For years, I fought to make bars and restaurants visible online — not against competitors, but against machines that didn’t understand what made them special.
Now, for the first time, the machines are finally learning to feel the difference.
My years with Donnelly Group was a slog through the organic search sandbox. Sure, I came from an SEO background, and I knew a thing or two about optimization, but I arrived in an era that saw organic search in hospitality completely throttled by big business sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor), whose authority eclipsed even the most popular and established venues.
We had a strong brand, and those searches yielded plenty of traffic, but we were losing organic traffic to sites that didn’t allow us to express the unique characteristics and experiences we were trying to offer.
The challenge was how organic search got overloaded with everybody chasing a piece of the entertainment pie – not just restaurants and bars. Soon, if you were searching for a place to go, it wasn’t the actual venue links you were clicking.
SEO – in hospitality anyway, was effectively dead. We just threw money at our keywords and abandoned the notion of at least sniffing the top of “Best Pub in Vancouver”.
Content was a massive challenge – how do you articulate a great night out in key words and interlinking? Do we add a schema for “Really Fun Bartenders”?
In a nutshell, google could never really understand an experience that somebody was after. You needed to tell it what you specifically wanted and it would find a place that had the “things” you wanted. There was not a lot of room for nuance – and frankly, people didn’t search for that.
They just got used to how Google worked, dropped “Cheap Happy Hour East Van” into a search and found locations through a listicle.
Until now.
Now, AI actually reads what you’re about, what you want to do and most importantly – what you want to experience.
You can use words like “fun” and “energy” and you will be served answers that align with the “vibe” you are after. It will summarize it into entertainment buckets and criteria for how you choose to experience a night out, be it solo, with live music or in a group setting.
Questions you used to have to dig for or just didn’t know until you arrived.
And it’s not just machines that are doing the learning, people are beginning to search differently.
The sophistication of LLMs has surprised everyone – even their creators. AI speaks to users conversationally – like it knows them, and it feels like a trustworthy confidant instead of a machine that spits out links. Users are being far more explicit and intimate in their questions, and trusting AI to go out and find something that fits them.
The problem is, very few hospitality sites have invested in developing content that plays nice with AI. Most abandoned a deep content strategy as they a) didn’t have the budget and b) didn’t see the benefit of chasing organic, so they invested their resources in managing their presence for everybody else’s websites.
This new era will allow for businesses – not just in hospitality – to express what they are really “about”, because AI reads the semantics of your presence, not just matching a key word.
It will find reviews of course, but also compare the types of events you are hosting, read the details of bookings and take a look at who is sharing and connecting with your brand. It will deliver conversational, contextual results (budget, food types), keep the answer personal to you, or serve you up the menu or specific items you might be interested in without you digging for a pdf buried in a site somewhere.
Google would never be able to understand if you were a “fun, live music venue great for couples”, because the real estate for those key terms was utilized in trying to wedge your way into the most popular search buckets.
The new thing is called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Yes, another gross acronym for us to throw on an invoice – but it’s important to understand that traditional SEO is changing, and that more than 65% of google searches are receiving an AI summary instead of a list of links.
And when that happens, the search listing CTR rate plummets by 30%.
GEO isn’t another marketing buzzword — it’s the evolution of how visibility works. Search is no longer a list of links; it’s a conversation between humans and machines about what matters.
The brands that win in this new landscape won’t be the ones that game the system, but the ones that can teach AI who they are and why they matter.
In the age of AI search, you don’t climb rankings — you earn recognition.
Damon Holowchak is a marketing strategist and creative technologist with over 20 years of experience building brands that don’t just show up online — they get talked about.
As an early adopter of search and digital strategy, Damon spent two decades helping hospitality groups, consumer brands, and tech companies grow through content, storytelling, and experience design with Super Collider Consulting, a boutique Brand Marketing agency.
But as AI began to reshape how people discover information, he saw a major gap: traditional SEO no longer explained why some brands were being cited, summarized, or ignored by AI systems.
That’s when he created Semantic Search Marketing — a consultancy focused on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the new discipline of helping brands become machine-readable, referenceable, and recommendable in the age of AI search.
Damon’s work bridges creative direction, data architecture, and AI communication. He helps organizations understand how large language models interpret their content — and how to design digital ecosystems that teach AI to trust, quote, and reference their expertise.
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