelers are using AI to plan trips. This is a bit of an old stat, but I like it because it’s from a huge survey Booking.com did last summer: looking at 37,000 international travelers, 62% of them are using AI in some portion of their trip-planning process. The idea that an AI tool is going to be the intermediary between you and the visitor is no longer theoretical — that is happening today.
If you sense that maybe you’re not using AI yourself, or you aren’t hearing friends and family talk about using AI for trip planning, I’ll share that because we’re focused on international tourism, the United States actually lags behind many markets when it comes to AI adoption, specifically for search. This is search in general, not specifically travel search, but I’m sure it’s very applicable to us. India, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Australia — those markets are using AI more frequently, and probably more proficiently, than we may be doing at home. This particular study also didn’t look at South and Latin America, and those markets are embracing AI more quickly than we are here in the US. So even if you think this issue isn’t touching you yet, I promise you internationally it is. We need to be discoverable when it comes to AI search.
What does that look like, and what are the issues we’re facing right now? You’re probably familiar with AI overviews inside of Google — what they call a zero-click search, where when you type something into a search bar, Google just answers the query inside of Google and you don’t need to visit a website to get your answer. As a result, many businesses are seeing a decline in web traffic, and the impact of that differs based on the kind of business you are. For destination marketing organizations, and I know we have many on the call today, a decline in site traffic might be an important metric we report back to our boards — we’re generally not selling anything, so what we’re promoting is information and content about our destinations, and it can be frustrating not to be rewarded with traffic for providing that information, or even to know which information is getting pulled into these AI overviews.
For the small businesses on the call, this may not be quite as existential. Studies have shown that even though the traffic decline is real, the traffic you do get — if you’re selling a good or service, a hotel room night, an attraction ticket — is much more ready to buy. It’s a more qualified visitor once they make their way through the AI overview and land on your website. But either way, we’re seeing a decline in website traffic, so what do we need to do about it?
I attended a Google-hosted global travel and local executive summit back in April where they talked about the changes they’re making in search. Their headline for all of us was that good SEO is good GEO. SEO is search engine optimization — where you fall in Google’s search results. GEO is generative engine optimization — the idea that if I’m using ChatGPT or I’m in a Google AI overview and I ask a question, is my business showing up in that result? Google’s message is that the things you do to rank high on Google are the same things you need to do to show up in AI overviews, and they specifically frame that as E-E-A-T. This isn’t a new framework — Google used it even pre-AI to encourage people to create good content in order to rise in Google’s rankings.
So what is E-E-A-T? The first E is Experience: first-person accounts, original photography, the idea that an actual human being created the website and the content isn’t generic — “I am an expert, this is what makes me an expert, and here is my experience.” The second is Expertise: they’re looking for credentials, who you are specifically and what your expertise is in the area you’re writing about. The third is Authoritativeness: do other sources besides you say you’re great? I can say I’m great, but it matters more if somebody else says so — they’re looking for press, institutions, your local DMO having an article or listing that points to your website, which gives your small business a level of authority. The fourth is Trustworthiness: is the information on your website accurate and up to date? Can readers tell if it’s fresh? Is it clear who owns the content? If you have a quote from someone, is the citation transparent, or did you just copy content from someone else’s website?
That’s the secret formula Google uses to determine where you show up in a search result — and where you show up in an AI overview.
Beyond the Google-specific advice, what does this mean for us? AI rewards content that only you could have written. AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or a Google AI overview — don’t want to pull in obvious AI content. They want content that’s specific, authoritative, and useful. You don’t want to just answer a frequently asked question, because if a question is frequently asked, the answer probably lives everywhere on the internet already, so there’s no reason for an AI to cite you specifically — they already consider it fact. What becomes valuable are the infrequently asked questions: information that isn’t already on the internet. That’s the interesting content to create — not just a list of the top ten restaurants in your destination, but a specific interview with a restaurant owner about what kind of clientele come in, or what the vibe is like at different times of day. Comparisons are also important to AI, since a lot of people use AI search to compare two things they’re deciding between — if you can provide content that answers comparative questions, that’s what AI is looking for. They’re also looking for structured content, which I’ll go into in more detail shortly, and for what the press says about you, since that gives authority to what you say about yourself.
As an example throughout this presentation, I’m going to share a real website I built myself, for my parents’ business. My parents are retired but have a little antique shop inside a big beautiful house in Kansas City that holds eight antique shops — a small mall of sorts. It’s open two days a week, and they had zero internet presence. At one point they paid someone $500 to build them a website, but it was so difficult to keep updated that they stopped updating it, and eventually stopped renewing the domain.
I’m not going into how to use AI to build a website today — ping me in the Q&A if that’s interesting, since it could be a future webinar topic. But if you’re a small business not necessarily selling anything, like my parents — this is really just a business card online — it is dead simple to create a website like that and push it live, and the only real cost is the domain name, about $11 a year.
These constraints might feel familiar if you’re a very small business. Like my parents, they’re not going to open up the code for this website and edit anything — and neither am I, honestly, because I don’t know how to write code. I was a theater major. I worked on Broadway for twenty years. I got into AI because I found it fascinating what you can do with it, and I figured this stuff out by sheer brute force, not because I’m a developer or have a coding background. So everything I’m talking about is accessible to everyone on this call.
I used Claude to write the code for my parents’ website — you could do this with any frontier model, Gemini or ChatGPT too. On the question in the chat about which AI generator is better, comparing ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok: I’ll confess I haven’t used Grok, but I understand even Grok has gotten quite good in its latest release. Really, if you already have one paid model, you don’t need to shop around, because the things one model can do, another might leapfrog tomorrow — that’s something that can change overnight, so you can’t switch providers every time that happens. At the moment, Claude has been my favorite, going back to last November, and it also has really good administrator controls from an enterprise perspective. But as long as you’re paying for one of these tools, you’re going to have a good, trusted experience, and any of them can do what I’m walking through today.
That website for my parents is hosted on Vercel, which has a free tier. I have analytics set up through Google Analytics, which is free, and Google Search Console, also free, so I can see how people are searching for the site. The domain name costs about $12 a year.
So whether or not you’re building a brand-new website from scratch, what do you do to encourage its visibility? Here are the steps to walk through one by one — start small, you don’t have to do all of this today, and each step shouldn’t take much time.
The most important step is fixing your Google Business Profile. This is actually the piece I couldn’t do for my parents, because they don’t own their Google Business Profile — it belongs to Gillham House, the larger antiques mall their shop sits inside of, which hampers their AI discoverability. But most of you on this call probably don’t have that same restriction. Just search “Google Business Profile,” and make sure your name matches your actual business name — don’t fill it with keywords or check off a long list of categories, go narrow and specific about what your business actually is. Make sure your hours, address, and phone number are correct everywhere they show up, and keep seasonal hours updated on your profile.
When it comes to your website itself, put your facts in plain text — hours, address, phone number, prices if relevant, reservations, cancellation policy, accessibility information. The reason it matters that this information can be highlighted with a cursor, rather than being inside a picture, is that it’s much harder for a machine to read text out of an image than to read plain text on the back end of your website. For the same reason, don’t bury that information inside a PDF — most AI search tools can read a PDF, but they probably won’t, and it’s certainly not as fast for them as reading plain text. Just like humans, they’re lazy — they want information laid out as obviously as possible.
Third, claim your other listings. Google is most important, but the same goes for Bing Places, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Apple Business — all free. Make sure you’ve claimed and own all of them, and that your information is identical across every one, because inconsistent information across listings is a flag to AI systems. If you work with your local DMO and they have listings for you, make sure those are correct too, since that’s a trusted resource, and any mismatch could send a bad signal that something in the pipeline isn’t to be trusted.
Now for the more technical part — but it’ll be fine, and I’ll keep it plain. Check whether crawlers are blocked from visiting your website by looking at your robots.txt file: type your website address, then add “/robots.txt” at the end. If that page doesn’t exist, you’re fine. If a file does appear, you want to see “allow” across the board — this is a real screenshot from my parents’ robots.txt file, and everything explicitly says allow. Honestly, that might be overboard, but when I asked AI for advice, it erred on the side of being permissive. You want to make sure everything is allowed to come to your website, because if it isn’t, you are literally telling AI it can’t pull information from your site — the single biggest blocker to being found by AI.
This affects three layers of AI visibility. First, are you in the training data? You might remember when ChatGPT first came out and couldn’t search the internet, so the training data’s cutoff date mattered a lot — there could be information about your business baked into that underlying training data, and these companies continue to train new models, so they continue scraping the internet for more. As a business, you want information about you to be scraped into that training data. Second is live retrieval — this is when ChatGPT or Claude puts up a little bubble that says “Searching the web.” That’s a separate AI bot behaving like a search engine crawler, coming to your website to see if the information it’s looking for is there. Third is legibility — can the bot actually read the information it received? This is a bit more technical: it comes down to where your website’s information lives and how it’s served. Some programming approaches don’t make the words appear until the website is rendered in a browser on someone’s computer, rather than being served directly from the server. If a human being needs an open browser for your information to become visible, AI won’t be able to see it either. If your website has a lot of JavaScript functionality, that’s worth checking — ask your web team whether your information is being served server-side or client-side; you want server-side.
Different bots do different jobs. A publisher like The New York Times might not want their content used to train models unless they’re being paid for it, so they’d disallow GPTBot or ClaudeBot — but they might still want their public-facing pages, ahead of the paywall, to show up in a ChatGPT search result, so they’d allow the OpenAI or Claude search bots. Then there’s Common Crawl, a service that continuously crawls and saves copies of the internet for posterity, and that data feeds many models. Depending on how sensitive or valuable your website’s information is, this is why you’d allow or disallow individual bots.
I’ve had a few questions in the chat from people checking their robots.txt and finding error messages I don’t recognize — I’ll admit I don’t know what those specific messages mean either. What I’d suggest for now is dropping the error into your favorite AI tool and asking it to explain, because that’s what I’ll have to do too.
On this same question of whether your information is visible to AI, you might be blocking AI without realizing it. If you work with a service like Cloudflare or Akamai, which serve your website across multiple servers, there’s often an automatic bot blocker built in that you have to override manually. Check your robots.txt for a secondary server that might be blocking bot traffic, so you can adjust what these services are blocking on your behalf.
Next, add structured data. Structured data is code on the back end that isn’t visible to humans, but again, AI is lazy — it wants the easiest, most obvious way to find answers, and structured data is an easy way to tell AI, “this is officially the information you’re looking for.” One way to check if you already have structured data is Google’s Rich Results Test — just search for it, enter your URL, and it’ll show you what structured data looks like on your site.
Structured data can include schema: a small block of code that states information about your business in a format machines can read. AI can technically read all the text on your website, but that text is often buried inside a lot of design code the AI doesn’t need, and sometimes it gets lazy — if the top of your page is full of instructions about header colors, it may not make it down to your business hours. Schema doesn’t change what the website looks like to a human viewer, but it makes clear to the “robot viewer” what you want to communicate. So while a person sees that my dad’s antique shop is open Fridays and Saturdays inside Gillham House Antiques, the machine reads that exact information as code. Humans don’t need to know the latitude and longitude of a business address, for instance, but there are reasons that’s useful for AI to find quickly.
I built a small tool with links showing how to see what AI sees when it looks at your website — if you scan the QR code, it takes you to my personal site, janetteroush.com, under AI Audit, where you can see what AI crawlers see when they visit. It shows things like freshness — are there indications of when the page was last updated — and schema, what type of information the site contains. You can screenshot that output and drop it into your favorite AI tool and ask it to explain what you’re looking at, or whether it’s something to worry about. There’s as much variation in these results as there are people on this call, so I don’t know the answers to everything either — I’m at the level of going back to AI to explain it to me in real time when questions come up, and if I can do that, you can too. Use this as a tool to get started.
The next step is to ask the tools what they say about you. If you’re a DMO or larger organization on this call, you’ve probably had vendors pitching AI visibility tools that measure how often you’re cited or mentioned by AI. For a small business, a good way to start is simply opening an incognito browser and asking the kinds of questions your customers might ask, to see if you come up. I asked, “Tell me about the antique scene in Kansas City,” and the Google AI overview didn’t mention Gillham House or my parents’ shop — not surprising, since it’s a pretty new website and a small business, a tiny drop in a much bigger bucket. But when I asked specifically about the business, it pulled in all the information from the existing website, which told me at least that what’s on the site is being read correctly by that AI tool. You don’t need to invest hours in this, but it’s worth keeping a tab on how you’re showing up. Just make sure you’re in incognito mode — a logged-in session will already know your business and carry persistent memory across chats, so it won’t give you an anonymous view of what the AI actually thinks.
As a bonus, you can measure what AI traffic looks like to your website. These numbers will be small, since a lot of AI retrieval leaves no visible trace, but you can measure whether someone clicked through a citation and found their way to your site. There are two tools worth setting up, or having your web company set up and share access to: Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console. Analytics tracks what people do once they’re on your website; Search Console tracks what gets them there — what people are searching, which phrases surfaced you in results, and which phrases actually sent traffic. You can also use AI to build a dashboard from this data, or to send you a daily push notification on any interesting traffic trends.
For my parents’ website, which I put up at the end of June, I’m genuinely pleased with the traffic level so far — and the most interesting part is the “AI assistant” referral category, which shows it’s starting to come up in AI search results, or that AI bots are visiting to gather information. That matters to me because part of my prompt when having Claude build the site was to throw every trick in the book to make it AI-friendly, and it’s nice to see four or five percent of traffic already coming from AI assistants. It’ll be interesting to watch how that changes over time. Search Console shows how often you’re appearing in Google search results, on which pages, and for which queries — information you can use to decide what content to create next to drive more of that traffic.
Now, the final piece: working with vendors of AI tools and services. Back in early 2023, when ChatGPT was brand new and I was working on the marketing team at New York City Tourism, we got a pitch a week — and the frequency only ramped up — from people saying, essentially, “Do you want AI? I’m here to help you AI with your AI.” We did a few discovery calls, and it was often, “Eighty thousand dollars, and we’ll ask some questions, figure out your needs, and help you AI.” Don’t do that. But it is genuinely confusing to navigate this landscape when we’re told constantly that AI is important, without a clear sense of what it’s important for, or what you need to pay someone for versus what you can do yourself.
Here’s the broad spectrum of pitches I imagine companies like yours are getting, because it’s what’s landing on my desk: training for you or your team on how to use AI, using AI for customer support (a big one right now), people reaching out on LinkedIn offering to “automate your content engine,” AI assistance with CRM and customer relationship management, and back-end administrative or financial support and workflow automation. All of these are legitimate things to do with AI, but you want to think carefully about what exactly you’re paying for.
There are four cost components to any AI project. First is the build itself — say it’s an AI customer service agent with a phone component that can also handle text and email. That’s the kind of thing I’d hesitate to build myself, and I could see real value in paying someone to build it — but ask upfront whether it’s a custom build, and whether you own that build or are renting it, paying a monthly fee in perpetuity. Ask who owns the actual code.
Second is hosting, because there’s a real cost to running AI — tokens are used every time the agent responds by voice, text, or email. Are you being billed a flat rate, or per token? Per-token might be cheaper, but harder to control, since costs rise with volume. Ask whether you can use your own API key so you’re not paying a markup on tokens the vendor is buying and reselling — or conversely, whether they get a bulk discount that benefits you.
Third is the outcome — are you billed per lead, per booking, a flat monthly fee, or per successful query resolved by the agent? Fourth is the human element — how many hours do you get, or are you only paying for outcomes rather than by the hour? With any vendor these days, if they bill hourly, it’s worth asking whether AI now lets them do these tasks in fewer hours than before, and whether that should bring the cost down.
Those are the four things to look at when evaluating an AI vendor pitch. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by what a vendor is telling you — no vendor should overwhelm you. If they’re good at selling, you should be able to understand in plain terms what the thing does, without feeling talked to death. You also want to know what it does that you couldn’t already do yourself with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini; how the price breaks down across each component versus one lump sum; whether an “AI visibility” service is actually something Google says you need, since some vendors claim things that don’t yet have proof behind them; and finally, what you keep when you cancel — do you keep the infrastructure they built, or does it all disappear once the contract ends?
As we come to the finish line, I genuinely see AI becoming the operating system of business. The way I work now, I open Claude and ask it to look at my emails, give me my agenda for the day. When I have to prepare something like this presentation, I’m not opening PowerPoint — I’m talking to Claude about what the outline should be, what framework to use, what examples to give, and it builds the slides based on the outline we work on together, then we edit them together. I genuinely believe that in the next few years we’re all going to migrate to this way of working, thinking not in terms of “I work in a Microsoft environment or a Google environment” but in terms of the AI tools that connect your business to everything it needs to do. I hope this is one small step in getting you ready for that future — because once AI is the operating system of business, it becomes the operating system of your personal life too, including how people plan travel. If I start planning travel by asking Claude where I can go on my Marriott Bonvoy points for good value, I’m going to expect Claude to be able to talk directly to that Bonvoy account — and if it can’t, having to go log into a browser separately is going to start feeling pretty strange. Not today, but in a year or two, we’re going to expect our AI tools to be able to talk to our other SaaS tools. So as you think about your business’s future, especially if you take bookings by phone or online, think about how you’ll be prepared once agentic commerce becomes more common.
If you’re looking for additional training resources: if you’re new to AI, I recommend Claude’s Academy — three videos that aren’t just about Claude, but about AI in general, to help you understand how it works and what that means for your business. Beyond that, there are tools specifically for small businesses: Grow with Google, a specific AI guide from the University of Minnesota Extension, and a small business basics course with multiple videos from the US Chamber of Commerce. I also really liked the content from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a nonprofit providing free video training for small businesses on AI. And if you’re deeply interested in GEO and AI search specifically — an area where I have better-than-surface-level knowledge, but not deep technical expertise — Propellic is a company that works exclusively with tourism businesses and writes on a more technical level; their free email newsletter is a great way to stay current. And of course, if anything gets too technical, you can always ask AI to “explain this to me like I’m a bright eighth-grader.”
Thank you so much for joining today. Feel free to keep putting questions in the chat as I walk through the last couple of slides. Our next webinar will be on AI-powered event prep, specifically for people who work in sales — if you’re looking for ways to use AI to prepare for sales calls or a trade show, that will be the topic.
A recording of this webinar will be available in a few days on our recently relaunched website, which now has its own AI resources section, including a dedicated spot for these webinars once I’m able to edit and post them. You’ll also receive an email once it’s live.
Thank you again for your time. I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn, where I write a lot about AI, or to reach out by email at [email protected] with any follow-up questions. I appreciate everyone’s attendance, and I look forward to seeing you at the next Agents of Change webinar. Have a wonderful afternoon.
