How to Audit What AI Says About Your Tours

AI assistants now sit at the front of trip planning, and the traffic they send behaves differently: AI referral traffic converts at roughly 4.4x the rate of organic search, and ChatGPT accounts for 78–87% of all AI referral share. That makes one question worth answering properly — when a traveller asks an assistant about your kind of experience, do you come up at all?

Step 1 — Build 20 realistic traveller prompts

Write them the way a traveller types, not the way a marketer does. Cover three bands: brand prompts ("is [your company] any good"), destination prompts ("best things to do in [city] in October"), and category prompts ("family-friendly boat trip near [city] under $60").

Step 2 — Run each prompt at least three times, in incognito

Assistants are not deterministic. Identical prompts return consistent answers only about 73% of the time, so a single run tells you almost nothing. Incognito keeps your own history out of the result. Repeat across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews.

Step 3 — Score mentions, citations and position separately

• Mention: were you named at all?
• Citation: were you linked as a source?
• Position: were you first, mid-list, or an afterthought?

Keep these three columns apart. Being mentioned without being cited is a very different problem from not appearing at all.

Step 4 — Analyse which domains do get cited

Log every source the assistant leans on. It is usually the OTAs, a handful of review sites and one or two local blogs. That list is your competitive set inside AI, and it rarely matches your search competitors.

Step 5 — Diagnose a likely root cause per gap

• Not mentioned anywhere: no machine-readable product data exists for you.
• Mentioned but never cited: your own site is not the authoritative source about you.
• Cited but with wrong prices or times: your published data is stale or inconsistent.
• Only cited via an OTA listing: the marketplace owns your visibility, not you.

Work through those five steps and you will have a real picture in a couple of afternoons. If you would rather not spend the afternoons, the $299 AI Visibility Audit runs the same methodology automatically in minutes.

If you want to keep tracking your AI visibility every month instead of a one-off snapshot, use AI Visibility Monitoring. It re-runs the same methodology weekly and shows you new citations, lost citations and share-of-voice versus your competitors.