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A
Welcome back. We've been doing some really cool podcasts recently and really cool chats around AI agents and AI for, like, your business. And obviously we've been building agents and all that good stuff. But I wanted to pause for a minute on that, and there's a. The chat to my right, on my left, however you're watching, has been talking a lot about this online recently, and it's a really cool topic because it's SEO, but for the modern day, like for SEO for 2026, SEO for 2027, and how it's all shaping and it's got a new term. Just as you're all getting used to what SEO stood for, there's now a new term that we're going to dig into today and, and more. So, Gil, thank you so much for, for joining us. So give us a little bit of context about how you've gone down this rabbit hole. Obviously, being based out of San Francisco, you've got literally all of the texts on your doorstep, but give us a little context about why you're sort of being so enthusiastic about geo, what it is first and foremost and where you're at to now. We're recording this May 18, 2026, and it's really important that we stress the date with all of this because, you know, if you come at this in December, all of this could be out of date. So it's really relevant to. To now and where we're at. So, Gil, yeah, just give us a quick rundown, please, of, of where you're all at with all of this going on.
B
Yeah, I'm actually, first off, I, like, I'm thrilled to be, like, doing this recording with you. I think a lot of folks on the outside see us as like, two different ends of the spectrum, but we actually, for a lot of folks don't know, like Mark and I, we, we collaborate and we talk quite often. We're multiple mastermind groups or kind of like chats, and we talk about AI quite a bit. So I think a lot of folks don't know the other side of that. Collaboration.
A
Yeah, no. 100%. The, the amount of people who, who, like, when. When I tag you on stuff or like, we talk about each other and they go, can you talk to Gil? He's like your competition. I'm like, no, yeah, we chat a lot. I've done this since day one. I, I've always believed in collaboration is the best way, 110%. And when I first got going 10 years ago, there was two people in the industry who will remain nameless who literally didn't see it like that. And as I was starting to post stuff, they were like doing everything in their powers to make sure that nobody would listen to me. And then ever since then I was like, listen, if whenever we've got cool people who come along and do good stuff, I want to amplify them sometimes more than what I do. And we pass a lot of work between each other. I share a lot of what Gil puts down because it is relevant, topical, but most importantly, good stuff. And if there's good stuff that's out there, it needs to be shared. So absolutely love this. And we are part of a Slack channel together called the Dark Book in Avengers, which has got Gil from Hudson Creative and we've got Conrad in there, got Tyne in there. So, yeah, absolutely amazing. Love this collaborative approach. So very, very quickly then. So obviously based out of San Francisco, you've got a lot of this pretty much on your doorstep. I was speaking with Margo from hostfully about this topic because Margo goes to a lot of. Lot of meetups and networking events, etc, being based like so close, obviously Silicon Valley. So how do you. How do you found it? How have you found this year 2026? Has it been a bit overwhelming at times? Like, how have you sort of separated the noise from everything else and, and like, how have you adapted it into your business and what you're doing to help?
B
Yeah, so I think, like, part of it is like, me being the nerd and geek guy. I am, like, I'm a very curious person. So, like, when I pick up something that I don't quite understand, like, I try to understand the fundamentals and what's actually happening. And we've been seeing all this chat about, like, how do I appear in AI Search? And that's relevant for any type of business. It's relevant for vacation rental managers that we serve. But it's also relevant for our own business here as well too, because we're starting to see folks like. And same thing I think goes on your side, Mark. A lot of folks are now finding us through ChatGPT and like, how do they find us? Like, what are, what are they doing? So it went down like, it's pretty much like a rabbit hole of like, understanding what are the fundamentals? How does it work in the first place? What's actually happening behind the scenes? Because once you understand what's actually happening behind the scenes, then you can figure out, okay, how can I leverage this? How can I use this to our advantage? And I Kept on getting asked questions. I still take a lot of the onboarding calls. I still love talking to folks and understanding why they wanted to start with us, how the onboarding experience is like. And one of the questions I get asked quite often is how do I appear in ChatGPT? How do I appear in perplexity? And when I get that, I want to give them a very solid answer. And in the very beginning it was really just answering them through kind of the proxy of what SEO is like. If you have good SEO, then generally you have good AEO and geo. But I wanted to dive a little bit deeper and so I, I've gotten, I've gotten so many calls with Google at this point, probably six or seven different calls with Google. And Google's one of our partners. Like Google, we were part of the Google for Starters program. They invite us over to the headquarters quite often, so we get to talk to the people that are doing search and trying to understand like what's actually happening behind the scenes, what's coming up ahead. Because we want to make sure that our customers have the technology to really showcase, to be in front of the customers when things start to shift. And we're already starting to see a pretty big shift there. And so that's kind of like what led me down this rabbit hole. It's just a lot of curiosity being in San Francisco, being connected to Google and really being like obsessed with how we serve our customers.
A
So there's a WhatsApp group that we're part of. It's the AI WhatsApp group chat. And today, literally today, a couple of hours ago, Liam Carolan, he posted in there, just hopped off a call with a brand new owner who found us through Chat, GPT and Gemini. He asked AI about us before we'd even spoken. So we turned up already to the call. Knowing his experience and how they operate. I did the selling before I even met him. He was ready to sign up, which is a really fascinating post in our little WhatsApp group chat, which is a sign of the times where I said to you just before we hit record, I really want this episode to be about how Chat GPT, Gemini AI is like the new influencer marketing. So why from all of your conversations with Google, for all of your inquisitiveness, why do you feel like, compared to a Google search, why do you feel like now with LLMs and chat that people are doing the search and trusting the result? And then like he said, Liam said, he. But he booked a call, he signed up pretty much Signed the papers, new management contract there and then on a call.
B
Yeah, I think the difference is that traditionally SEO you type something in there that you want something you want an answer to, you put in what they call keywords and they'll give you a response 10 per page and you can land on any different page there. And that's how people did research back then. They would click through, they'll read on it. And now you're going to this new era where people are now asking questions Inside perplexity, inside ChatGPT and they're getting thorough responses and it's the same tool that they use to run their entire business. Like I'm sure both of us are spending a God non God awful amount of time in these tools that helps us make decisions and if it's helping us make decisions on how we do our pricing, how we look for new markets, when we look for new tools, like we trust it just as much. So it's, it's almost become our buddy in many different ways. And I think that's what's really happening is that these AI tools are becoming like you mentioned, like they're influencers. But I would say they're more like that friend that you go to for advice on what to use. It's more like that rather than just some, some person that you idolize or you follow. It's, it's, it's a much more intimate feeling and because they know your business,
A
I, I, I really do get what you're saying and I was just trying to think of a reaches a recent purchase I made. So I didn't go on Google search, I did it all in perplexity. Typed out a question. You'll like this. So my son's 3D printer broke. He had the Anycubic Cobra S1 printer and we bought it in January and This is what, four months old and it's broken at least four times for a number of reasons.
B
Pretty common for 3D printer.
A
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So I had enough, literally had enough. And I was like right, number one went back to the seller that we bought it from. Luckily it was a UK based because any cubic is based out of China and they were being non responsive and I was like right, I just want my money back. I've spent so much money replacing these parts. So any perplexity, sorry went through full terms and everything for me got it all done, got it all sorted, I've got the, the thing ready to send back and my son obviously is going to get his money back because I want to print. I want another printer because he uses it to sell little crafts at craft fairs. And I was like, right, because the, the previous ones, I've just let him buy it and every single time that's gone down wrong. So I was like, right, let's just go to pack for plexity. And I just said, right, I want something that is UK based. I want it to be reliable. I'm not. I don't even care if it's like the old singing, old dancing. I just want reliable at this stage. And Perplexity did all the research, found different versions and yada yada. And I just said, just add it to my basket. I just, just add it to my basket. And it did it. I literally, I have, it's in my basket ready to check out. We're just waiting for the money to come back for the printer we're sending back. But that has all been done through zero Google search, zero searching on social, zero TikToking, zero whatever. It's just perplexity is dealt from start to finish. And that's probably one of many times that I have done that this year from. From big things like a printer to big things like a vacation to small things like my next book. So interesting.
B
I think, I think one thing that it's worth going and diving really deep into is the difference between the different terms. Because we talked about SEO and people know of SEO as a search engine optimization. But there's other terms to go along with it. Some people categorized as lm, EO or aieo, there's actually two industry terms that are being solidified. Google even hired someone specifically for one of these terms. So there, there's three different terms now. There's search engine optimization, SEO, there's aeo, which is answer engine optimizations, and then there's geo, which is generative engine optimizations. Those are all three different things. So SEO is how you rank. SEO ranks you, AEO answers for you. This is what happens when you go on Google and you ask a question and they have this little snippet on the very top of the page. That's what AEO is. GEO recommends you when you go in chatgpt into perplexity and you're asking it a question. GEO is the one that's saying you should go with this or you should check out these four options. So those are the three different places that you want to be optimizing for. And the good thing is that they're all kind of built on top of each other there.
A
Well, that's A fantastic segue into what we're going to talk about. So Liam management company based out of Norwich, 70 odd properties, been doing it for many years. He's obviously got a lot of goodwill. How did he come up above everybody else when the owner was typing in management companies in Norwich? What is like the basis? How can people watch this and go, right, girl, I'm going to get cracking on this. What's like the. How can they rank?
B
It's a lot of the same fundamentals that SEO is built on. You want to make sure that your site is easily crawlable, meaning that Google ChatGPT perplexities, they can send their little AI bots in there and your website, it can pick up all the right things. So we call them schemas. There's a lot of different schemas that you want to make sure that your website has and it basically when an AI bot goes onto your website, they're not looking at the pretty pixels, they're looking at the content that's underneath the HTML and they want it structured in a very formatted way. And if you do that, these engines are able to then pull that information, store it, index it and then be able to retrieve it. If you don't, they're going to have to make guesses on Mark what you do or what Liam, what he does. So you want to make sure that any website that you're building, it has very strong structures in place.
A
Okay, it's a quick question then. PMS websites, we have so many people who come to us and go, mark, I don't need a new website. Okay, show me your website. And they pull up a PMS website with everything that's going. Do they have any structure for this or is it just a glorified landing page? What's your opinion on this?
B
Some do it better than others. Some do a terrible job, like an absolute terrible job. They don't have any, any SEO structures, not even talking about AEO and geo. They have no even SEO structures in place. They, I think probably the one of the biggest challenges is that you just don't have a lot of content depth. So a lot of times when you have PMS websites, they have this landing page. You have a hero image on the very top of the page, you have this one line sentence that you could put in there and then you have a list of all your properties. It's great. If you want something free that someone is going to repeat book with you, they know you friends and family, they just need a place to like actually do the checkout, that's fine. But if you're trying to appear in search engines, if you're trying to appear in chat, what you're going to need to do is give these search engines enough meat about your business. What makes you special, what's your specific niche for them to say, oh, Mark is really known for, or this one thing, or Liam, he is the best property manager because he writes all this content specifically in this area there. So that if you have more content, if you start having that blog, those landing pages, that makes a huge difference on the signals that you're giving back to these search engines so that they can come back to you. If you give them nothing, they don't know your vacation rental. They don't even, probably even know where your property properties are located.
A
So moves me on to the next question. With all of these sites like Lovable, for example, these AI websites that are popping up, are they, are they helping with this or are they not helping with this? Are they like the PMSs that don't structure anything really well, or you know, can you have your cake and eat it on these sites that you can put together in a few minutes?
B
There's so many things bad about Lovable. It's Lovable, I think is a really good prototyping platform. If you have an idea that you want to get off your head, you want to actually like visualize it, you maybe even want the first versions of it. Lovable is amazing. Like I have my own Lovable subscription. I probably use it once every quarter because oftentimes I'm using cloud code and doing it the traditional way. But if I want to get a quick and dirty idea out and I want to have something as quick as possible, Lovable is really, really good at it. They make some beautiful looking websites. And I've had folks that were shopping us and then I find that they ended up building out their own lovable website or they use Claude code and they built their own website. And honestly they look amazing, they look great. It brings in the fonts that they have. It does have those quirks where, you know, it's AI generated, like it's super obvious. But it looks really good for, for the most part. And I think where it starts to fall apart is if you start digging into the aeo, geo, SEO side of it, the content depth in there. And I probably the worst is like the actual integration back into the pms. Almost everyone that's doing it, they're using widgets, it's not API integrated, it's not pulling Content from the pms. It's not structured how a hospitality website should be structured. Yes. And it's, it's, it wasn't intended that way.
A
Yeah.
B
So I, it's not any blame to the, the property.
A
Yeah. So I don't know if you've ever done this before, but in the United Kingdom, in your, in your younger days, when you're going for a drink, right, you'll have a drink one or two o' clock in the morning, you're feeling a bit hungry after a night out. And so in England, we have a kebab. It's basically doner meat, Turkish food. It's like dirty, it's cheap, but it fills a hole. Right. That is what. When you were describing a lovable AI website, that's what I was thinking about. I was thinking about that. It's cheap day and you regret it the next day. But if you want the good stuff, you know, you cook it yourself.
B
It takes love.
A
Yeah, it takes love.
B
It takes love, it takes work, it takes experience. We've done 190 product releases since September of last year. 30% of that is in the SEO Aeogeo space. Like, we're pouring so much money, so much investments in making sure that our customers are getting the best tools. And like, if you're talking about lovable, that can create any type of prototyping application, like, they're, they're covering a pretty broad range there. It's not to say, like, with enough, like, prompting, maybe you'll burn through your credits and you'll be able to put something that's much deeper. But for the most part, like the vibe coded websites I've seen, they fall apart once you look inside. Like, if you start looking under the hood, like I saw your post the other day about the Lamborghini that has no engine. It's like that.
A
Yeah, I was just about to say Lamborghini without no engine looks super pretty. Looks, looks lovely. But if you want to get it from A to B, which is, you know, if you want to get bookings, A to B is like the thing you want to do, then there's no engine, you can't drive it. So, yeah, very interesting. But again, getting ideas off out your head onto something phenomenal. Okay, so they know everybody now needs to have a website that's got, you know, schema, lots of words about your topic. One of the things that I was looking at was it was a Neil Patel blog and he was talking about sources. So the places that these AI goes to find their information and it was talking about a lot of places like Reddit, YouTube, etc. Etc. So as well as having a very good website, do you need to make sure that for this AEO or GEO or even SEO for 2026, you need to be listed on many places as well? Is that a thing that you need to be doing or what's to play there?
B
So kind of going back to what we're saying earlier, AEO and GEO is built on the foundations of SEO. So if you traditionally have done really well for SEO, you're actually way ahead of most folks. So if you've been nurturing it, you've been spending time on writing blogs out there, you've been getting backlinks from other places, you're just going to continue riding the wave. You'll definitely want to make some, some improvements on the schema side to make sure that you have really structured content, because the way that LLMs pick things up are slightly different. And then there's like one other thing of, like when you're writing content, you want to write as if you're answering a question. You don't want to write like a marketer. So you don't want to say the best places in the Great Smoky Mountains. You want to write the title being like, what's the best place to visit with two young kids? Like, you want to answer a question. And if you start with that and then you start to answer it, it's actually how people are searching for it. Because back then, if you think about, if you think about, like SEO, you're putting keywords, best places to visit in spiritual contents. And if you, excuse me, I'm recovering from a cold. So. And if you think about, like how chat is being used now, people are asking questions instead. They're not putting keywords, like five keywords into a search bar. They're asking long tail questions. And what perplexity. And what Claude is doing is adding additional information. So say for instance, you're planning a trip. Like, for instance, I came back from Japan not too long ago and I was planning a trip. I gave it information on where I wanted to go, what places, what regions. I'm looking at how old my kids are, what they're interested in, what Pokemon centers that they may want. Now when I ask it a question of where I want to stay, what it's actually doing is really writing a long question back to the search engines to come up with the right sources that helps answer that long tail keyword. So it could be best places to stay in Akihabara with two young kids near a Pokemon center. And so if you know what people are searching for, what the questions are, and you answer that, guess who appears when people are searching for it. It's you.
A
Okay, two things. Number one, Pokemon centers. What does that mean? Real life Pokemon running around in Japan. What's going on there? What's that?
B
It's, it's. It stores all. They're basically stores for Pokemons. Oh, okay. You. It's like gigantic stores where there's like stuffies and Pokemon cards and games and all that stuff. And there's like eight of them. Yeah. Yes. Yes, it is.
A
Kids will absolutely love that. Okay, so number two, let's say that in the past Liam has been guest blogging or on other people's websites. Always be mentioned on other people's websites. So for a, a hospitality provider, that could mean that you have been spoken about on a tourism website or whatever website, right?
B
Yes.
A
Now, does he need to go back to said blogs and said websites and saying, hey, could I just rewrite what's on the website about me? And then he would then restructure it in terms of not keyword stuffing, as we call it, but. But writing the question and giving the answer. Is that a good play for 2026?
B
I mean, yes and no. I don't think that. I think you're. It's almost like two different things that we don't necessarily need to conflate together. One is you want to make sure that you're cited. You want to make sure that you continue to build those backlinks. So have your Google business profile on there, be a part of the chamber of commerce, have your links in there, local businesses be on their websites. All the great stuff that you should be doing on an SEO site that doesn't change. And then when you start to produce content, I wouldn't go out and start to overhaul everything because then Google is going to get signaled like you're producing a whole lot that's out of the norm. So you want to trickle that in there. Don't send a bunch of Hermes agents out there and start building a bunch of blog. Going to hurt yourself. Don't do that. Like you want to make sure that you trickle this over time. And what. One thing that they, One thing that I want folks to know is that LLMs have this thing called entity, which is basically what do they know about certain things. It's an object, it's a place, it's an organization, it's a person of influence. Whatever it is, it's an entity. So what you want to give Google is or all the LLMs is what is this entity known for? What is this property management company known for? And that way when it's building its graph, it knows that these things are connected together. So if you're a vacation rental manager, they know which markets you're a part of, what niche you're a part of, they know your reviews and they starting to connect all these dots together so that when they're scouring the web they know which entities have enough authority and can speak to certain topics there. So you want to like Mark, we've probably talked about this quite a bit about niching down. It's now more than ever important for you to niche down because the better that the LLMs know you for this one thing, it could be pet friendly stays in this neighborhood for this type of family. If you can niche down that much, your entity is so strong in that. So that when Gemini Perplexity Claude chatgpt recommends you, you rise up above everybody else because you become the expert at this one thing. And if you start to like just in marketing, if you try to be an expert or if you try to be known for everything, you're just going to get lost. And it's so much more important now because you're not just trying to convince people people that you're important now. You have to convince robots that you're the best thing for this one small thing.
A
Okay, so you literally took the words out of my mouth about the riches are in the niches. I want to come back to that. But what about social media? Do VLMs do they look at, you know, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. So are you then having to niche down on your content on socials as well? What, what spots the social media play?
B
Here they are. I think it was mid last year Google started to have YouTube being referenced and actually I think that happened before. But also meta started releasing Instagram to be able to be indexable whereas prior you couldn't ever search the web on certain things and the Instagram content be like valuable at all.
A
Yeah. Okay then so brings me to this question. If the riches are in the niches and let's just say there's a host who's got 10 properties in the Smokies, 10 properties in Myrtle Beach, 10 in the Poconos spread around.
B
Right.
A
So it's very hard to be known for that one thing when you spread all over. Is there an argument where you would need to create yourself 4 websites say around different niches for social media accounts around different niches. Is this where we're sort of heading towards where you're going to have your one main branded website say, well then you've got other smaller websites to take advantage of this.
B
Yes and no. We recently did a study where we looked at five really big property management companies. Really, really big, like red awning, like and we looked at both regional and nationals to figure out which ones actually shown up in chatgpt and Perplexity. So we sent a bunch of crawlers out there to see where these, where they landed. And we found that the regional property managers showed up in search so much more than the national ones. And we're talking about national. Like Vacasa for instance. Yeah. Like they did not show up as closely as cabins for you in the Great Smoky Mountains because they just have so much richness in their content there. Now if you. I think that's there. There's like this resource is not infinite. Like you still have. And yes, you can do more with AI agents and so so on, but you as a person only have so much mind share. If you have to manage four different accounts, you're then spreading your energy, you're spreading the site authority there like you're, you're peanut buttering yourself. So you have to take that in consideration because I've seen people that create individual websites for each and every one of their properties and they have separate social media accounts and they have like eight different accounts and they burn out, they get nowhere because they just don't get the momentum. And when they consolidate into one, they still are known for something, they still have this high standard of hospitality, but they're now growing one following count. They're building a one site authority and so then they're able to get more momentum. So I don't think it's a binary thing. It's really like how do you manage your resources? How do you think that you can consolidate things where you have one thing that you could be known for? Like I've known a property manager that all they focus on is autism and they write blog posts about like how their stays are autism, like autism friendly. And they're really mindful of these different things. They've niched down quite a bit and guess who shows up when someone's searching for that in ChatGPT? No one else is talking about that stuff.
A
So we've digged a lot into organic. We are probably days, if not weeks away from ads. So you can just shortcut all of this with a paid ad. What's your views on this as somebody who is delving so far into the GEO AEO SEO era, Like, what is your viewpoint on ads to sort of shortcut your way to the top? Is it something that you're excited about, wary about sitting on the fence about where, where does that lay for you?
B
It's the same thing for ads on search. Like it's existed for quite a while and there's this purpose for everything traditionally. Yet SEO, that was your long term thing. It pays off dividends. Maybe not this year, maybe next year, the following year, two years from now. You're so happy that you spent the time to nurture that. But in the meantime you may need to get those booking that calendar filled. You're going to run ads. We have lots of customers that generate such significant returns just on ads alone. And I think that like in this new age, that's not changing. We're swapping out SEO optimizations for AEO and Geo and now with ChatGPT leaning towards ads, people are going to funnel money into ads as well too. Both are important. It just depends on what your goals are. Are you looking for something that you want to nurture over time and you don't mind that long game, or do you want to pony up and pay to get those bookings now? Just know that it doesn't help you. You're basically swapping cash for cash so that that the RO ads import is important. So you better measure your impact.
A
It ties into nicely what we're talking about. With our last guest. We had Amber Knight on from Bookings Cloud and obviously Bookings Cloud is all about ads and she was talking about Meta and roas etc and the thing that she right from the office. It doesn't matter how good your ad campaign is, doesn't matter how good the company is that you work with. If the website that you're sending to is trash and it can't convert, then you just basically say money on on fire. So I feel like there's tons of advice in this episode and we're coming to the end. So last question. There's somebody that's watching this, listening to this and you know they've heard all these terms that they may have never heard before. What would be the first thing that they could do after watching this, listening to this, that they could take action within the next 30 days and sort of have that aha moment. Doesn't have to be like, because like SEO is a long game, right? But what's that little aha moment they could have if if they action that one thing after this episode.
B
So we did a study, like I mentioned earlier, that we, we looked at five different brands and it's really hard to show up when people are searching for the best places. About 10% of those brands showed up when you had those keywords. But there's also what happens if you show up under your own name. So if you have for instance, cabins for you, do you show up in ChatGPT and perplexity when someone's searching for your specific brand name? If you don't, you have a very fundamental problem. You should be always, almost always showing up when someone is doing a brand name search. And so if you aren't, take a look at that first because nothing else matters if they can't even search for you in the highest intent area. And very likely what's happening is you're not registered on Bing, you're not registered on Bing Webmaster Tools. That's what's powering ChatGPT. Bing. ChatGPT does not go on Google for searches. It uses Bing. So if you're not already registered on Bing, do it today. Let Bing start to recognize you and start slowly building content towards your niche.
A
You couldn't have nailed it better. Bing is the untapped resource for marketing. I do a lot of Bing ads and we do a lot of Bing bits on Bing and I personally have never done a search on Bing but so many people do because like you said, it's the natural search for ChatGPT and so many people don't do it and it is bananas. You can, you can literally do everything that you do on Google with business places, etc over there on Bing. And I say Bing mass, webmaster tools, etc. Is easy. If you think, oh, that's another thing I have to learn. Just literally load up Comet by perplexity and just get it to help you do it for literally step by step or even do it for you. It is so simple. You'll be like, oh my gosh, you can. Even when I set up the Bing Ads account, I could just transfer everything I imported my Google Ads account into Bing Ads. Is that easy? Is literally one button click go over. So yeah, really good tip. All right, go. You're talking loads about this. What is your favorite channel if you want people to follow along and so join you on this journey as you are going down AEO and Geo and all of the G's and all of the hours.
B
Yeah, if you want to geek out, LinkedIn is probably the post. The area where I'm going a lot deeper. I'm a lot of long form content,
A
a lot of LinkedIn posts.
B
Yeah I I spend every morning just reading the News. I have 36 news articles that I comb through and I get a little bit help from Claude but I comb through and I figure out what's happening in the news today because I want to make sure that the community around us has the tools because it's super confusing. So if you want to kind of weed through some of that I would say LinkedIn is probably the best place to follow me. I also repost a lot of that on my own Instagram and our craft estates Instagram as well too.
A
Nice. Go and check it out. Fantastic. I'll put all the links and stuff in the usual places Spotify, podcasts, YouTube etc Gil, appreciate it as always. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll be back again on the next one. Cheers now.
B
Bye.
Podcast: The Boostly Podcast
Host: Mark Simpson
Guest: Gil (Hudson Creative)
Date: May 19, 2026
Episode Theme:
Exploring how AI-driven search is transforming traditional SEO, with a focus on what short-term rental (STR) and mid-term rental (MTR) operators must know to stay visible and competitive in an era shaped by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and generative AI agents.
Mark Simpson welcomes Gil from Hudson Creative for a deep dive into how AI search agents are rapidly changing the landscape of SEO for hospitality businesses. The conversation unpacks the new terminology operators need to know (AEO & GEO), the real-world impact of AI-driven discovery, website and content best practices for 2026, and actionable steps hosts can take to boost their direct booking efforts outside of OTA dependency. The episode delivers practical, timely insights, peppered with relatable anecdotes and a collaborative, candid tone.
A New Era of Search:
Collaboration over Competition:
AI as the New Influencer (and Trusted Advisor):
Anecdote — Real-World Example:
"SEO ranks you, AEO answers for you, GEO recommends you..." — Gil (10:36)
Fundamentals Still Matter, But Structure is Key:
Pitfalls with PMS & AI-Generated Websites:
Being Everywhere That Matters:
Content Strategy for 2026:
Backlinks & Entity Authority:
"...more than ever important for you to niche down...you become the expert at this one thing." (24:07)
"If you have to manage four different accounts, you're then spreading your energy...and you burn out." (28:21)
"SEO ... pays off dividends...ads are for filling your calendar now. Both are important, depends on your goals." (29:44)
First Step: Check Your Brand Search in AI Tools:
"If you aren't [showing up under your name], take a look at that first...you're not registered on Bing, do it today." (32:31)
Bing is an Untapped Resource:
Connect with Gil:
Listen & Watch:
Summary prepared for those seeking actionable, up-to-date strategies in direct booking, SEO, and AI-driven search within the hospitality industry.