More of your guests are skipping the search results page. They open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or the AI answer at the top of Google and type something like “best airboat tour near Everglades City” or “what’s a good half-day boat tour near me for a family with young kids.” They get back a short list of three to five companies, with a sentence or two about each. A lot of them book from that list.
If you’re on it, great. If you’re not, that guest never sees your site at all. There is no page two in an AI answer.
I build websites for outdoor and marine businesses, and this is the question I get asked most right now: how do we get on that list? Nobody controls these answers, and anyone who promises you a spot is guessing. But the assistants pull from things you can see and fix, and most of those things are the same work that makes your site book better anyway. Here is what I look at.
How AI assistants decide who to recommend
When someone asks for the best tour near a town, the assistant is trying to give a confident, specific answer. To do that, it leans on sources it can read and trust. In practice that comes down to three things:
- Your own website. Can it tell, in plain text, what you run, where you run it, who it’s for and what it costs?
- Your Google Business Profile and maps listings. Location, category, hours, photos and reviews.
- What other people say about you. Reviews on Google and TripAdvisor, local tourism sites, press, blogs and forums.
When those three agree with each other, you look like a safe answer. When your site is vague, your profile is half filled out and your reviews say something different, the assistant has less to work with and is more likely to recommend the competitor who made it easy.
Make your website easy for a machine to read
A lot of tour sites look great and say almost nothing. A full-screen video, a tagline like “Adventure Awaits” and a book button. A guest who already knows you might be fine with that. An AI assistant gets almost nothing from it.
Every tour you run should have its own page, written in plain language, that answers the questions a guest would actually ask:
- What the trip is and where it starts, with the town and the meeting point spelled out
- How long it runs and how many people fit
- The price, or a “from” price
- Who it’s good for: families, kids under a certain age, first timers, photographers, private groups
- What’s included and what to bring
- What happens with weather and cancellations
That last group matters more than people think. Guests rarely ask an assistant for “the best tour.” They ask for the best tour for their situation: with a toddler, for a bachelor party, for someone who gets seasick, on a rainy day. If your page says plainly that you run private trips for families with young kids, you can match that question. If it doesn’t say it, you can’t.
Answer the questions guests actually ask
Your phone and inbox are full of the questions guests ask every week. Can I bring my dog? Is it OK for my 70 year old dad? Do we see alligators every time? Where do we park? Those questions are exactly what people now type into an assistant.
Put them on your site with straight answers. A real FAQ on each tour page, not a generic one buried in the footer. This helps three ways: guests stop calling to ask, Google can show the answers in search, and assistants have something specific to quote when someone asks the same thing.
Behind the scenes, we also add structured data (schema) to tour pages and FAQs. It’s a layer of code that tells search engines and assistants, in a format they read cleanly, that this page is a tour, here is the price, here is the location, here are the questions and answers. Guests never see it.
Get your Google Business Profile and reviews in order
For anything with “near me” or a town name in it, your Google Business Profile carries a lot of weight. Check that:
- Your business name, address and phone number match your website exactly
- Your primary category fits what you actually do
- Your hours are current, including seasonal hours
- You have recent, real photos of your boats, guides and guests
- Your website link points to the right page
Then reviews. Assistants seem to lean on review volume, how recent the reviews are, and what people actually say in them. A review that says “Captain Mike took our family of five out at sunset and we saw gators and a manatee” tells an assistant far more than “Great time!” You can’t write your guests’ reviews, but you can make asking for one part of your process, and you can reply to them.
Show up in the places assistants read
Assistants don’t just read your site. They read what’s said about you elsewhere. Make sure you’re listed on your local tourism board or visitor bureau site, your chamber of commerce, and any “things to do” roundups for your area. The goal is simple: when an assistant looks around, it finds the same clear story about who you are and what you run, in several places.
What I’ve seen on a real tour site
I’ll be straight about what I can show you. My closest tour build is Epic Airboat Tours, a private Everglades airboat company. We built it with a clear page for each tour, real reviews up front, plain answers to the common questions and a short path to booking. In its first month it picked up 244 Google clicks and 18.5K impressions. That is search visibility, not bookings, but it’s the foundation. The same clear content that earned those clicks is what assistants read.
Most of my other proof is booking-driven work in the fishing and marine world. No Name Fly Lodge brought in 378 booking requests in its first 12 months. Catch brought in 437 leads in 7 months, RO brought in 264 in 9, and Islamorada brought in 154 in 5. Different businesses, same approach: say clearly what you do, answer the real questions, and make it easy to take the next step. You can see how we approach tour sites on our Adventure and outdoor experiences page.
Don’t forget the booking side
Getting recommended only matters if the guest can book once they land. Someone who just got your name from an assistant is ready to go. If they hit a slow page, no price and a booking calendar that’s hard to use on a phone, they’ll go back and pick the next name on the list.
I’ve connected FareHarbor on a good number of sites, and the rule is the same with any booking tool: put the book button on every tour page, keep it visible on mobile, and let the guest book without feeling like they left your site. Track completed bookings in your analytics so you can see which pages and searches actually make you money.
A quick check you can do today
Open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask it for the best tour like yours near your town. Then ask it about your company by name. Look at what it says:
- Are you on the list? Who is, and what do their sites have that yours doesn’t?
- When it describes you, is it accurate? Does it get your location, trips and prices right?
If the answers are wrong or thin, that usually points straight at what’s missing from your site or your profile.
If you want a second set of eyes, tell me what you run, where you run it and how you take bookings today. I’ll run the same check, tell you what I’d fix first and whether a rebuild even makes sense. Sometimes it’s a few tour pages and a cleaned up Google profile, not a whole new site.
