# How to get your town into AI trip planning. > Travelers plan with AI now. How AI tools read a destination's website, what makes attractions and events readable, and how to check yours. [Guides](https://hiveway.org/guides) · For destinations Travelers plan with AI now. How AI tools read a destination's website, what makes attractions and events readable, and how to check yours. Guide · Updated October 2026 · 10 sources · About 3 minutes ## In plain English More travelers ask an AI tool to plan their trip. In Deloitte's 2026 summer travel survey, 25% of Americans used AI to plan travel, up from 15% a year earlier. AI tools can only suggest places they can read. A destination site where every attraction, event and itinerary is its own page, with plain text and structured data, gives AI something to work with. This guide shows what to build and how to check. ## Visitors plan differently now - **25% of Americans** used AI to plan travel in 2026, up from 15% in 2025, according to Deloitte's survey of 4,003 people. Millennials led at 36%. - **Google says AI Overviews reach over 2.5 billion people a month,** so even a regular search often starts with an AI answer. When someone asks "What should I do on a weekend in a small town near here?", the AI picks a few places and names them. Your job is to be readable enough to be one of them. ## Give every place its own page - **One page per attraction, restaurant, park and shop worth a visit,** with its name, what it is, where it is, hours and why someone would go. - **One page per event,** with the date, time, place and price in the text. - **Itineraries as real pages:** "A Rainy Day Downtown" or "Two Days With Kids," each stop linked to its own page. - **Plain words a visitor would use.** Say "free parking behind the library," not "ample amenities." A single map widget or a PDF visitor guide is hard for a machine to read. Pages are easy. ## Add structured data Structured data labels your facts so machines don't have to guess. Schema.org has types for exactly this: - **TouristAttraction** for places to visit. - **Event** for events, with dates, location and offers. - **LocalBusiness** (and its kinds, like Restaurant) for businesses. - **TouristTrip** for an itinerary. Google's rule applies everywhere: the structured data must match what's visible on the page. ## Make sure AI tools can get in - **Text in the HTML.** A 2024 study found that the major AI crawlers it measured, apart from Google's and Apple's, don't run JavaScript. If your listings load with a script, they may see nothing. - **Check robots.txt.** Blocking a tool's search crawler keeps you out of its answers. OpenAI, for example, says sites that block its search crawler won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. - **No special files needed for Google.** Google says there's nothing extra to do for its AI features beyond search basics. Some sites also publish plain-text (markdown) copies of pages for other AI tools, an extra, not a must. ## How to check your site - View the page source of an attraction page. Is the name, description and address in the text? - Run three pages through Google's Rich Results Test. Does it find structured data? - Open your robots.txt. Are AI search crawlers allowed? - Ask two or three AI assistants to plan a weekend in your town. Which places do they name? Do they cite your site? - Write down what you found, with the date, and check again each quarter. From Hiveway, the people who wrote this guide ## How Hiveway handles this Every place worth visiting, every event and every itinerary is its own page, with structured data and a markdown twin, and the text is in the page when it loads. Partners keep their own listings up to date, and your visitor events calendar takes public submissions you approve. Hiveway for Destinations is $999 a month. Hiveway is in its founding season: the two of us are building it now with our first chamber, and taking applications from founding chambers and destinations. If that sounds like you, [apply here](https://hiveway.org/apply). ## Questions, answered plainly. ### How many travelers use AI to plan trips? Deloitte's 2026 summer travel survey found 25% of Americans used AI to plan travel, up from 15% in 2025. Millennials used it most, at 36%. ### How do we get our town recommended by AI? Give AI something to read: a page for every attraction, event and itinerary, with the facts in plain text, structured data that matches it, and crawlers allowed in. Then check what AI tools say about your town each quarter. ### Does a PDF visitor guide help with AI? Not much. Web pages are much easier for machines to read and link to. Turn the guide's best content into pages. ### Do we need an llms.txt file or markdown pages? Google says it needs no special files. Some other AI tools read plain-text copies of pages, so they can help, but readable pages with structured data come first. ## Sources, checked October 2026 1. [Deloitte: 2026 Summer Travel Survey press release](https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/about/press-room/deloitte-as-rising-costs-slow-summer-travel-to-six-year-low-travelers-plan-to-spend-more.html) 2. [Google: Sundar Pichai's I/O 2026 keynote](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/sundar-pichai-io-2026/) · AI Overviews and AI Mode users 3. [Vercel: the rise of the AI crawler](https://vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler) · December 2024 4. [OpenAI: overview of OpenAI crawlers](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots) 5. [Google Search Central: AI features and your website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) 6. [Schema.org: TouristAttraction](https://schema.org/TouristAttraction) 7. [Schema.org: Event](https://schema.org/Event) 8. [Schema.org: LocalBusiness](https://schema.org/LocalBusiness) 9. [Schema.org: TouristTrip](https://schema.org/TouristTrip) 10. [Google: Rich Results Test](https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) Related: [How to run a public events calendar without spam](https://hiveway.org/guides/run-a-public-events-calendar-without-spam) · [How much does a DMO website cost?](https://hiveway.org/guides/how-much-does-a-dmo-website-cost) · [AI search and your chamber directory](https://hiveway.org/guides/ai-search-and-your-chamber-directory) · [All guides](https://hiveway.org/guides) ## Get your whole town found. Tell us about your town, your partners and what your visitor site needs to do. One of us reads every application and writes back by email. [Apply as a Destination](https://hiveway.org/apply?type=destination) · [More Guides](https://hiveway.org/guides) Source: https://hiveway.org/guides/get-your-town-into-ai-trip-planning