Getting a marine charter operator into AI answers as well as Google
A charter business whose overseas customers increasingly begin their research by asking an AI assistant rather than searching. We built a combined SEO and generative engine optimisation programme so the operator is both ranked and quoted.
Marine charter operator (name withheld)
Marine tourism
Eastern Caribbean
2026
The challenge
Almost all of the operator's customers plan from overseas, weeks or months ahead, and an increasing share were arriving with information they had been given by an AI assistant — information that named competitors and aggregators, not the operator.
The website ranked reasonably for its own brand name but poorly for the itinerary, island and season queries customers actually use, and contained almost no extractable facts: no clear pricing structure, no stated inclusions, no season or route detail in a form a machine could read.
What we did
- We began with the technical foundation: crawlability, speed, internal linking and a clean information architecture organised around itineraries and islands rather than internal departments.
- AI crawler access was made explicit in robots.txt, and an llms.txt summary of the operator, fleet, routes and contact details was published at the site root.
- Every significant page was restructured answer-first, opening with a quotable factual paragraph, followed by detail and a maintained FAQ written in the language customers use.
- Structured data was added throughout — organisation, service, offer, location and FAQ — with consistent name, address and contact details across the site and third-party listings.
- Monthly reporting now covers both conventional rankings and AI visibility, tested by putting real customer questions to ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity and recording whether the operator is named and whether the facts are correct.
Outcomes
- The operator's own facts — routes, inclusions, seasons, contact details — now published in machine-readable form rather than inferred from aggregators
- Named and described accurately in AI assistant answers to itinerary and island questions where it was previously absent
- Improved visibility for itinerary and season queries alongside brand terms
- A repeatable monthly measurement routine covering both search rankings and AI citations
- Enquiries arriving better informed, with fewer basic questions before booking
Outcomes are described qualitatively. We publish performance figures only where a client has reviewed and approved the specific numbers; named references are available on request.
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