AI Is Killing SEO Tricks. Here's What Hospitality Brands Should Do Instead

0:00Wil Reynolds: ZS is a global consulting and technology firm that partners with companies to improve life and how we live it. Working with the world's top hospitality brands, ZS brings together data, science, technology, and human ingenuity to transform ideas into customer loyalty. They're ready to help you elevate guest experiences, improve operations, and uncover preferences and motivations through their AI-powered solutions. With more than 1 ,700 clients in over 170 countries, ZS has built the expertise, fortitude, and vision to help you deliver impact right where it matters.

0:56All right, we are here with Will Reynolds. Just got off stage at Guest Eval and already can tell it's going to be one of the best discussions of the week. So, Will, do you want to do a quick introduction of yourself? Sure. I'm Will Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive. And I think I'm like a concierge of the Internet. Like, I like helping people find great things on the Internet. So it kind of fits that I'm here today. Yeah, perfect. Well, we're excited. And the room's already been buzzing about you. So the line of people to talk to you afterwards was fantastic. I know you were like, first session of the day, really knocked it out of the park.

1:30Yeah, set the bar high, man. Let these people set their game up, you know? I know. I have a session later. I'm like, oh, no. Okay. So one of the favorite points that I heard was this trap that people are getting into of building over-engineering AI, putting it in too many places, and really losing that human touch. Do you want to describe that for us? Sure. Well, so one of the things that I talked about, I was supposed to be a 45 minute session, so we had to cut it down so I missed some things. But one of the biggest things I realized in my own business was I was building more content than I was getting social traffic.

2:04And I'm like, wait a second. If nobody cares about this content enough to share with their friends, why am I writing? And what happened is as I lost marketing staff coming out of the pandemic, I didn't rehire people back. And I realized that when I got to zero marketing staff, I 10x my social traffic. And I went, well, what was different? I produced about 90 % less content. And every piece that I wrote, I cared deeply about. And with each one of those, they got picked up by trade publications. They got picked up by all the influencers. They got picked up in people's private WhatsApp groups. And the conversion rate on social for me is 5x the conversion rate out of AI or search.

2:42So my business grew by writing less content. Pipeline leads, all that. less is actually more in the AI era when everyone's thinking more is better. I think I wish people would apply that to their AI written emails that I keep getting. Yeah, no, but it's like, it's interesting. Like, it's cool now, but a lot of people aren't thinking, a year from now, do we really want everybody to write 100 pieces of content a month? It's like, no, I'll just hold off for the one person that seems that they're writing something that they really care about. Yeah, 100%. A lot of people in the room are heavily reliant on Airbnb and Burbo for their bookings.

3:21But I get the impression that your take is now is a chance that they can gain a lot of that market share back. Is that accurate? Extremely accurate. So I have an example that's not in the industry. But if you search for the word ethical genes, so you're looking for ethically made genes on Google, Banana Republic ranks like number five. Banana Republic is not a brand that any of us thought of when I said the word ethical jeans. No. It's not in our hard wiring. You may not know an ethical jeans company, but you surely didn't think it was Banana Republic, right? So there's this company called Nudie Jeans.

3:54And Nudie Jeans, who I love. Great name. Yeah, right? Nudie Jeans does all these things to make sure that their jeans impact the environment as little as possible. If you buy Nudie Jeans, they will repair your jeans for free for life so you don't buy new jeans because every pair of new jeans negatively affects the environment. I'm going to go buy some jeans after this. They have a store in Madrid. So, and if you ever rip them, you can come back, get them fixed, free forever. What's your commission? Zero. Zero. Zero, zero, zero. Nudie, you need to give him a link or something. I've been talking about this for years.

4:25But here's my point. When you go, so how did Banana Republic rank in Google for ethical jeans? They went to the bottom of the page and put the word ethical jeans a bunch of times, a few words, and they showed up for something that wasn't who they authentically are, right? it in an AI world I've run that search maybe a thousand times Banana Republic has never shown up so it's like your brand now has to be about the thing that you say you want it to be about or your visibility you used to get in Google is done which means Airbnb is able to because of their brand heft and their domain authority in Google was able to rank for things that they really didn't write the best content in the world on chat GPT is like we don't believe you we're going to actually get content from people that are local that we have seen over and over again, which is a massive opportunity for people in this industry.

5:14Yeah. All the people that had like the text in white, just like hidden in their websites. It's like, that's over now. For a while that was working on ChatGPT as well. It was. But ChatGPT 5.6, actually about ChatGPT 5, started making a massive change that made that stuff stop working. So another thing about short-term tricks, Be careful. If you're out there and you're a brand, the problem with short-term tricks is, remember, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, they have unlimited compute. They will throw unlimited compute at your spam and figure it out and knock you out pretty quickly. So, like, stop trying to trick unlimited compute.

5:55Don't try to trick it. Like, just do the stuff that they want you to do. They're kind of smart. Speaking of kind of smart, you had probably 10 actionable items for people to take home. Give us three of those real quick. Search ChatGPT for strengths and weaknesses of your brand. Then see whether or not you agree or disagree with that. That's number one. Number two, take all of your content. If any of your content gets 90 % or more of its traffic from Google search or AI, you're building content nobody wants and shares with their group, which means you're never going to build a brand. You're never going to win over hearts and minds.

6:31Third tip, ChatGPT tends to like brands more that publish studies and data. And guess what happens with studies and data? They end up more and more in journalist queries who are doing deep research on a topic. It's a great way to grow your brand. So we have done a lot of studies that ended up in deep research for topics around our space. And as a result, our traffic from major publications in our industry year over year is up 45x. I think a really great example of that for property managers could be taking your actual case studies of comparing, like, you know, trying to get a homeowner to, you know, improve their home and buy new furniture, doing the case study of all the homes that did that, what the reviews look like, how the revenue improved.

7:19Oh, so this is one of the things that I did is I scraped a bunch of reviews off of Airbnb just to see what was common about the top performer in my space. So I did this. I'm like learning this industry in real time. So I'm like, I'm going to try to do my best at this presentation. So I'm learning. So I'm like, how do you scrape Airbnb? So I get these top 150 results for the best Airbnb in Blue Ridge, Georgia. And then I took somebody who just launched their new listing and I compared the two. And it was like, if you want to be like the number one group, do things that make people mention you by name in their reviews.

7:53It was one of the craziest things that I saw is you're like, oh, all the top places. They're like, Barbara was amazing. The actual humans behind it. Humans. That's what we're talking about here. Like, you keep thinking your little AI bot's cute, but when people realize that your AI bot will is not actually will, people don't like being tricked. So if you are going to use AI to scale communications, just tell them it's a bot. Don't try to do the, like, it's me but not me shit. You could just say it's an assistant. It's an assistant. I have an AI assistant that's helping me get back to you faster, but really, you know what's better than that?

8:27You getting back to me faster. Yeah. And one of the points in your presentation that I loved, when guests review online or make comments on Reddit or on Google reviews, a lot of people in this space say, give us your email. We'll send you a note. We'll take this discussion offline. We'll remedy it. Why is that the wrong approach? So the reason why that's the wrong approach is when you start to realize that ChatGPT and all these guys are indexing Reddit, it means they've indexed this page that says a negative thing about someone's experience with your brand. That page is in the index. You don't know if your response to that is in the index.

9:05If you take it off of email, now you saying, I care about you. I'm sorry this was your experience. And everybody, even if you do it online, don't do the freaking copy and paste answer that everybody gets. Oh, I'm so sorry. We really care about your blah, blah, blah. What would be a lot better is, hey, this is the third time somebody has said this about this property. That upsets me. Here's your money back. And I'm going to create a record publicly on my website that shows how I'm improving it. And I will update this thread on how I'm becoming a better business. Done by zero companies would instantly build a brand in your region.

9:41I love that. I love that. And then the other piece that very quickly helps your brand on AI was a Trustpilot. Trustpilot. Yeah. So Trustpilot commissioned us for a study. And what we realized is... Another one of those studies. Another one of those studies. Data. Data, baby. So Trustpilot commissioned us for a study to pretty much say, like, what are the impact on AI when people have no reviews versus when people have 1 to 13 reviews versus 13 or more? and literally if you have no reviews on Trustpilot, you have a 1 % chance of being recommended on the prompts that we track where Trustpilot reviews are showing up a lot.

10:16And if you have one to 13 reviews, you had a 54 % chance of showing up in those. So it's important to be on the review sites because the review sites are hardwired into the brain of ChatGPT 5.6. So when you think of B2B software, it's like G2, dog. So if you're not on G2 and it searches G2 only, not your website, it's searching G2 and you're not there, then it doesn't know what you are, what you're about, et cetera. Or if things are negative, even worse. So add Trustpilot to the list of platforms right now. Less AI slop, more trust. Less AI slop. But what I would also say is it's always data. Trustpilot was for certain types of brands and products.

11:00I would say what are the review sites most reviewed in the hardwiring fan out is what it's called in the fan out of chat GPT. And whatever that is in the hotel review space or the vacation rental review space, that's where I would make sure I was getting reviewed. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, appreciate the time today. Yeah. Keep it short and sweet. I mean, honestly, maybe you come on the show another time. This is fascinating. We could talk about this for a long time. I think I would learn a lot too after talking to this guy. I think I would learn a lot too. And I would love to kick it with you guys if I can.

11:30Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you.

11:52Wil Reynolds: ZS is a global consulting and technology firm that partners with companies to improve life and how we live it. Working with the world's top hospitality brands, ZS brings together data, science, technology, and human ingenuity to transform ideas into customer loyalty. They're ready to help you elevate guest experiences, improve operations, and uncover preferences and motivations through their AI-powered solutions. With more than 1 ,700 clients in over 170 countries, ZS has built the expertise, fortitude, and vision to help you deliver impact right where it matters.