What to do this week

Run ten prompts. Open ChatGPT and ask the questions your customers would ask. Don't use your brand name. See if you appear. See who does. Ten minutes will tell you more about your competitive position than any marketing report you've read this year.

View your page source. Right-click your homepage, select "View Page Source," and search for your key differentiators. If they're not there in plain text, AI can't see them. This is the most common issue we find in premium brand audits, and it's fixable.

Check your Wikipedia page. According to Ahrefs, Wikipedia is the most-cited domain in ChatGPT. If your page is outdated or nonexistent, that's a gap worth understanding.

Boost Background:

We ran 50 prompts through ChatGPT last month for a luxury hotel client in San Francisco. Questions a real traveler would ask: "best boutique hotel near Union Square," "where to stay for a weekend anniversary trip in SF," "luxury hotels with a spa in San Francisco." The client showed up in 4 out of 50. Their competitor down the street? 31 out of 50.

Both properties have beautiful websites. Both have strong reviews. Both have been in business for years. The difference had nothing to do with quality. It came down to which brand had structured its digital presence in a way AI platforms could actually read, cite, and recommend. That gap is what the zero-click economy looks like in practice.

What's actually happening:

The majority of your potential customers are getting answers without clicking through to any website. According to Semrush, nearly 60% of all Google searches now end with zero clicks. When AI Overviews appear at the top of results, Ahrefs research from February 2026 shows they reduce click-through rates for the top-ranking result by 58%. On Google's AI Mode, 93% of sessions end without anyone visiting an external site.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly users. Gemini crossed 750 million monthly actives last quarter. Perplexity grew 370% year over year. These platforms don't show ten blue links. They give one answer. Your brand is either in it or it's not part of the conversation.

Why premium brands get hit hardest:

This is counterintuitive, but the brands that invested most heavily in beautiful digital experiences are often the most invisible to AI.

A luxury hotel site built on a JavaScript framework with full-screen video and minimal text? Stunning for a human visitor. Essentially empty to an AI crawler. AI crawlers read raw HTML. They don't execute JavaScript, watch videos, or scroll. If the information isn't in the page source as clean, structured text, it doesn't exist in the AI ecosystem.

Premium brands also rely heavily on their own website to tell their story. But according to Superlines, brands are approximately 6.5 times more likely to be cited through third-party sources like Reddit and Wikipedia than through their own domains. A property with a sparse TripAdvisor profile and no Wikipedia presence but an incredible website is fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

What we've learned from client work

After months of running visibility audits across hospitality and cultural institution clients, a few patterns keep showing up.

The brands appearing in AI answers almost always have clean, text-rich pages with clear heading structures. Not the best-designed sites. Often quite simple ones. But their key information is in the HTML where any crawler can find it.

Third-party presence matters more than most brands realize. We've seen clients jump 15 points in visibility score after focusing exclusively on strengthening their citation footprint on external platforms, without touching their website at all.

And the window for early advantage is real. TakeUp's January 2026 research found that 84% of travelers say a trusted AI recommendation directly influences their booking decision, and among those who've tried AI for trip planning, 63% now use it for most or every trip. The brands that establish strong AI positions now will be significantly harder to displace as these habits become default behavior. The zero-click economy isn't coming. It's here. The question is whether your brand is part of the answer.