Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of making sure AI assistants find your destination, describe it accurately and recommend it when visitors ask where to go. Here's what it means for a destination marketing organization, how it differs from the SEO your team already knows, and where to start.
When a visitor asks ChatGPT for a fall weekend within four hours of Dallas, or asks Google for the best small beach destinations in Texas, the answer arrives as a short list with a few sentences on each place. That list is the new consideration set. GEO is everything a destination does to earn a place on it, and to be described the way your team would describe it.
The assistants visitors plan with include ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Meta AI and Google AI Overviews. Each one reads the web differently, leans on different sources and changes as its makers update it, so GEO is ongoing work, the same way search has always been.
GEO builds on search, and most of what your team already does for SEO still counts. What changes is where the visitor sees you and what decides it.
SEO: A ranked page of links.
GEO: One written answer with a short list of places.
SEO: How relevant and trusted your pages are.
GEO: What the wider web says about you, and how clearly your own site states the facts.
SEO: Mostly your website and the sites that link to it.
GEO: Your website plus travel editorial, reviews, Reddit, Wikipedia and your partners' listings.
SEO: A click to your website.
GEO: Being named, described accurately and recommended, whether or not the visitor clicks.
SEO: Rankings, impressions and clicks.
GEO: How often and how well the AI assistants name you, tracked over time and assistant by assistant.
Visitors have already moved. In Phocuswright's study The AI Surge (March 2026), 56% of active U.S. travelers used AI for planning, booking or help in the destination on at least one trip in the past year. Adobe reports that traffic from AI sources to U.S. travel sites grew 1,822% from October 2024 through July 2026. When the answer is the first stop, the destinations an assistant names are the ones a visitor compares.
Sources: Phocuswright, March 2026; Adobe, August 2026.
For a DMO this lands in three places at once: the visitor who decides before reaching your website, the partners whose hotels and restaurants are named or skipped inside the answer, and the board asking what your team is doing about AI.
GEO reaches further into a destination organization than SEO did. For most destinations it comes down to five areas.
A clear structure, the facts visitors ask about stated clearly enough to quote (hours, addresses, seasons, events), and crawler settings that let the assistants in. OpenAI and Anthropic each run separate crawlers for model training, for search, and for fetching a page when someone asks, so blocking the wrong one can keep you out of answers without anyone noticing.
Travel editorial, local news, Reddit threads, Wikipedia and review sites carry much of what the assistants say about a place. Your earned media and PR plans are now GEO plans too.
Assistants answer with hotels, restaurants, attractions and events. When your partners' own listings are thin or out of date, the destination's answer suffers with them.
Whether AI connects your destination with what you stand for: the waterfront, the food scene, the heritage. A pillar your team claims that the answers never carry is the clearest content brief you'll get all year.
The answer changes with where the visitor is asking from. A destination can lead the list for one drive market and be missing from the next.
AI answers vary from one asking to the next, so a single screenshot proves very little. A reliable read asks the questions visitors ask, across the assistants they use, on a regular schedule, and reports a change only when it is larger than the normal variation between answers.
In August 2026 the IAB set out shared language for this with four Ps: Presence, Prominence, Portrayal and Persuasion. Zertura reads all four for destinations every month, with every figure traced back to the real answers.
The Destination Source Scan shows whether AI assistants can reach and read your site, and whether the outside sources they trust point to it. It takes about two minutes.
Run the Source ScanThe Algorithmic Audit Kit is a guide and workbook for a first look at how AI assistants describe your destination.
Get the Audit KitA 45-minute call where we show what AI assistants tell visitors about your destination, and where your team's effort belongs first.
Book time with usA 45-minute live demo on your own destination, and an honest read on where your team's GEO effort belongs first.
