Find out whether your attraction appears in AI recommendations, check what visitors are being told, and make your website a clearer source of information.
“Where can we take a five-year-old near Halifax this weekend if it rains?”
That is a question a family can now put to ChatGPT while planning a day out. If your attraction is a good fit, you want it to feature in the answer. You also want the details to be right: the right opening times, the right ticket information and an honest description of what the family can expect.
To check whether ChatGPT recommends your attraction, test realistic visitor questions using web search, record the recommendations and inspect the sources. Repeat the exercise over time. One answer shows what happened in that conversation, rather than what every potential visitor sees.
For attraction owners and marketing teams, there are two questions to answer: are you being considered, and are you being described accurately? This guide explains how to check both, then prioritise improvements to your website.
Key takeaways
- Test discovery questions that do not name your attraction, as well as practical questions that do.
- Record mentions, factual errors and cited sources separately. They reveal different problems.
- Publish specific information about who your attraction suits and how to plan a visit.
- Check crawler access and keep seasonal details consistent across your website and key listings.
- Treat AI visibility as something to monitor and improve. Inclusion cannot be guaranteed.
How to check whether ChatGPT recommends your attraction
Start with five to ten questions based on the visitors you want to attract. Include your location, likely travel area and the constraints that shape a real visit, such as age, budget, weather or access requirements.
1. Test whether people can discover you
These questions should leave out your attraction’s name:
- “Things to do near Halifax with children.”
- “Where can I take a three-year-old and a seven-year-old near Sheffield on a rainy day?”
- “Suggest a family day out in Yorkshire for under £60, including admission for two adults and two children aged six and nine.”
- “Which museums near [town] have activities for children aged five to eight?”
- “Suggest gardens within an hour of [town] where we can bring a dog.”
Use a mixture of short searches and detailed questions. Keep the scenarios relevant: an outdoor garden does not need to appear in every search for indoor activities.
2. Test what people are told about you
Now name your attraction:
- “Is [attraction] suitable for a toddler and an eight-year-old?”
- “What does a family ticket to [attraction] include?”
- “How much is parking at [attraction], and how far is it from the entrance?”
- “Which areas of [attraction] have step-free access?”
- “What is on at [attraction] for Christmas [year], and does it need a separate ticket?”
Being described correctly when named does not demonstrate that you appear in discovery recommendations. Keep the two sets of results separate.
3. Make the checks repeatable
Use a fresh conversation for each question and select web search where available. Avoid first explaining that you run the attraction, which introduces context an ordinary visitor would not supply.
Record the date, platform, exact prompt and whether a web search took place. Save the answer and its source links. If a result matters, repeat it in another fresh conversation to see whether it is consistent.
You can run the same questions in Perplexity and Google AI Mode. Where Google shows an AI Overview, record that too; an Overview will not appear for every search. Google explains when its AI features appear.
Use a simple log:
| What to record | What it helps you assess |
|---|---|
| Attraction recommended | Whether you appear for that visitor scenario |
| Reason given | Whether your appeal is understood |
| Practical facts | Whether visitors receive accurate information |
| Cited pages | Which sources to inspect or update |
| Other attractions mentioned | Which alternatives appear in the same answers |
| Action needed | The specific content or technical issue to investigate |
Open the cited pages and check whether they support the answer. A citation is a starting point for verification, rather than proof that every detail is correct.
Repeat monthly and after significant seasonal changes. This is a useful sample of visibility, not a complete measure of how often AI assistants recommend you.
Where does ChatGPT get information about attractions?
An answer can combine information learned during model training with information retrieved when answering the question. An answer without a fresh search should not be treated as a check of current opening times or availability.
When reviewing a search-based answer, look for sources such as your official website, tourism listings, editorial guides and reviews. The sources shown are more useful evidence than asking the assistant to speculate about its own ranking decisions.
Your website gives you a place to publish authoritative operational information. Third-party coverage can provide additional descriptions and perspectives. You cannot directly edit what a model has already learned, but you can correct your published information and request updates to inaccurate listings.
If an answer says “check the official website”, investigate why. The information may be missing, difficult to retrieve, contradictory or simply too changeable to state confidently. That phrase alone does not prove there is a problem with your site.
How to improve AI visibility for your attraction
The most useful starting point is a website that explains your attraction clearly, answers practical questions and stays up to date. The following changes help you provide better information wherever visitors encounter it.
1. Explain who your attraction suits
“A great day out for all the family” gives a visitor little to compare.
Be specific about the experience: the ages your activities are designed for, how much is indoors, how long people should allow, and what makes your attraction distinctive. Include your town and region naturally.
For example, a fictional museum might replace:
An unforgettable adventure for curious minds of all ages.
With:
Our indoor science museum in [town] has hands-on exhibits designed for children aged five to eleven. Allow two to three hours for a visit. The outdoor water play area opens seasonally, so bring a change of clothes if you plan to use it.
That gives a family useful reasons to choose it. Only include claims you can substantiate, and avoid creating near-identical pages for every nearby town.
2. Answer the questions that stand between interest and booking
Review your plan-your-visit, ticket, accessibility and event pages. Could a first-time visitor find a clear answer to each of these?
| Topic | Useful information to publish |
|---|---|
| Tickets | Age bands, what is included, booking fees and separately ticketed activities |
| Opening times | Relevant dates, last admission and different hours for individual areas |
| Parking | Location, charges, payment methods and distance to the entrance |
| Accessibility | Step-free routes, surfaces, facilities and contact details for specific enquiries |
| Dogs | Where dogs are permitted, restrictions and assistance dog information |
| Young children | Buggy access, changing facilities and age or height restrictions |
| Weather | Indoor activities and the policy for affected outdoor events |
Put the direct answer first, followed by exceptions and a useful next step.
For example, using fictional details:
Parking costs £4 per vehicle for the day. The main car park is approximately 200 metres from the entrance. Blue Badge spaces are beside the entrance; the usual parking charge applies.
An answerability tool can help identify gaps. Holp’s free Site Answerability Check tests questions against a sample of your pages and highlights answers it could not find. Review those findings against the full site: a missing answer in the sample may exist elsewhere. The check does not measure ChatGPT recommendations.
3. Make key information easy to retrieve
Publish essential visitor information as readable page text. A poster or downloadable guide can supplement it, but should not be the only place your ticket prices or event dates appear.
You do not need to remove every accordion or tab. Ask your developer whether its content is present in the page HTML or only fetched after someone clicks. Making essential text available in the initial HTML reduces dependence on JavaScript; not every bot can run it. Google’s JavaScript SEO guidance explains the distinction.
Link to practical information from relevant pages. Someone reading about your Christmas event should be able to reach that event’s access information and booking terms directly.
4. Check search crawler access
Ask your developer to review your robots.txt, indexing settings and any firewall or bot protection rules. A public page that loads for a person may still be blocked for a crawler.
For OpenAI, the distinction is:
| User agent | Purpose |
|---|---|
OAI-SearchBot |
Discovering content for ChatGPT search |
GPTBot |
Crawling content that may be used for model training |
ChatGPT-User |
Certain user-initiated page visits; robots.txt rules may not apply |
OpenAI treats search and training controls independently. You can allow OAI-SearchBot while disallowing GPTBot. Blocking search access can affect how your own pages appear in ChatGPT search, but does not erase references to your attraction elsewhere. OpenAI’s crawler documentation sets out these controls.
Use Holp’s robots.txt checker as an initial check, then investigate hosting or firewall restrictions separately. A robots.txt result cannot establish that every crawler successfully receives your page.
5. Keep seasonal information unambiguous
Attractions have a particular challenge: an accurate answer in July may be wrong in December. Event tickets, closing times, access routes and dog policies can all change together.
Whenever an event launches, review every page that describes it. State the year and applicable dates, distinguish normal admission from event admission, and make separately ticketed activities explicit.
For example:
The Christmas trail runs from 22 November 2026 to 4 January 2027 on selected evenings. Entry requires a separate timed ticket and is not included in standard daytime admission.
This is illustrative copy, not a real event listing.
Keep a useful recurring event page current. If you retain previous years’ pages, label them clearly as past events and link to current information. Add a reviewed date where helpful, but only change it when the content has actually been checked.
For variable prices or availability, explain that they depend on the selected date and link to the booking system. Avoid publishing a fixed answer that your team cannot maintain.
6. Correct important third-party listings
Check your Google Business Profile, local tourism board and the directories or articles appearing in your test results. Prioritise incorrect addresses, opening hours, ticket descriptions and booking links.
Where appropriate, give tourism partners useful factual updates about new exhibitions, facilities or events. Accurate coverage helps visitors understand what you offer, regardless of whether they discover it through a search engine, an assistant or the publisher itself.
Do you need llms.txt or special AI schema?
Treat llms.txt as an optional experiment, rather than a priority visibility fix. Do not assume that adding it will make an assistant use your pages.
For Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google explicitly says that additional AI text files and special structured data are unnecessary. Its existing SEO requirements apply. Any structured data you use should agree with the information visitors can see, as Google’s guidance for AI search features sets out.
Put your effort into accurate answers, sensible navigation and accessible pages before maintaining an additional file.
How to measure progress
Keep three measures separate:
- Visibility in your sample: how often you appear across the discovery prompts you tested.
- Accuracy: how often the checked facts are correct, with serious errors recorded individually.
- Website outcomes: identifiable visits from AI platforms and the bookings or enquiries associated with them.
For example, appearing in six out of ten test answers describes those ten answers. It does not mean you reach 60% of people searching for a day out.
In your analytics, investigate recorded sources such as chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. Attribution depends on the information your analytics receives, so use identifiable referrals as a partial view. Some people may read a recommendation and later search for your attraction by name.
Google includes traffic from its AI search features within Search Console’s overall Web performance reporting, according to its measurement guidance.
If a monitoring service helps you repeat these checks at scale, ask how it selects prompts, controls location and repeats tests. You should be able to inspect the underlying answers. Be cautious about promises of guaranteed recommendations or a universal “ChatGPT ranking”.
Does an AI chatbot on your website help?
A website chatbot serves a different stage of the visit: helping people who have already reached your site find answers and decide what to do next.
Holp works with a number of UK visitor attractions, and our guide to AI chatbots for visitor attractions covers how an assistant can help with practical visitor enquiries.
Those enquiries can also inform your website content. If visitors repeatedly ask whether an event needs a separate ticket, make the answer prominent on the event page and keep the assistant’s source information current.
These conversations show what your own visitors ask. They do not reveal private conversations in ChatGPT, and installing a chatbot does not guarantee external recommendations.
Frequently asked questions
Why does ChatGPT recommend a competitor but not us?
Start by comparing the recommendation with the question. The other attraction may better fit the requested location, age group, budget or activity. Inspect the cited pages, then check whether your own site clearly explains the relevant experience. One omission is a reason to investigate, not proof of a technical fault.
How quickly will website changes affect AI answers?
There is no reliable timetable for a corrected page to change a recommendation. Retrieval, indexing and answer generation are separate steps. Recheck after updates and keep a dated record rather than expecting an immediate change.
Can we stop content being used for training while allowing ChatGPT search?
For OpenAI, yes: its GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot controls are independent. Ask your developer to configure them deliberately using the official crawler guidance. Check other providers’ policies separately.
Is AI search optimisation different from SEO?
Much of the practical work overlaps. For this exercise, the additional focus is checking how an assistant describes your attraction, which facts it repeats and whether those facts help visitors make an informed decision.
Start with five visitor questions
Choose three discovery questions and two practical questions about your attraction. Run them through ChatGPT using web search, save the results and inspect the sources.
Then fix the most consequential issue you find. An incorrect event ticket description or missing access detail is a better starting point than trying to appear in every possible recommendation.
Want help finding gaps in your content? Run the free Site Answerability Check to see which questions Holp can answer from a sample of your pages, review the supporting sources and try the assistant built from your website.
