From SEO to GEO:

So, how do you catch AI’s eye?

Well, it’s not just about keywords. Generative search rewards:

• Authority & trust - Publish useful, accurate content and AI is more likely to name-drop you.
• Freshness - Dust off that old copy; travellers (and AI) want what’s up-to-date.
• Structure & clarity - Clear, machine-readable pages make it easy for AI to pull you in.
• Local expertise - The ace up your sleeve: showing you know your destination inside out.

That last factor is a real game-changer. Guests don’t just book a bed, they buy into a story. Increasingly, they’re looking to hotels as local guides, eager for hidden gems, seasonal quirks and the kind of “only locals know” tips that Google Maps just can’t quite muster.

And in hotel GEO terms, local expertise isn’t a nice-to-have, it can be a decisive signal that helps secure your hotel’s visibility. A guide like “48 hours in Dublin” or “Family-friendly activities near our resort” doesn’t just help guests plan, it starts to nudge your hotel into the AI answer when someone asks, “What’s the best thing to do with kids in Dublin?” Handy.

With GEO, you’re not just competing on price or room type. You’re competing to be recognised as a trusted local voice. Hotels that deliver fresh, characterful and genuinely helpful content won’t just boost visibility, they’ll build equity, trust and a stronger brand. And when AI might only serve four or five results, being in or out could be the difference between winning, or losing, the booking.

This is the “why” of GEO. But how do you turn it into action? Well, let’s handover to our expert partners Obvlo, the specialists in creating, scaling and delivering local content at volume.

Sell the destination

Guests don’t start their journey by booking a hotel in Dublin, they start by imagining their time in the city. At this stage, a hotel is secondary in their mind to the desired experience. But many hotel websites are product focused, missing the simple, local details that drive initial discovery and engagement.

Hotel websites that don’t effectively market the destination don’t have a fighting chance of appearing organically at the early discovery stage, when potential guests are using traditional or now AI search tools to plan their trip. Those that do, will win.

Even when visitors do arrive on a hotel website, many will quickly leave to research the destination elsewhere when the site does not cover this essential area. Even during their stay, opportunities for building loyalty are missed when guests must rely on external like review sites, local blogs and maps to plan what to do and where to go.

The practical fix: dynamic destination content

A clear and scalable destination content strategy can recover these missed opportunities and become a key revenue driver across the entire guest journey. The challenge has always been in scale, freshness, and personalisation without adding heavy workload to the team.

Obvlo’s solution uses AI agents to build unique, dynamic destination content embedded at  multiple touchpoints in your journey. You can personalise local guides for all types of travellers, apply your authentic brand tone of voice, and publish in the languages most relevant to your audiences.

Once created, Obvlo publishes destination content as fully indexable pages that attract organic traffic and deliver personalised local recommendations that help people plan, book and enjoy their stay. Obvlo then systematically keeps details accurate and up to date, reducing manual work for marketing teams.

Optimising for Generation Engines (AI search)

Obvlo optimises this content to be discovered in both traditional search (like Google) and AI Generation Engines (like ChatGPT and Gemini), while still matching your brand style and tone of voice. 

These pages are fully indexable HTML, built and hosted by Obvlo, but connected to your main URL using a reverse proxy on a chosen URL path. This means to the site visitor, to search engines and to AI tools, these pages look and feel like a natural part of your primary website.

As 80 DAYS point out, GEO is an evolution of SEO. The fundamentals still work, which gives hotel marketers a fantastic base to build on rather than an entirely new discipline to manage.

To serve both SEO and GEO, Obvlo focuses on these aspects when building content:

• Keyword optimisation: Use target keywords as the foundation, then build topical authority with a clear hierarchy of guides from city to neighbourhood to theme.
• Schema markup: Add structured data so search and AI systems understand context and meaning.
• Astro framework: Use lightweight builds that load fast and are mobile friendly, scoring highly on key technical metrics.
• Tone of voice and languages: Match your brand voice and generate content in the languages you require.
• AI optimised content: Provide authoritative, well organised answers that meet user intent with concise facts and topical relevance.

So those important GEO aspects identified by 80 DAYS are well covered:

• Authority and trust: Topical relevance and expert citations as standard.
• Freshness: Content kept up to date dynamically.
• Structure and clarity: Near perfect technical SEO scores and best practice.
• Local expertise: Researched and maintained using AI agents with humans in the loop for quality control and curation.

Measuring what matters

Alongside technical optimisation, Obvlo measures engagement and satisfaction so you can see real value for visitors. Strong engagement supports ranking and leads to more conversions, stronger brand loyalty, and rich zero and first party data.

Current results: near perfect PageSpeed technical SEO score, 5.5 minutes average engagement time, and 90% average CSAT score.

Local Insight, Global Scale

Hotel marketers know that selling the destination is essential to discovery, conversion and guest experience. The challenge has always been the time and investment required to create content, build pages, keep them fresh, and handle localisation. 

By combining AI with human curation, Obvlo is able to build destination content that becomes a reliable revenue driver throughout the funnel, with Generation Engine Optimisation covered from day one.