For thirty years, if a visitor to your town wanted to know what to see, they stopped at the tourist information desk, opened a paper map, or asked at the hotel front desk. Increasingly, they do something else first: before they have even booked a train ticket, they ask an AI assistant on their phone — “what’s worth seeing in this town, and how do I get there?” — the same way they would once have asked a concierge.
A concierge that has read everything, and forgets nothing
Think of that assistant as a new concierge who has read an enormous number of guidebooks, town records and museum websites, and remembers all of it. Like any concierge, it can only recommend what it has actually read. Nobody needs to understand how it does this any more than a hotel guest needs to understand how their concierge learned the town — only that it is already being asked, by real people, before they arrive.
And here is the part most owners never realise: it doesn’t read the way a human does. A beautifully written website, all flowing prose with no facts laid out plainly — opening hours, address, what makes the place unique — is a little like a museum placard written only in a language your visitor doesn’t read. The information is there, honestly and correctly. It is simply invisible to the person standing in front of it.
The placard in a language your visitor doesn’t read
Every heritage manager already understands this problem from the physical side. A fresco described beautifully in Italian tells a Japanese visitor nothing at all, no matter how well it is written, unless the label is also given in a form that visitor can actually read. Nobody considers this a failure of the fresco. It is simply a mismatch between how the information is presented and how the visitor in front of it is able to receive it.
AI assistants create exactly the same mismatch, just with a different kind of “language”. They are very good at finding plain facts stated clearly — an address, an opening time, one sentence about what makes a place different — and comparatively poor at extracting the same facts from long, elegant paragraphs that never quite state them directly. A page can be completely honest and well written, and still be effectively unreadable to the system that is now, more and more often, doing the recommending.
What actually helps a place get “read” properly
This does not require an owner to learn anything technical. It requires the same discipline as a well-organised library catalogue: a book might be wonderful, but a librarian can only find it for a reader if its card states the title, the author and the subject clearly, rather than leaving the browser to guess from the cover. A heritage listing works the same way — clear facts, stated plainly, are what let both a human visitor and an AI assistant find and trust it.
A free, editorially built listing does this by design, the same way a well-kept catalogue card does: the facts about a place are recorded in a form that is legible to a reader who has never been there, human or otherwise, without the owner needing to know anything about how that reading happens.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to understand how AI works to benefit from this?
No. The same way a concierge does not need to be interrogated about their training, an owner does not need to understand the mechanism — only that clearly stated facts are what gets read and recommended.
Does a well-written website already solve this?
Not automatically. Elegant prose and clearly stated facts are not the same thing; a page can have both, or either, or neither.
Is this only relevant to large attractions AI would already know about?
No — the smaller and less documented a place is, the more it depends on being stated clearly somewhere, since there is less other material for an assistant to have “read” about it.
What is the simplest first step?
A free, editorially verified listing that states the basic facts plainly — what the place is, where it is, what makes it distinct — is enough to be legible to both visitors and AI assistants.
Where to start
Cultural Heritage Online lists heritage places, tours and cultural associations across Europe free of charge, built from clearly stated facts rather than self-description. If you organise tours, walks or events, the organiser page explains what is included, or you can simply write to the editorial team and ask.
Sources
- Cultural Heritage Online, About — growth and readership figures
- Cultural Heritage Online, Press page
- Photo: Fred Cherrygarden, Hotel Central – Concierge, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
