Short answer
AI tools recommend venues they can understand and trust. To be one of them, make your website answer common questions clearly, add complete structured data, keep your name, address, hours and links identical everywhere online, rank well in Google and Bing, and earn genuine mentions in reviews, local guides and press.
Ask ChatGPT "where should we book a work Christmas party in Northbridge?" and you get a shortlist of two or three venues with a sentence on each. Not ten links. Not a map with twenty pins. A shortlist. If you are not on it, for that customer you do not exist.
That shift is why AI search optimisation, often called generative engine optimisation or GEO, matters for hospitality. Here is how the tools decide, and what to do about it.
How AI tools choose who to recommend
Each assistant works a little differently, but they share a pattern. When a question needs current, local information, they search the web, read a handful of sources and summarise what those sources agree on.
- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's own index. Analyses of large keyword sets have found the overwhelming majority of AI Overview citations come from pages already ranking on page one or two, so classic SEO still does the heavy lifting.
- ChatGPT search leans on external search indexes, with Bing a major one, then favours sources that answer the question directly and look trustworthy.
- Gemini uses Google's index and is closely tied to Google Business Profile data for local questions.
- Perplexity cites its sources openly and rewards well-structured, specific pages.
Research into generative engines backs up what we see in practice. A 2024 study presented at the ACM KDD conference found that adding clear statistics, citations and quotations to content lifted its visibility in AI-generated answers by around 30 to 40 percent (Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization).
Seven things to fix first
1. Answer the question on the page
If people ask whether you do group bookings, have a page that says so in the first two lines, with the group sizes, the packages and how to book. AI tools quote pages that answer plainly. They skip pages that make them dig.
2. Get your menus out of PDFs
A menu as a web page is readable by every search engine and AI tool. A PDF menu is often ignored, slow on phones and impossible to quote accurately.
3. Add complete structured data
Schema markup tells machines exactly what you are: a restaurant, its cuisine, address, hours, price range, menu and booking link. Google notes there is no special markup just for AI Overviews (Google Search Central), but clean, complete structured data helps every engine understand you.
4. Make your details identical everywhere
Your name, address, phone, hours and website should match exactly across your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Instagram and directories. Inconsistency makes AI tools less confident recommending you.
5. Do not ignore Bing
Because several AI assistants draw on Bing's index, claim Bing Places and verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. It takes twenty minutes and most of your competitors have not done it.
6. Earn mentions, not just links
AI tools look for consensus. Being named in local guides, "best of" lists, press coverage and reviews that mention specific dishes and occasions gives them a reason to trust you.
7. Rank in classic search too
Strong Google rankings remain the single biggest input to Google's AI answers. Fast pages, good content and a well-run Business Profile still matter.
How to measure AI visibility
Write down ten to twenty questions your customers actually ask, by occasion and suburb. Run them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google every month in a fresh session, and record who is named and which sources are cited. In GA4, watch referral traffic from AI tools. It is not perfect measurement, but it shows the trend and where you are missing.
If you would like us to run that check for you, it is part of our free audit, and ongoing tracking is included in our AI search optimisation work.