What my Airbnb website taught me about AI legibility

Part of the fun of Airbnb-ing my upstate house is that it occasionally offers some unexpected learnings for my AI comms consulting biz…for example, the house has a website I built last month. No backlinks, no authority, so it doesn’t rank in Google.

In its first eighteen days, ChatGPT sent it about 12x as many visits as Google Search.

That’s a small sample over a short period, but it’s interesting because SEO ranking requires authority, and authority takes years to build. AI legibility is available right away: clear facts, real pricing, and an FAQ page written in an actual guest’s language rather than mine.

One mistake I learned from. The geolocation in my schema markup was three miles off, so every drive time on the site’s area guide was off, too. When your own site contradicts what other sources say about you, the assistant has to pick, and it often picks against you.

That’s conflict resolution, and it erodes AI trust in your site (conflicting info reads as suspect/ambiguity).

The numbers are probably understated, too. AI answers that don’t produce a click leave no trace at all, which is exactly the case for auditing.