The March 25, 2026 episode of MC Fireside Chats, hosted by Brian Searl of Insider Perks and Modern Campground, featured Peter Pilarski, founder of the Tourism AI Network and CIPR Communications, alongside Mike Lee, the solo developer and owner of the Campsite Tonight app. The conversation centered on how AI and evolving technology are reshaping discovery, marketing, and commerce for campground owners and tourism operators.

Peter Pilarski introduced the concept of "digital authority," describing it as the convergence of traditional PR and digital marketing into a single discipline aimed at making tourism businesses the definitive, trustworthy answer across both human searches and AI-driven queries. He emphasized that websites need to expand beyond marketing fluff and instead focus on answering real, specific questions travelers ask — everything from campsite amenities to nearby attractions — and that this content must be structured with tools like schema markup and FAQ sections so AI systems can easily parse and surface it. He also stressed the importance of entity consistency, meaning that a business's core identity and claims should be uniform across every digital touchpoint, from Google Business Profile to LinkedIn to press releases, so that AI tools and search engines build a coherent picture of who you are.

Mike Lee shared his perspective as a tech entrepreneur building Campsite Tonight, an app that aggregates campsite availability across dozens of fragmented public and private sources in the US and offers a premium feature that monitors for cancellations at high-demand locations like national parks, placing open sites into users' carts. He pushed back gently on the idea that consumers are ready to let AI handle purchasing decisions for camping, noting that campers tend to have highly specific, individualized preferences — proximity to bathrooms, shade, particular site numbers — that make fully agentic booking difficult in the near term. He did, however, validate the importance of structured data, sharing that when he reformatted about 40 to 50 of his website pages to present historical cancellation statistics and availability trends in a machine-readable way, his Google search impressions tripled without any other changes.

Brian Searl wove the discussion together, raising the point that much of the detailed campsite information campground owners possess is currently buried behind JavaScript-heavy booking engines that AI tools cannot read, making it invisible to anyone searching through ChatGPT or similar platforms. He also explored the tension between bot detection and the coming wave of personal AI agents acting on behalf of consumers, questioning where businesses and public lands should draw the line between blocking automated behavior and accommodating legitimate agent-driven browsing. He noted that the interface for tools like Campsite Tonight may evolve — potentially piping data into conversational AI platforms or wearable devices — even if the underlying business model remains strong.

The three speakers converged on several practical takeaways for small business owners feeling overwhelmed. Peter recommended starting with a fully updated Google Business Profile, treating it like a social media account with frequent photo uploads and current information, then moving to enriching website content with specific, verifiable details and structured data. Mike advised campground owners to identify their single biggest problem — whether it's on-site experience or discovery — and focus energy there rather than trying to do everything at once. Both guests and Brian agreed that the businesses most likely to thrive are those that do genuinely good work, communicate transparently about what they offer, and make that information easy for both humans and machines to find and trust.

The intro? No? Oh well it stuttered on my end. Everybody was saying it was stuttered on their end, so. Anyway, maybe it'll just fix itself and I have an excuse to not do my job.

So, welcome everybody. We're excited to have another fourth week episode here of MC Fireside Chats. This is the week where we talk about all things AI and technology.

We have a couple guests with us today. Peter Pilarski, I'm gonna let him introduce himself in a second. And Mike, who I don't know your last name from Campsite Tonight. What's your last name, Mike?

[00:01:27] Brian Searl: Mike. Well that's even easier. I think I can remember Mike Lee without it being displayed in front of me. Hopefully I'm not that old. But briefly gentlemen, do you wanna introduce yourselves? Peter, do you wanna start?

So I can unpack that in a little bit, but so really AI adoption and digital authority, those are my two, my two games that I play every day.

[00:02:19] Mike Lee: Sure. I'm a tech worker turned entrepreneur. And so I am the solo developer, owner, camper, advocate for a mobile app called Campsite Tonight. It primarily operates in the US and focuses on two things.

One is aggregating availability across numerous sources. As many of you probably know, availability is very fragmented from various public entities, private entities. And so I do a good job of trying to aggregate that.

And then the feature that, you know, most of my premium users love is something called add to cart. And so I'll monitor for cancellations and then I will put it into your cart so you can check out.

Don't check out for you, but that's, that's been incredibly helpful for folks who are trying to visit the US National Parks, which are perennially sold out. And the cancellations are hard to actually pick up unless you're attached to your phone, which many of us are, but you really need to be attached to it.

Is that like the Silicon Valley house where you guys all build your tech products all together? Or is that just a generic Google Meet background that I'm making a bad joke about?

[00:03:35] Brian Searl: Is it really? I didn't even know that. Okay.

[00:03:38] Brian Searl: That's why everybody uses it then. Okay.

All right. Yeah, everybody's in the nice house with the pool and I'm like, I haven't made it to the pool yet. I don't know what I'm doing wrong in my life, but. So, okay. So let's start with you, Peter. Let's briefly talk about what you, just tell us what you do. Let me give you a softball.

And what that means is either helping people just learn about AI tools and understand how to implement them in their businesses to building AI strategies, to building custom AI solutions. So just depending on kind of the need of the company and the size of the company.

And then on my marketing agency side, it's really what I call digital authority. And so, you know, what I'll say is I started off as a PR agency. I've been running a PR agency from day one. We eventually added digital marketing to our PR agency.

And kind of we're in this interesting full circle moment where all of a sudden PR is important again, even though it always was important. And so it's kind of funny timing, but for me it's like digital marketing and PR, you bring those things together and it's really about digital authority.

And really, making tourism, either destinations or tourism operators, really the authorities, in their industries, obviously digitally so that they're, so that they're basically, it's whether you're doing Google search or you're searching through AI tools or you're, you know, whatever way you're looking for information about that destination or about that, about that operator, they're basically being, they're they're what's being served up and what's being recommended.

So to me that's kind of what digital authority is, it's really PR and digital marketing kind of brought together into one discipline.

And here's where I, I, take it from and I'm not saying this is your opinion, this is mine, right? Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But like, I view it as, as authority is the single source of what you need to be working on for the next, well, however long this, whatever we're going into, excuse me, sorry. Because like, you're you're nearing a future now depending on the survey you look at 40, 50, 60%, 40, 50% of website traffic is all bots already. Some regular bots, some Google search, some ChatGPT searching from ChatGPT, some agents browsing websites. But by all intents and accounts, that's probably gonna be at least 55, 60% by the end of the year and only climb from there, depending on who you believe.

And then at that point, the button design and the curves and the call to action you're agonizing over for 18 hours in your meeting doesn't matter anymore. It collapses into authority, which shows in AI systems, which causes you to be the answer to more questions, and then causes people to consider you to purchase or uses as a travel planner or whatever your business is, right?

So to me authority is also, you know, what are people saying about you off your website. So that's your Reddit posts or, you know, do you have editorial content i.e. are you being published by newspapers or magazines or third-party, you know, credible third-party sites, right?

To me, authority is a lot of things beyond just your website. But obviously you have to also have the content on your website that proves that you're the authority on the topic on whatever whatever you know, your piece of the world is, right? And you have all of the answers in your content that the AI systems and the humans are looking for.

Right, right? So essentially we're we're away from this old SEO game of just writing content and writing content. Now we're answering questions. And then now we're also making sure we're credible businesses so that when the AI systems search us, they they're saying yeah these these are really good answers from a really credible organization. So to me all of that makes up digital authority.

And so I think it's fair to say that most people who are watching and have a campground business in some form or fashion, some terrible and some good, maybe more terrible than good. have some form of a website presence and some form of a social media presence.

And so as you look at the future of, let's start with websites first. Do websites need to expand or do they need to contract or how to, what does the future of a website look like in Peter's mind?

But it might be beyond just your campground. So it might be your campground and the immediate I don't know, 30 kilometer radius, so maybe the fishing and the lakes and the whatever you know, whatever kind of is part of your campground experience. And so to me the website has to be the authority on everything related to that at your level, right? And so that's kind of in my opinion where the websites are gonna go. But in addition to that, the website also needs to be searchable by AI tools. And so there's a lot of we can unpack that, there's a lot of technical things that have to happen. It has to be easily understood, indexed easily by AI tools. and and eventually it has to also be able to do the transaction itself, right? And has to be be able to kind of work with and and and connect with other AI tools because we're gonna get to a point where the humans are not even gonna be involved anymore.

[00:09:48] Peter Pilarski: Sorry?

[00:09:52] Peter Pilarski: Yeah, yeah, things like that, yeah. Not there yet, but coming.

[00:10:06] Peter Pilarski: It's coming.

[00:10:15] Mike Lee: Yeah, please Mike. Brian, can I pop in?

[00:10:18] Mike Lee: You know what's funny is I've spent a lot of time talking to campers and at least for me, I I don't believe they're looking to buy through AI. And maybe that's because it hasn't become good enough, but...

[00:10:34] Mike Lee: I certainly mean buy. Discover, I think they they love AI and they'd love to have help, but you know, buy, they love to be specific.

And what I mean by that is some users want to be close to the bathroom, some people want to be under trees, some people want to have site ABC. Some people don't want those sites. And the criteria in which they are trying to decide what they want seems to differ, you know, quite a lot from camper to camper. I haven't found much standardization.

And so for me I've just gone kind of the opposite path and just saying, hey, I'll give you power users who love to go camping like as many choices as possible. So you can control your own destiny. I did originally think that hey, you know what, people are just looking for ease. I wanna go camping here, help me go. But that wasn't actually enough. They wanted to have much more control and, you know, they wanted to look at photos, they wanted to have a better understanding without being beholden to something doing it for them.

[00:11:58] Peter Pilarski: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I, and and so first of all Mike, I agree with you as well. I I I'm I'm probably talking about more of a future state in terms of like the AI tools aren't there from a commerce perspective and a buying perspective. Society's not there yet, but that's where it's gonna go. I think it's just a matter of time.

But what I'm saying is your point exactly, Mike, in what you're saying there is exactly the point is so, you know, I wanna be under a tree in the shade next to the bathroom. All of that is content that needs to sort of live on the website or be there for the for the AI to help people discover that information or the context or and for the human.

So when I say the website, you know, we need to kind of expand our websites, it's actually for both the human and the AI. So it's really we need to just answer people's questions. So if people have a lot of very specific things they want, we need to provide them with the information so that they can make a a very nuanced decision based on their preferences and what they want.

And I think that's what's missing currently. You know, we write all these content about, I don't know, top 10 things to do here and all this kind of like fluff content, where it's really people want the specific information about this campground or this campsite or this, right? What am I, how am I gonna plan my day if I'm over here and I'm gonna spend three day or three days over in this in this campground, what am I gonna do, right? So I think that's kind of you know, we're getting away from that short form sort of keyword to much more nuanced longer form, you know, type questions 'cause we can ask our AIs all of that now.

So when you're searching in ChatGPT alone, it's for one that's not using agentic tools right now, it's not filling out a date picker to get that information. So many campground owners are burying their pull through, back in, patio site, furniture, 50 amp, 30 amp, has wifi, doesn't, all behind that booking engine that the AI can't read.

So when someone asks, hey I wanna go camping near Austin, Texas or Calgary, Alberta, and I want a site that's under $70 a night, that's pull through, it has no idea that you offer that because it's not on your website anywhere. It's on your booking engine.

[00:14:34] Brian Searl: Which I think is a better world honestly, like I was kinda sick of the content fluff game from a marketing perspective. So.

[00:14:42] Brian Searl: Alright, so we've unpacked websites, but and how does that impact people like Mike? Like so Mike's running Campsite Tonight, do we have any data or evidence on how AI is treating apps or discovering apps or can it dig deep into apps or do you have anything, I, I don't, do you have anything on that Peter or Mike that you know?

[00:15:08] Mike Lee: Yeah, I mean before I fully jump into it, what I'd kind of say is like if you're if you come from the other side, you're either Google or you're these AI machines, the thing that Peter is saying is very crucial but I'd call it out differently, which is you want to make sure they can easily digest the information.

And what I mean by this is like actually writing a blog post or writing some of these things isn't easily digestible for the machines. It actually needs to be in a very specific structured format. Otherwise they're not going to take it.

And the reason why they're not gonna take it is largely I think although camping is popular, the long tail of campgrounds is very large and so they're not going to spend all this excess compute effort to tweeze out the details from a blog post. Or to tweeze out something from a web page that's not structured in a way for the machine to read easily.

Now if it's structured in a way for the machine to read easily, they'll read it all day long. Because it's essentially just teed up for them. And I think that's really crucial and Brian you kinda touched on that earlier talking about how the data is hidden behind, but even if the data's not hidden behind it, it it just needs to be teed up 'cause these companies are not IT.

Like we're creating these plans for campgrounds now where we're creating individual like amenities pages. A page on your playground that describes your playground. And we have clients emailing us back like, this is too dense, nobody's going to read this. I'm like, look at your heat mapping, 78% of people don't scroll past your hero image. So we can win both ways, right? So go ahead, Mike.

And so you know if you're in Austin, Texas and you have a I don't know a lazy river because you're a humongous you know RV campground, like trying to play that up in the right way I think will will go much farther than trying to just even structure the data as I just talked about.

Because that's not necessarily gonna distinguish you from some other player. I think it's going to be really important to distinguish you and you know again having those data points and questions in a structured way for, you know, AI and Google to consume.

And so at some point, right? You're gonna get these agents that go out on behalf of, and Peter I'm just gonna give you a seven-year-old daughter. I don't know if you have one but I'm gonna give you one for my example. So Peter has a seven-year-old daughter who loves playgrounds. Time to book the camping trip, whether you do that or the agent reaches out to you proactively in the future.

Goes to research campgrounds, we'll just use Austin 'cause we've been talking about it, finds an amenities page with 20 bullet points, one's a campground, check, little girl's happy.

Goes to the competitor website, that has a dedicated playground page that's fleshed out more as you talk about Mike, with more details and information and has the photos of the playground and says I have a plastic slide instead of a metal slide so your kid's butt won't get burned on an 80 degree Texas day and if they fall off the teeter-totter it's mulch and we have two swings and here's some activities that people can do on our little merry-go-round thing.

Where do you think the AI is gonna pick for that little girl?

[00:19:28] Mike Lee: I think it's, it depends on all the other pieces of information held equal. So you know, an example would be that if you looked at Google reviews and one is a three and a half and one is a four and a half, that's a pretty big difference. So it doesn't matter how great your playground structure data is if you're not providing the service, I think that's that's what's still crucial.

Is like at the end of the day, every brand in the world needs to just do good work and communicate well about the good work that they do. And then you know really have their reputation sort of take do the heavy lifting right? So to Mike's point it's like if you have a if you have a four and a half star Google rating and you know 300 reviews and recency in your reviews and people are talking positively about you that's gonna have a massive impact on those AI tools basically refer you instead of instead of your competitor and and and recency matters...

And so like what I kind of tell my clients all the time is like, it doesn't really matter what you say about yourself. What matters is actually what people say about you and what people believe about you. Now you still have to do the work and have the right content and have all of the information and have it fleshed out and have it structured properly.

So a couple things that we recommend to people on their websites is you know, the Q&A shouldn't just be a Q&A page somewhere on your website. There should be a Q&A on every page of your website that's relevant to the section, you know, whatever content is on that website, right? So again, we're building out FAQs more than we have, almost everything needs an FAQ at the bottom.

Schema markup, Mike brought up structured data, super important. A lot of platforms do it somewhat well natively, some not at all, so you have to really understand it's not the sexy fun creative stuff, but the technical part of a website matters a lot. For humans, yes, but almost even more now for these AI agents to be able to actually easily just, you know, sort out what they want to know and and it all comes down to just having a great user experience.

And then ultimately just being a good company that does good work that people will talk about. So what's cool about this for me if I think about tourism and campgrounds and everything else is hopefully the AI tools can help the operators spend less time in front of their computers and more time providing great experiences in wow moments, which actually will help that reputation and actually will probably lead to better results in reviews, which will actually lead to them becoming more referenced by Google and AI tools the like right? So it's sort of this kind of whole full circle piece to me.

[00:22:06] Peter Pilarski: I hope so. That's my my hope out of all of this, yeah.

[00:22:25] Mike Lee: So certainly with AI discovery I think again you have to find your edge. Is I think where where I view it and my edge is really from a data background and so you know if you look at one of my website pages that I fleshed out and built.

I push, you know, a lot of I'd say ideally helpful information for serious campers that want to go to National Parks or very popular parks. It won't just tell you like here's what we have, here's what's there, here's what people do.

It'll tell you hey you wanna go in July, you don't have a spot. Historically here's how many spots were re-reserved less than seven days before checking in July. Here's how many were done in two weeks before, here's how many were done you know a month before. Do you wanna look in August? Do you want to look in June? This is what I'll give you. And I can split it by a site type and all these different dimensions, you know site length, and then that way you know what people get is hey, what's my chance to go? Because particularly for some of these in-demand places they're their supply is far exceeded by demand.

And so you know there are always cancellations and if you don't know that or you don't feel confident about it this will help get you there. And so you know again I take that data, I structure it in a way for AI to use and I'd say that like when I made some of these pages and I probably updated about 40 or 50 I saw my search impression traffic from Google triple.

It was nothing. I did no different things other than, you know, present the data and restructure in a way for Google to consume and use. And then now it shows up more in, you know, review snippets, it shows up more in just general search results. And all of these things I think are the things that you can do as you think about, you know again, how AI will help you with your discovery.

Now, I would switch gears and say like you know we did talk a little bit about AI and like agentic buying. You know again I think these things are all fine when competitive dynamics are not too high. sure Peter, you know, you live in Canada, I thought you said Calgary. I'm very positive that the National Parks in the summer going to Canada are supremely competitive. And so agentic buying actually won't help you unless you're, you know, trying to pick up a cancellation...

[00:25:30] Mike Lee: I mean largely that's what my app does.

[00:25:33] Mike Lee: For the US National Parks. There is a lot of different complexities there. But but checking is only part of the thing, right? And again you know we're talking about picking up a cancellation. That's a little bit different than booking in real time because in real time when the sites are released you're talking about hundreds or maybe thousands of sites being booked in two seconds.

And you know, as AI and people's bots and that type of stuff get better and better, so does detection. And so you know the host site isn't gonna just let you run an API call or run some type of automated looking bucket. It's gonna say, well you know, I haven't seen this this Brian's account login like this before ever. This seems strange. Brian has accessed my website 54 times in two months and this one looks nothing like the other 54. I'm not gonna let it through. And so you know...

[00:26:41] Mike Lee: I think that'll get particularly tough particularly for public lands, because public lands are very different than private land. Private land I don't think people will mind minus even if you create some kind of turn style feature where people come in first come first serve. But public land has a little bit of a different um service that they have to provide. They can't really provide a pay to play service. That's not in their, you know, mandate I'd say.

But that's fine. Like I wanna be in the open source models, so I don't block it. But then the question becomes is, you're right, they can block some of these headless browsers, but if I'm an agent using real Chrome on your computer, how do you block that and call that a bot? Is the interesting thing.

[00:28:16] Brian Searl: Like I I don't know that you can. You're right, you can flag the pattern, but that have to be a really aggressive delicate balance pattern to make sure you're not blocking an actual user. Because eventually everybody's gonna have these agents working on their behalf. And we know that the government is, well they took 15 years to regulate Facebook and they still haven't done it properly. Right? So I I agree with you, Mike. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that it's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out.

And you know what you are seeing is like at Olympic National Park, there's a few campgrounds that are just staggered, you know, so one third of the sites get released six months in advance. You know, one third of the sites get released one month in advance, and one third of the sites get released two weeks in advance. And that's you know, again aimed to fulfill their mandate of making sure people who want to go can go. Because not everybody can either plan so far in advance or not everybody can book right when it opens.

You know, I think in terms of what you're saying of, you know, agentic purchasing on device, I'd say I've spent time doing it. It's still not easy. It's not easy to guarantee success. You know what I'd probably tell you is, again, as as technology evolves to evade, the technology to, you know, prevent undesirable behavior improves too.

And so, you know, one of those things is something called reCAPTCHA. And so I think most people can be familiar with this which is if you browse a website too crazily, you get told to say like, choose a sidewalk or choose a bridge or choose a car and there's a whole bunch of these that actually also exist more silently.

And instead of asking you to choose something, they just return back this looks strange. This type of behavior. And to be honest even running some automated behavior on a local computer can get flagged like that. Because it just looks non-human. And so if their mandate is to say hey, we want to block automated behavior. It could be a real user behind it, but they're using automation and that publisher has decided, you know, I don't want to really allow that, for whatever choice they've determined.

[00:31:36] Mike Lee: I think those are, the middle is different based on the party you're talking about. I think the middle for a national park is different than the middle for a private campground owner. And so I agree, I'd be way more permissive on it as a private campground owner. In terms of national park and other items like that, I I think it's possible you may get there, but anytime I've talked to anybody from any public and Peter's probably the best person for this, public entity, that's really against their mandate. If you had said something like, hey I'm going to help underrepresented groups get access to AI tooling, maybe you have a better shot. But if you're talking about just general users, don't see that happening for a while. I think that their mandates won't change that quickly even if AI does.

[00:32:47] Mike Lee: All the all the core actions are on the app. There is some cross posting of data back to the website. More for discovery purposes.

[00:33:28] Mike Lee: You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about that and I'll I'll choose a different travel parallel if that's okay.

[00:33:35] Mike Lee: So you know, if you had been buying plane tickets on the internet for a while, there was a period of time where you really probably went to Kayak first, and you went to other websites later to search for prices because the prices weren't all unified for you so if you wanted to check, you know, Air Canada's price, you wanted to check WestJet's price, you wanted to check, you know, United's price, they just weren't all in one place. And so as a user it wasn't convenient for you.

And so for me I think on Campsite Tonight it will continue to be okay one because I don't think camping is a large enough vertical that the machines will spend enough time on and energy to make agentic buying as easy as possible. And I think second, for a lot of that to change, we'd have to go to a different non-fragmented or some type of unified availability system that I just can't see happening.

If you look inside the US, and I'll just take where I live, which is near San Fran or in San Francisco. There's 100 campgrounds within 100 miles. That inventory is spread across 50 websites.

[00:34:53] Mike Lee: Largely due to private campgrounds. But like even if you look at public ones, within about a 100 miles from me, there's I think five different county websites for five different counties. There's a state, and there's federal. If if I believed that all those systems would push inventory into a singular unified place for the user to benefit, yeah, I think I'll run into a lot of trouble. But do I think that six different government entities would align on something like this? It just seems unlikely.

[00:36:07] Mike Lee: Yeah, I mean I think that's totally possible. I I have looked into, you know, making connectors for ChatGPT. But you know, I think the other issue is I could provide the supply, but if the demand isn't there at the moment, it doesn't really matter.

[00:36:30] Mike Lee: Yeah.

[00:36:35] Peter Pilarski: Yeah, I mean it's an interesting conversation. So first of all, you know, I'll just talk to some changes Google made recently, which are kind of interesting in the sense of much more focused on benefiting kind of local businesses. so they've made a couple changes recently that have kind of taken the power a little bit away from the websites and I'm not saying talking specifically about Campsite Tonight, but I'm talking more of the Expedias and those types of guys out there. So and so they obviously they added their core update in December which is prioritizing local first content over aggregators, and then they did a discovery update which is prioritized regional storytelling and feeds, and then obviously the real world data, which is maps and business profiles. So what I see happening here is Google's under threat for the first time in a long time. And so Google is looking at their assets and saying, what do we need to change in our text stack and our app, like how do we leverage the assets and what we have that makes us unique. And I think there's a lot that Google has, maps and Google business profiles and other things that make Google very unique. And so you know they're prioritizing that local first content and so I think that matters a lot for tourism. I think that matters a lot for campsites and it kind of goes back to the conversation we started with is that at the end of the day we don't know what's gonna change out there and who's gonna win this game.

At the end of the day, if I'm a business owner and I need to think about basically how do I make sure that I'm answering all the questions and and again we're talking about technology and making sure we're set up for a success for technology to find us. But at the end of the day, if we do this well for technology, we do this well for humans as well, right?

So you know, what are the common questions I I get asked? What what are the details that people are looking for? Back to Mike's point about I wanna camp under a tree next to the river and away from the toilet. It's like, okay, well how do we structure our data and our information to make that information available to people so we can actually answer people's questions and give them what they want?

I think if we do that well as business owners we will succeed for our humans and we will succeed for our AI tools. We will succeed for Google, et cetera, et cetera, right? So you know, I think kind of... Again it's sort of this like it's like a full circle moment for me in terms of just being a good business and answering and and and giving people what they're looking for and not sort of hiding information unnecessarily making it as transparent as possible. That's, that's the, that's the path forward no matter what.

I've got a website designer but I don't know what they do. I don't know what SEO actually means to them. Whether that's a plugin that they've ignored for three years or, right? So where do I start? Because what I tell my clients is like after you talk or the prospective clients I talk to, is after you talk to me go to ChatGPT and ask if Brian is full of shit. Right? 'Cause you can now. But where do they start?

But you know I'm gonna go back to Google still matters a lot and fundamentally people still use Google. So I if, you know, if I had limited budget, limited time I would start actually with making sure my Google properties are up to date. So Google business profile super important right?

So Google is prioritizing that again. So making sure your Google business profile is 100% full out, it's accurate, has all the information is up to date, all your hours are up to date, your phone number, all that kind of stuff, right? Reviews. Getting reviews, really matters a lot. Interestingly photo velocity is starting to matter. So Google's actually prioritizing recency a lot more now and so just making sure that there's photos constantly so you know treat your Google business profile like a social media account and post often on there post content on there. Make sure everything's up to date. That's like really easy low hanging fruit and that will serve you well in the in the Google world.

We played it last week on Outwired, but we're gonna play it on this show 'cause nobody's seen it yet. So this is a little promo video from Google about their new Maps feature which is relevant to all the campground owners and tourism operators too. Go ahead.

So I think that hits to the heart of a little bit of what you were talking about Peter like the the number of reviews like this is we're gonna get we talked about website but number one updating Google Maps because that single sort of truth is gonna pull from the more reviews you get the more people talk about you the more photos you have the more the AI is gonna either structure data, extract all that stuff or eventually see it right?

So back to I love Mike I love Mike's sort of early example of I wanna campground under the tree away from the bathroom next to the river or whatever it's like it's like well that information has to somehow exist somewhere digitally in order for somebody to be able to actually find something like that right so you know the photos the maps the details the you know all that information has to somehow be thought of in terms of how do I make that available digitally right and how do I answer questions as much as possible.

[00:43:23] Peter Pilarski: Number two is you know really I think answering questions is really on your website. I think that is the job of a website now. It's just answering questions and really restructuring your content in a way that gets into more of a Q&A and short answers and short form. But in addition to answering questions there's also some technical things you can do on your website this is getting a little technical but for example schema. So for those who don't know what schema is, schema is essentially you know directions to digital tools as to what's on your website. So you know when an AI, when an AI tool's looking for an answer to something, they're scanning a website to see if the answer exists on that website and then they might go and they might go and check reviews and third party information to see if this is a credible website and then come back.

And so making sure you have not only the the the content structured in a way that's easy for the AI tools and the humans to parse and make sense of, but also you have some instructions on the backend in your code to tell the AI tools what's actually on your website so it can scan it and make it make it easier to find. So those are I think kind of two really important things and then the other thing the other component that AIs really like and I've done a lot of AI search visibility audits recently is is specific verifiable numbers and I'm gonna give you an example.

I have a heli-skiing client who has the largest heli-skiing tenure in the world. And the largest heli-skiing tenure in the world is sort of a hard concept to get your head around a little bit other than you know it's a lot of heli-skiing area right. But when I did an AI search visibility audit, it said, oh, the AI's really quote that you have 10,100 square kilometers of heli-skiing terrain.

That's saying the same thing as the largest heli-skiing tenure in the world, but it's saying it differently and that's a very quotable verifiable number. And AI tools really quotable verifiable numbers so as much as possible is thinking about your language and what's quotable verifiable that can be consistently put across the internet as again, kind of what Mike was talking about, that's a very unique component of that business um that the AI tools will quote all day long.

And they'll quote it with largest heli-skiing tenure. And that's something that makes that business very unique. And when people are searching, they're looking for unique heli-skiing experience, well here's the largest heli-skiing tenure in the world, it's 10,100 square kilometers, right? And so that's something that will then be surfaced by the AI tools a lot.

[00:46:06] Peter Pilarski: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:46:19] Peter Pilarski: Exactly.

[00:46:28] Peter Pilarski: Yeah.

[00:46:54] Peter Pilarski: Exactly. You gotta know that stuff because this is the future of your business that you're talking about here.

[00:47:01] Peter Pilarski: I think so. And and I'll just add one more point Brian, in terms of things for people to consider what's important is I call it entity consistency. So making sure that all digital places are consistently talking about you the same way.

So back to your, you know, I'm a I'm a campground 35 kilometers from downtown Austin, Texas. That should be on your LinkedIn account, on your Facebook account, on your, you know what I mean, and like having it consistent everywhere. If you write press releases, that should be in the in the about section of your press release.

So the more places certain things are repeated that are very verifiable, the more likely then it's gonna be surfaced by the AI tools and Google and AI tools are looking kind of at the same in a very consistent way.

And I'm gonna use myself as an example of this and this a very heartbreaking example real example. And so I've I've run obviously I have Tourism AI Network really shows up well. And I have CIPR Communications. And the challenge we've had with CIPR Communications always from day one is that we started off as a general purpose marketing agency and we started specializing in tourism.

And so I did this digital authority audit on my website recently and I gave it some parameters in terms of like where I'm going and the direction and all this kind of stuff. And what it came back to and said, well, you said that you wanna specialize in tourism, but right now what I'm seeing online across all digital assets is a general purpose agency that serves tourism.

And so are you a general purpose agency that serves tourism or are you a tourism focused agency that has other clients? And it was like, that was like the fundamental question to me, which we have work to do, obviously. But that's an example of entity consistencies. Like, okay, well what are you? And what is that sort of claim in the world that you're making about you?

And that's where Mike's talking about sort of, you know, what makes you identified you know differentiated and and special. And then how do you make that consistent across the whole internet so basically that's kind of what's known about you when the search comes back.

[00:49:05] Peter Pilarski: Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Yeah.

[00:49:16] Mike Lee: So, I do have private campgrounds on there. So I'll show results from Hipcamp and Campspot if you've input dates.

[00:49:25] Mike Lee: Then I'll go fetch it for you. If you haven't input dates I won't show the result on the map. I also have some of the KOAs in the US too. Also if you put in dates. You know, I'd love to put in more, honestly, but it hasn't been the highest priority for me.

[00:49:52] Mike Lee: That's right. I mean I think I had started with discovery that's why I had brought them those various sources in, 'cause I thought, you know, I'd love to just be aware of all the possible choices. But that wasn't something people were willing to pay for. They're actually okay to do at that time discovery across many different systems, and that was okay with them.

[00:50:18] Peter Pilarski: Nicheing and being specialized helps a lot actually. As it turns out.

And so it's saying, well we're really close to Austin, like and maybe you are suggesting a bunch of things people can go do in Austin on a day trip. And those types of items that play into your strength and so it's not just, hey we've put this text everywhere, it's leaning into that and weighing that experience in and saying, you know, we're the closest and you wanna go down to South Congress? We can get you there in 25 minutes or whatever the number is.

This is, this is thinking through what Mike just said. This is thinking through the tourism versus whatever, the Austin versus kilometers. This is, and maybe you don't do this 'cause you don't have the time to do this as a campground owner, but you've got to make sure somebody is on your behalf. Which is probably gonna mean budgeting more for your website and your marketing. But I don't control the world, that's just the way the world is, right? So.

And so if I'm gonna write content around we're 35 kilometers away from or miles sorry I'm in Canada, but miles away from Austin, maybe I'm writing content pieces about, hey, we're 35 miles away from Austin and these 18 other things to do around us. And so now we're giving people sort of a bit of a, hey, you're staying at our campground, but here's all the things to do around here.

And now imagine I create partnerships with all 18 of those different providers and I have some kind of, you know, either a discount or just some kind of referral or whatever, whatever that looks like. Now all of a sudden I have a natural link on my website to this other property.

And so that's kind of what I talk about when I talk about the sort of full circle PR moment of like being a good corporate citizen and and, you know, this is the role that destination management and marketing organizations play in terms of like tying all of these pieces together. But also every individual business has these partnerships, it has these different relationships and how do we surface all of those to again provide a better user experience for people, right? Ultimately.

So that's kind of how it all comes together full circle in my mind and a lot of those things I think campground owners probably do do, but they just don't put it on their website and don't make it available to people to people.

And that's something unique because the AI is already gonna be able to connect a little bit to the fact that you're near Austin, that you're near the Natural History Museum, but the discount and the distance are unique things to that site.

And this is kind of how it all kind of comes together for them and you know maybe ultimately the booking doesn't happen on platform but they're, you know, they're at least sort of figuring out the starting point and figuring out all the connections and by creating those connections yourself you know you become the hub basically and you become the answer, right?

[00:54:36] Mike Lee: Well to find more about the app you can just go to my website campsitetonight.app, or you could probably search for Campsite Tonight and it should show up. You know, I I think the tough thing is, look I run a small business too. Trying to do everything is very very tough. so my only guidance to the campground owners would be try to think about what your biggest problem is. Right? Is your biggest problem on-site experience, is your biggest problem discovery? And then making sure you're spending the right amount of time and energy focused on improving that area. That's what I've often seen pay the most dividends. And trying to do everything isn't going to help you. Focus on the biggest needle mover.

[00:55:31] Peter Pilarski: Yeah I mean I I actually love the advice of focus as well because I think to the point of this kind there's lots of different things we talked about and it's all very technical and it's all very hard to understand.

But like you know again if you wanna if discovery is a problem or a challenge you know focusing on just your Google Business Profile and a little bit of your website will go a long way, right? Maybe focusing on the partnerships and creating experiences. So again depending on your situation, but I love the idea of focus.

I think that's really good advice 'cause for me too it gets overwhelming and I'm actually in a place now where it's like okay I know exactly which pain points I want to solve and I'm gonna put all my attention to those pain points and then I'll move on to the next one, right? Whatever that problem is, just focus on that singular thing, get it done, knock it out and then move on to the next thing.

If not, we will see you next week on another episode of MC Fireside Chats. Thank you Peter and Mike for joining us. Go download Campsite Tonight. Go check out Peter if you, do you want campground clients or PR, Peter?

[00:57:13] Brian Searl: Where do they find out more about CIPR?

[00:57:21] Brian Searl: Awesome. Thank you guys, I appreciate you. Have a great day.