Kreutz & Partner
Innovation and strategy consulting. Where I learned to frame problems and read how a business actually makes money.
Visit Kreutz & Partner ↗
GEO & AI visibility · design-led hospitality
Travelers now ask AI where to stay. Make sure it says your name.
When someone asks AI where to stay, it names a few places and skips the rest. I help design-led hotels, villas and brands become one of the few, by structuring what makes you worth recommending so generative search can actually read it.
A beachfront resort
Another villa nearby
structured ✓
Citra · Kuta Mandalika
This is what GEO does: it turns a property from an unnamed also-ran into the one the answer actually recommends.
The shift
Search just changed its front door.
Travelers used to get a page of links and choose for themselves. Now they ask, and the AI chooses for them, naming a few places, not fifty. Search gave you a ranked list; being #8 still meant being seen. There is no #8 in an answer. You're named, or you're not in the conversation. And here's the cruel part for independents: AI leans on what other sources say about you (press, "best of" lists, OTA listings) far more than on your own website. That favors big, well-documented brands. The design-led places with the best actual stays are often the thinnest on those signals. Worth recommending, just not built to be found.
67%
of travelers already use AI somewhere in planning a trip
Booking.com, 2025
2 in 3
hotels are never named in AI answers, even in small markets
Lighthouse, 2026
57%
of London's AI hotel picks went to just five hotels
LuxDirect, 2026
These come from early industry studies, not settled science. The field is that new. But they point the same way, and so do controlled academic audits: AI names a few, and skips the rest.
What I do
Start with one honest question. Then a system that answers it.
It begins with the uncomfortable question, does AI name you today? From there it becomes one system, built in order. Each layer makes the next one work.
Start here · the entry point
The AI Visibility Audit
Before any work, we measure where you actually stand: whether AI tools name you, who they recommend instead, and which signals are costing you the mention, all against your real competitive set. You get a clear baseline. It's the lowest-regret first step, and usually the most revealing.
01
Data structure
Structure
A clean, machine-readable foundation: schema, entities and listing accuracy across your own site, OTAs and directories. Those listings are what AI checks to verify what it already thinks it knows. When they're stale or inconsistent, you read as ambiguous, and ambiguous loses.
02
GEO strategy & content
Surface
We earn the signals AI actually weighs. Around 8 in 10 sources it leans on are editorial features, "best of" lists and OTA pages, so we treat press and placement as distribution, not decoration. And we rewrite your content the way the research shows works: clear, evidenced, specific. Not keyword-stuffed, because that does nothing.
03
Content automation
Sustain
A content engine that keeps the story fed: seasonal, on-brand, consistent, without a marketing department. Runs on your own infrastructure, GDPR-compliant.
From invisible to your name in the answer.
GEO is still early. What works today can shift as the models change. Controlled studies show visibility gains of up to about 40%. That's a benchmark, not a promise. The moves above hold up regardless, because they improve the signals any future engine is likely to rely on.
Track record
A strategist who has actually built the thing.
My background runs from framing problems to running brands, so the visibility work is grounded in how a business actually makes money, not just tactics.
Hijack Sandals
European distribution for a design-led Indonesian brand: brand-building, outreach and market entry, hands on.
See Hijack Sandals ↗Citra Villas
My own design-led hospitality project in Lombok, and the live testbed for everything here. The visibility system I sell, I run on my own brand first.
Visit Citra ↗Most GEO offers sell you a dashboard. I think brand-first, because making a place worth recommending comes before making it findable.
Who it's for
Built for places and brands worth recommending.
Boutique hotels & villas
Independent, design-led stays that win on character, not scale.
Design-led groups
Small hospitality groups that need consistent visibility across properties.
Design & lifestyle brands
Product brands that want to be the one AI names in their category.
The research
Want the full picture? I wrote it down.
I pulled together where AI-driven travel discovery actually stands: the data, the mechanisms, and the honest open questions, drawing on industry studies and peer-reviewed work from 2023–2026. No gate, no email wall. Read it, pressure-test it, then bring me your hardest question.
Questions
What people ask first.
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
GEO is the practice of structuring and positioning your content so AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini name and recommend you when people ask questions in your category. It's the AI-era counterpart to SEO: instead of optimizing for ranked links, you optimize for being named inside a generated answer.
Why does GEO matter for hotels and design brands specifically?
When AI answers a travel question, it names a few properties, not fifty. One audit of 4,545 ChatGPT prompts surfaced only a small recommended core, with roughly two-thirds of hotels never mentioned even in small markets (Lighthouse, 2026). And the bias runs toward scale and star rating, not guest satisfaction: review scores barely predicted visibility. That leaves independent and design-led properties most likely to be skipped, before a guest ever reaches your website.
How is this different from traditional SEO?
SEO optimizes for ranked links on a results page. GEO optimizes for being named inside a generated answer. They share fundamentals like clean structure and trustworthy content, but GEO adds entity definition, structured data, and presence in the third-party sources AI engines trust. Around 8 in 10 of those sources are editorial features and OTA listings, not your own site.
Does this actually work, and how do you measure it?
Honestly, it's early. The foundational research shows GEO tactics lifting visibility by up to about 40%, but that figure comes from non-travel benchmarks, and measurement in this field is still immature. So I measure directly: I track whether AI names you, against a defined set of competitors, before and after the work. I'd rather show you movement than promise a number.
Do you only work with hospitality?
Hospitality, meaning boutique hotels, villas and design-led stays, is the focus. I also work with design-led lifestyle and consumer brands, where the same logic applies to product discovery.
Are your content automations GDPR-compliant?
Yes. I build on tooling that can run on your own infrastructure (e.g. self-hosted n8n), so your data stays under your control.
Where are you based?
Cologne, Germany. I work with clients across the DACH region and internationally, remotely.
Let's talk
Let's see where you stand in AI answers.
The audit shows whether AI tools name you today, who they recommend instead, and what's costing you the mention. No guesswork, no urgency theatre, just where you actually stand. That's the place to start.