AEO for tour operators: how to get ChatGPT to recommend you

How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my tour business?

You can’t make it, and anyone who promises it is guessing. What you can control is what it finds when it looks. Write your trips, prices, trip lengths and dock on your own website as plain text. Label them with structured data. Let AI crawlers in. Keep your listings matching everywhere, and keep reviews coming on Google and Tripadvisor. That’s AEO for a tour operator, and most of it is SEO you should be doing anyway.

Try it. Ask ChatGPT for a half-day fishing charter in Islamorada for a family of four, and you get a short list of boats, what they charge, and which one it thinks suits kids.

Now ask it about your boat. Does it have your price? Your dock? That you take kids? Or is it quoting a listing from three seasons ago?

Your guests are already asking. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey:

45%

So there’s a new acronym, and a new line of agencies selling it. Here’s what’s real, what’s just good SEO with a new name, and what we build into every CharterChoice site.

What AEO and GEO mean

Two names, one job. AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) both mean making your business easy for AI assistants like ChatGPT, Meta AI, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews to find, read correctly and recommend.

The difference between the two is mostly who coined them. You’ll also see “AI SEO” and “LLM SEO.” Same thing.

It doesn’t replace SEO. Google says there are no extra requirements to show up in its AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in regular search (Google). ChatGPT and Perplexity run their own crawlers, but they want the same thing Google does: pages they can read.

Where AI assistants get what they say about you

An AI assistant has never been on your boat. It doesn’t know your business. It repeats what’s published about you.

Yext looked at 6.8 million citations in answers from OpenAI, Gemini and Perplexity and sorted them by where they came from (Yext, 2025):

86%

Yext sells listings software, so take the 42% with that in mind. The shape is still the useful part. Yext also found OpenAI leans heavily on third-party listings.

That splits AEO for a tour operator into two jobs:

1. Your website has to say the right things in a way a crawler can read.
2. Everything else (your listings and your reviews) has to agree with it.

The second job is mostly the same work as claiming the listings in our SEO guide. This post is about the first.

Most AEO advice is SEO with a new name

Every few weeks a new checklist goes around on how to get recommended by AI. Describe your photos in alt text. Label your buttons and form fields. Use real headings and buttons instead of styled boxes. Fix broken links. Say what you do in plain words instead of a slogan.

All of it is good advice, and none of it is new. It’s accessibility and technical SEO, the stuff a decent web developer has done for years. If your site already does it, there’s no secret second layer. If it doesn’t, that’s the problem, AI or not.

Here’s the rest of what you’ll hear, next to what’s actually true:

So when one of these checklists went viral in October 2026, we did the boring thing and ran our client site template against it. The parts that matter for a charter were already there: prices on the page, reviews as text, an open robots.txt. There was one gap, structured data for each trip, and we added it that week.

For a tour operator, three things matter more than the rest of the list.

1. Your trip facts have to be on the page, not in a widget

OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, Meta’s and Perplexity’s crawlers download your page, but they don’t run its JavaScript (Vercel, 2024). Anything that only appears after a script runs, they never see.

For a tour operator, that’s often the most important stuff. A price that loads inside a booking widget, a schedule in an embedded calendar, reviews in a widget that pops in after the page loads. Here’s the same trip, two ways:

FareHarbor’s checkout opening on top of your page is fine for guests, and it’s how CharterChoice sites book. But a crawler doesn’t click Book now. It’s the sandwich board on your dock: if the price is only inside the booking office, the board is blank. Write your price, trip length and dock on the page itself too.

2. Label the facts with structured data

Structured data is a block of code on the page that labels what’s what: this is the business, this is its phone number, this trip costs $650 for four hours and leaves from this marina. Search engines and AI tools read it so they don’t have to guess from the layout. It uses a shared vocabulary called schema.org, which has a type made for tours: TouristTrip.

The common one is a business block with your name and address. The more useful one for a charter is per trip, because the questions guests ask AI are about trips: how much, how long, where from.

3. Reviews on Google and Tripadvisor, and quotes as text

Reviews count twice. Your guests’ reviews on Google and Tripadvisor feed the listings AI tools lean on. And the quotes on your own site tell a crawler what guests say about specific trips, as long as they’re text. A screenshot of five stars tells it nothing.

What we build into every CharterChoice site

Here’s exactly what a CharterChoice site gives an AI assistant to read. No black box: you can check every line yourself with View Page Source.

That covers your website. Off your site, the 5-star review funnel asks every guest for a rating after their trip and sends the 4- and 5-star ones to Google and Tripadvisor, so your listings keep getting fresh reviews. Two one-time packages tune up the listings themselves: Google Business Profile optimization, and OTA listing optimization for FishingBooker, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tripadvisor and FareHarbor.

None of this makes ChatGPT recommend you. Nobody can promise that, and I’d be wary of anyone who does. What it does is make sure that when an assistant looks you up, it finds your real prices, your real dock and what your guests actually said, instead of guessing or quoting a listing from three seasons ago.

Check your own site in 10 minutes

You don’t need a tool or an agency to see where you stand. Do these on a computer. If you only do one, do the first.

1. 1

   Search your page source for your price

   Open one of your trip pages, right-click and choose View Page Source, then search (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) for the price. If it isn’t there, crawlers that don’t run JavaScript can’t see it either.

2. 2

   Try highlighting your reviews

   Drag your mouse across a review on your site. If it won’t select, it’s a picture. If it selects but isn’t in View Page Source, a script loads it. Either way, assume AI tools can’t read it.

3. 3

   Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt

   Look for “Disallow: /” under “User-agent: *”, or under an AI crawler by name: OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. Each one is a door closed to that tool.

4. 4

   Check Cloudflare, if your site uses it

   Cloudflare started blocking AI crawlers by default on new sites in July 2025, and any site can switch the block on, so a site behind it can turn them away even with a clean robots.txt. Look for its AI crawler setting.

5. 5

   Test your structured data

   Paste a trip page’s address into validator.schema.org. You want to see your business and, on a trip page, the trip with its price. Google’s Rich Results Test only shows the types Google uses for its own results, so it won’t show trip data.

6. 6

   Ask the assistants

   Ask ChatGPT, Meta AI and Perplexity what a guest would: “best sunset cruise in [your town] for a family,” then “[your business name] prices.” Write down what they get wrong, and where they say they got it.

On step 3: OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT’s search answers (OpenAI). On step 4, here’s Cloudflare’s announcement.

If the first three came back clean, the basics are covered. If they didn’t, that’s your AEO work, and it’s a fix you make once.

Where CharterChoice fits

CharterChoice is one system for charter and tour operators, for $297 a month: a booking website built the way this post describes, with FareHarbor on every trip page, plus missed-call text-back, chat that turns into a text, the review funnel, past-guest campaigns and a monthly direct-booking report. Month to month, no setup fee, live in 7 to 10 business days.

If you’d rather have it built this way for you, book a call, or see pricing first.

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