Conversational Content: Preparing Your Destination for AI Travel Assistants

If it feels like you’re seeing AI everywhere right now, you’re not wrong. OpenAI recently announced that ChatGPT is on track to reach 700 million weekly users soon. For reference, that’s almost twice as many users as there are people in the United States. To put it another way, that means more than 1 in every 15 people on Earth is using ChatGPT every week.

People are using tools like ChatGPT and Claude for everything from studying and cooking to coding and even finding new ways to improve website accessibility.

(Those are all me. I’m the “people” in those examples.)

So it’s no surprise that AI has taken off in the travel space, too. But users aren’t handing over their itineraries and asking a chatbot to plan their entire trip.

Studies show that they’re using it to do the early digging, like finding destinations, reading reviews and understanding the vibe of a place. It’s a new form of research, not a replacement for the fun of planning.

But this shift means travelers aren’t just browsing in the old way anymore. They’re asking direct questions, looking for quick clarity, and expecting AI to surface the most useful pieces of information without all the extra clicks. If your content can’t be read and understood by these tools, it risks being invisible at the very moment people are deciding where to go and what to book.

That shift in behavior is why your content needs to be ready for AI tools to find, understand and use.

What is Conversational Content for AI Travel Assistants?

When we build a website, our process starts with two fundamental areas: understanding the primary goals and identifying the questions customers are already asking.

To define the goal, we ask the “Magic Wand Question.” If you could wave a magic wand and make every person who came to your website do one thing, what would it be? This clarifies the ultimate purpose of the site. Then, to understand the audience, we ask things like, “What questions do you get most often?” or “What do you wish you could tell everyone who visits?”

This is where conversational content comes in. It’s the bridge between your customers’ questions and your “magic wand” goal. We define it as content written with the explicit purpose of answering questions the way a person would. Instead of a generic heading like “Pricing,” a conversational one asks, “How Much Does the Tour Cost?”

It’s different from traditional marketing language because it’s written the way it would be spoken. Harrison Ford famously joked to George Lucas about the dialogue in Star Wars, “You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.” Our goal is the opposite: to build content that you can say, because chances are it will be read aloud — either by a person or to them by an AI tool.

Why This Matters More Than Ever in Travel Marketing

I shared at the top, but I think it bears repeating that people are using these AI tools to plan vacations. Like the early days of Google and even social media, a large number of people are using AI for travel planning right now and even more will be doing it tomorrow. It’s easy to write these tools off as gimmicks and snake oil because those products certainly exist in the pantheon of AI tools, but it doesn’t mean these tools aren’t working their way into consumer habits, especially when we see the rate at which AI features are being adapted to existing products in the market. 

Incredibly, more than 35% of US residents regularly use voice search to browse the web. Local and “near me” voice searches account for 76% of all voice searches. And it’s only going to grow as more people use voice search to find nearby businesses.

When you put these stats altogether, it paints a picture of search and the web that isn’t just voice-friendly, but increasingly voice-first and even voice-only. Though currently in beta, Google even offers a mechanism for specifying content on a page that is written with the intention to be speakable, or to offer speakable alternatives to more complicated content. 

It’s clear that people and platforms alike are moving away from flowery copy packed with brand voice and keywords toward more natural language.

Destinations and businesses have an enormous opportunity to be the go-to source of information about their brand and influencing how these tools of the future present their brand to potential visitors. Dropping the ball here could mean that when a device or assistant is asked about your brand, the answer could come not just from someone else but even from a competitor. 

So what can destinations do to make sure AI assistants present their content accurately and persuasively?

Best Practices for Making Your Destination AI-Ready

Write Like You’re Answering a Traveler’s Question

This may seem obvious, but the entire idea behind writing more conversational content is to write as if you are standing in front of the user and answering their question out loud. When someone asks, “Does the cabin have Wi-Fi?” would you answer them by holding up a picture of the Wi-Fi icon and shouting the word AMENITIES as loud as you can? No, you would explain that the Wi-Fi is free and behind a simple password located on a magnet on the fridge. Think back to those questions that we try to answer for every single user. What is everyone asking? Now let’s answer it like we’re standing in front of them, plainly and naturally.

Add Helpful FAQs to Key Pages

The Wi-Fi question is a perfect encapsulation of how to make this work actionable. FAQs offer a kind of “cheat sheet,” not just for your team to structure their work, but for chatbots and search engines to make sense of how to answer specific queries. For your team, structuring these things into FAQs means not having to try to organically work dozens of questions and their answers into flowing paragraphs of written language. Make a list of questions, written exactly how you are asked them, and answer them exactly as you would answer them.

Like having specific pages dedicated to photo and video, the idea of having a giant FAQ page is a thing of the past. FAQs belong on the pages they correspond to, just like video tours and product photos do. This gets them in front of users who are already engaging with the subject matter in question and makes it far simpler for assistants and search engines to connect the dots between the two as well.

In a similar vein to the speakable schema I referenced earlier, the FAQ schema is also powerful here. You don’t need a computer science degree to make sense of it, but know that there are tools that exist that make FAQs more machine-readable and more easily parsed by visitors to your website who may not be human beings.

Here is an example of an FAQ built using the FAQ WordPress block from Yoast, which adds all of the relevant schema automatically:

Use Structured Data to Help AI Understand Your Content

We can make websites easier for machines to read without changing what human visitors see or experience. This might sound obvious, but a lot of the conclusions that platforms like ChatGPT and Google draw about pages are guesses, if not fabricated outright, because the answer isn’t clear. I jokingly refer to this in meetings sometimes as the part of our work where we make websites beautiful to machines as well as people. 

Structured data refers to the technical tools we can use to explicitly tell a machine “These are the business hours” or “This is the phone number,” so that the guesswork is removed. In the FAQ example above, you can check the source on this page and see that alongside the actual words is a bit of code that clearly delineates each question and its corresponding answer. This is an example of structured data providing clarity and semantics for machines.

There are plenty of other structured data types, too. Google even publishes a list of the ones they check when deciding how a site appears in search, and that list is constantly growing. The most future-friendly approach is to use schema anywhere it’s directly relevant.

Optimize for Voice Search and Mobile Discovery

Have you ever noticed how your written voice differs from your spoken voice? I grew up on Yahoo! Messenger and AIM, which meant I got used to writing in short bursts, sending one sentence at a time instead of big paragraphs. But when I speak, I’m wordier and tend to lean on analogies.

For voice search, that “AIM voice” is exactly what works best. Short, natural answers fit better in small spaces and are less likely to get cut off. Assistants can read them back cleanly, and travelers get what they need faster.

Local relevance matters just as much. On the web, we take context for granted. But if someone is on their phone, standing in your destination right now, the kind of information they need is immediate and actionable. Think of it like long-term and short-term planning: long term, I know I’m headed to West Virginia. Short term, I need to know where the parking is for Pies and Pints in Charleston.

Tools & Resources to Help You Get Started

So, where do you start with all of this? In most cases, the first step is as easy as seeing how things are already working. You may find that a lot of the tools you already use, like Google Business Listings and WordPress are doing a lot of the work for you. There are some specific things you can do to get a sense of where things stand and make a plan to build on that.

These quick checks don’t take long, but they’ll show you how AI tools are interpreting your content today. From there, you can decide what to fix, what to add, and where to lean in so travelers get the right answers no matter how they ask.

Wrapping Up

AI isn’t replacing the fun of planning a trip, but it is reshaping how people start. The businesses and destinations that answer questions clearly, use structured data and make content easy for both people and machines will be the ones showing up in those early conversations.

You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Start with the basics: answer traveler questions in plain language, add helpful FAQs, make sure your information is structured and accurate and run a quick test or two to see how AI tools describe your business today.

Travelers are already asking assistants about you. The only real question is whether the answer they get will come from you…or from someone else.