Is AI deciding which venues make your shortlist?
As planners increasingly turn to AI when researching venues, Hire Space co-founder Edward Poland explains why being visible to ChatGPT and other LLMs is becoming just as important as ranking on Google.
A planner asks ChatGPT for the best venues in Shoreditch for a 200-person awards dinner. Three names come back. If a venue is not one of them, they will never know the enquiry existed.
That is the uncomfortable shift underneath everything else happening in venue sales right now. The click is no longer the first step in a booking journey. It is the last one, and often it does not happen at all.
Things have moved quickly. Ofcom had 23 per cent of UK adults using AI tools in 2023, 31 per cent in 2024 and 54 per cent in 2025. On that trend we are somewhere near 70 per cent this year, which squares with the ICO and YouGov finding in March that 74 per cent of UK adults had used an AI chatbot. ChatGPT alone reports around 900 million weekly users, up from 400 million a year ago. The momentum is pretty extraordinary.
More importantly, the behaviour happening around the answer has changed. Pew tracked nearly 69,000 Google searches last year and found that when an AI answer appears at the top of the page, clicks on a normal result fall from 15 per cent to 8 per cent. Only 1 per cent of people click a link inside the AI answer itself. Twenty-six per cent stop searching there and then. Sistrix put the fall in clicks at the top organic position at 59 per cent where an AI summary is shown.
For venues, that means the page they have spent years optimising is increasingly being read by a machine and summarised to somebody who may never see it.
Ed Poland, co-founder of Hire Space
Ed Poland, co-founder of Hire Space
The old rule of thumb that buyers complete most of their research before they speak to anybody has hardened again.
The qualification conversation a venue sales team is so good at now happens before the phone rings, in a system they cannot see, on evidence they did not choose. That’s a major shift.
Invisibility is default
We discussed this shift when we hosted venue teams at our offices in August alongside the London Venue Sales Network (LVSN). One fact surprised everyone.
Lighthouse ran 4,545 ChatGPT prompts across nine cities using five traveller personas. ChatGPT could only ever name 13 per cent of the hotels in Paris. In Tokyo it was 10 per cent. Two Los Angeles hotels in one collection accounted for around 6 per cent of every LA mention. Guest review scores barely moved the needle. (Star rating did, with 83 per cent of business travel recommendations going to four and five star properties, even though three star suits most corporate stays).
So currently, brand wins the day. Being good is not the same as being known, and being known to a language model is a different thing again. There are things venues must do differently.
Five things that are true of LLMs, but not Google
If you take one thing from this, take this: optimising for AI answers is not SEO with a new hat on.
Think about the paragraph, not the page. A 90-word block listing capacities by layout, step-free access, in-house AV and minimum spend will outperform a 3,000-word brand page every time.
It is a different index. ChatGPT's search still leans heavily on Bing. If Bing has never seen a venue's sitemap, it is invisible to it - however well it ranks on Google. Submitting a sitemap takes 20 minutes and costs nothing.
Half the website may not exist as far as AI is concerned. Lots of venue sites are built so that the important bits, the capacities, the floorplans, the prices, only appear once your browser has done a second of work assembling them. Google waits for that, but the AI crawlers do not. If you want to see roughly what ChatGPT sees, ask whoever runs the website to load it with JavaScript switched off. Whatever vanishes from the page is invisible to the AI too.
Press and posts count, and they need no link. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found that being written about predicts AI visibility around three times more strongly than links do. Trade press, a best-of list, a LinkedIn post, a review: all of it counts, even unlinked. Remember the days where a followed link was gold dust? That may have changed.
Numbers and quotes beat adjectives. Research from Princeton, Georgia Tech, AI2 and IIT Delhi found that adding real statistics, attributed quotes and cited sources lifted visibility by up to 40 per cent. Keyword stuffing scored below doing nothing at all.
The pattern is consistent. Reshaping the same words does nothing - adding facts that only venues can supply does.
Get on the lists that get quoted
When Lighthouse looked at where AI hotel recommendations came from, 82 per cent of the sources were marketplaces and editorial, not the hotels' own websites. The venue site got the outbound click, but somebody else earned the mention.
Being written about, listed and quoted is what gets venues named. Their own site is what converts the click once they have been named.
Which, for venues, makes it worth auditing where they are listed, and auditing on the criteria a machine cares about: can a crawler reach it, are the listings in plain HTML, are there real numbers on the page, does each venue have a clean URL, and is any of it behind a login.
The spread across the platforms most venues use is enormous, and the login question is the one that catches people out regularly. Where a site requires a sign-in, no machine can read a word of it, however good their profile is. A large part of this industry's venue data is invisible to the systems its buyers now ask, even without knowing.
My advice to venues is to put their effort into the listings a machine can actually read, and keep those current. A stale listing on a readable site does damage - even more than a perfect listing on a site LLMs can’t reach.
The good news for venues is, none of this needs a budget or a new website. It needs a sitemap, a JavaScript check, a page of real numbers per space, a list of places they are listed, and a decision about which two or three of them are worth keeping properly up to date.
Client shortlists are closing earlier and earlier every month, so for venues it is worth knowing whether they are on it, and how to get there before their competition does.
Edward Poland is the co-founder of Hire Space.