How to audit your outdoor business's presence across AI platforms

AI platforms are already answering questions your customers used to type into Google. “Best fly fishing guides near Bozeman.” “Family-friendly rafting in West Virginia.” “Kayak tours in the San Juans.” When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or gets a Google AI Overview, your business either shows up in the answer or it doesn’t. There’s no page two to scroll to.

Most outdoor operators have no idea how they appear across these platforms. Some don’t appear at all. Running an audit takes about an afternoon and tells you exactly where you stand and what needs fixing.

Check what AI platforms actually say about you

Start by asking. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google (to trigger AI Overviews) and type in the queries your customers would use. Be specific: “best guided rafting trips near [your town],” “fly fishing guides [your river],” “family kayak tours [your region].” Run at least ten queries that match your core services and location.

For each query, note whether your business appears at all, what information the platform shares about you, and whether any of it is wrong. ChatGPT might know your business name but list the wrong address. Perplexity might cite a two-year-old blog post with outdated pricing. Google AI Overviews might pull from your competitor’s page instead of yours because their content answers the question more directly.

Write all of this down. A spreadsheet works fine: query in column A, platform in column B, whether you appeared in column C, notes on accuracy in column D. The goal is a baseline, not a scientific study. You just need to see the pattern.

Audit your google business profile

Your Google Business Profile feeds data to nearly every AI platform. Google AI Overviews pull from it directly. ChatGPT accesses it through Bing’s index, which mirrors much of the same data. Perplexity weights it when answering local queries. If your profile is incomplete or inaccurate, you’re starting with bad data everywhere.

Log into your profile and check every field. Business name, address, phone number, website URL, hours of operation, service categories, and business description. Make sure your categories are specific. “Rafting outfitter” is better than “recreation center.” “Fly fishing guide service” is better than “outdoor recreation.”

Upload recent photos. Profiles with 10 or more photos get measurably more engagement. If your latest photo is from 2023, AI platforms are working with a stale picture of your business.

Check your reviews and how you’ve responded to them. Review activity signals to AI systems that your business is active and engaged. A business with 200 reviews and recent owner responses looks more credible to an AI than one with 40 reviews and no replies.

Verify your information is consistent everywhere

AI platforms pull from dozens of sources and try to reconcile conflicting data. If your website says you’re at 123 River Road, Yelp says 123 River Rd, and TripAdvisor says 123 River Rd Suite A, the platforms have to guess which is right. Sometimes they guess wrong.

This is called NAP consistency (name, address, phone number), and it matters more for AI search than it ever did for traditional SEO. Inconsistent citations create noise that AI systems struggle to resolve.

Check your listings on Google Business Profile, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, and any industry-specific directories like recreation.gov or state tourism sites. Your business name, address, phone number, and website URL should be identical everywhere. Down to the abbreviation.

Look at your website through an AI’s eyes

AI platforms don’t read your website the way a person does. They scan for structured, factual content they can pull into an answer. That hero image with text overlaid on it? AI can’t read it. That pricing page that says “call for a quote”? AI skips it entirely.

Go through your key pages, starting with service and trip pages, and ask yourself what a machine could extract. Each page should have a plain-language description of the service, specific details like duration, difficulty, price range, age requirements, and a few sentences answering the most common customer questions.

Schema markup helps AI systems understand your content in a structured way. If you haven’t added LocalBusiness or TouristTrip schema to your site, that’s a gap worth closing. It’s a one-time setup that makes it easier for every AI platform to parse your offerings.

FAQ sections on service pages pull their weight for AI citation. Write three to five real questions customers ask, with clear two-to-three sentence answers. These map directly to the kinds of queries people put into AI assistants.

Check your presence on review and booking platforms

AI systems lean on third-party platforms when putting together answers. ChatGPT cites TripAdvisor frequently. Perplexity pulls from Yelp reviews. Google AI Overviews reference booking platforms and review aggregators.

If you’re listed on TripAdvisor, make sure your profile is complete and your photos are current. Same for Yelp. If you use a booking platform like FareHarbor or Peek, check whether your listings there are detailed enough for AI to cite. Listing on platforms like Viator is a separate strategic question, but wherever you do have a profile, it should be complete and accurate.

Look at what reviews say about you on these platforms. AI systems synthesize review content when forming answers. If five reviews mention your guides are great with kids, ChatGPT might include “known for family-friendly trips” in its answer about your business. If several reviews mention long waits or confusing check-in, that could show up too. You can’t control what people write, but you can make sure the overall picture is accurate by encouraging reviews from satisfied guests and responding to the negative ones thoughtfully.

Build a fix list and prioritize it

You now have a picture of where you stand. Some of what you found is probably fine. Some of it isn’t. Turn your notes into a fix list, ordered by priority.

Start with anything that’s factually wrong. Wrong address, wrong phone number, outdated hours, discontinued services still listed. These fixes are fast and have an immediate effect on what AI platforms say about you.

Next, address completeness gaps. Missing schema markup, thin service pages, incomplete profiles on review sites. These take more time but improve how often you appear in AI answers.

Finally, look at the content gaps. If your competitors show up for queries where you don’t, study what they have that you’re missing. It’s usually more specific content, more reviews, or better-structured pages. A broader look at AI search and how it applies to your outdoor business can help you set a strategy beyond the audit itself.

Make this a recurring check

AI platforms update their training data and search indexes on different schedules. What they say about you today might change next month. Set a calendar reminder to run this audit quarterly, or at least twice a year before and after your peak season.

Each time, re-run those same ten queries and see if anything shifted. Check for new reviews that might be influencing AI answers. Update any profile information that changed since last time. If you added new trips or changed your pricing, make sure every platform reflects that before the next wave of customers starts searching.

This isn’t a one-time project. It’s maintenance. The operators who treat it that way will keep showing up when customers ask AI where to go.