“AI search is forcing a return to the fundamentals of SEO.”

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed herein are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Choice Hotels International, Inc., its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, directors, or employees.

I heard someone say that if anybody tells you they know how LLMs work, they're lying to you. That's not my line, but I've now heard some version of it from 17 different people, including plenty who are leaders in the AI search space. The good news is we actually know a lot more about AI visibility than we might think.

SEO was once the big thing, but despite its importance, it gradually became an afterthought. The website gets built, the content gets written, and then somebody says, "Oh, we should probably think about SEO." Now, with LLMs and GEO and AEO and whatever acronym comes next, everyone's suddenly thinking about visibility again.

The renewed attention brings us right back to what SEO has always required. Look at what's actually on the GEO checklist: structured data, schema markup, H1s and H2s, consistent business information everywhere it lives, and yes, even FAQs.

I spent years in SEO before I came into hospitality, and I've always said a widget is a widget. The product changes. The fundamentals don't. In this case, the SEO principles didn't get replaced. They got expanded. GEO and AEO aren't a separate discipline. They're SEO on steroids.

So where has SEO expanded? It's less about abandoning the old rules than accounting for how AI discovers and understands content. For example, most LLMs still don't execute JavaScript, so anything rendered only on the client side may never be seen.

Search behavior has changed too. We used to optimize for "hotel in Scottsdale." Now the prompt is, "I'm a family of four looking for a hotel with an indoor pool because it's 115 degrees in July." That's not a keyword problem. It's a context problem.

Hotel content must go past URL, name, address, phone, and a rundown of what’s available on property. Guests, and now AI, want to know what's nearby, what's walkable, whether an attraction is worth the drive, or whether there are great restaurants nearby.

Your website also isn't the only place telling your story. LLMs pull from the OTAs, Reddit, trade publications, YouTube, Wikipedia, reviews, and other third-party sources, which makes off-page work matter even more than it used to.

The call from franchisees used to be, "I Googled my hotel, and I'm not showing up. What do I fix?" Now it's, "I asked ChatGPT for a hotel in Scottsdale with a pool, and I didn't come up. What do I fix?"

My answer hasn't changed. Get your data right. As smart as these tools look, they still run on information. Garbage in, garbage out has always been true.