When a traveller asks ChatGPT where to eat in St Martin
AI assistants recommend island businesses every day. What makes them cite your website instead of a directory, and what you can check tonight.
A couple from Boston is planning two weeks on the island. Five years ago they would have typed "best restaurants St Martin" into Google and scrolled through TripAdvisor. Today there is a fair chance they ask an assistant instead, in plain English: "we land Tuesday in Grand-Case, looking for dinner the first night, Creole, not too touristy".
The answer names three or four places and links to them. You are in it, or you are not. And unlike a Google results page, there is no second page to console yourself with.
How do you get recommended by ChatGPT or Perplexity?
By being readable to a machine that quotes sentences. These assistants read public web pages, pull factual statements out of them and cite their sources: they repeat what is written in plain text, in the right place, and confirmed elsewhere. There is no directory to pay and no box to tick, but there is a very concrete list of reasons why your site is unreadable to them today.
What an AI cannot read on your site
A PDF menu. Or worse, a menu as a photo of a chalkboard. Your dishes, your prices, your allergens: all invisible. The machine sees a file, not a menu.
An Instagram page. A social account is not freely accessible, it changes daily and it asserts nothing stable. Nobody can read your Sunday hours off it.
A site whose text only appears after scripts run. Plenty of sites built on the big platforms only show their content once several scripts have executed. Search crawlers can sometimes cope with that; the bots feeding AI assistants are considerably less patient.
A page that takes eight seconds to answer. Shared hosting in Europe routinely takes 6 to 8 seconds to serve a page to an American visitor. A crawler with thousands of pages to get through does not wait. Our pages are served in under 2 seconds from the United States, and that requirement serves your customers first.
Answer questions instead of telling your story
An assistant answers a specific question. To be the source of that answer, your site has to contain the question and the answer that goes with it, in plain text.
In practice, every page benefits from covering word for word what customers actually ask: exactly where you are, what time you open in September, what a full day out costs, how booking works and how fast you reply, what you do that the place next door does not. Put the question in a heading, answer underneath in two or three factual sentences, then elaborate. That is the shape answer engines quote, and it happens to be the one hurried visitors read too.
The trap is drowning everything in atmosphere. "Welcome to our haven of peace in the heart of the Caribbean" answers no question and will never be quoted.
Consistency beats volume
An assistant cross-checks its sources. If your website says you close on Mondays, your Google listing says Tuesdays and your Facebook page says nothing at all, it will conclude nothing reliable, and it will happily quote a directory that is at least consistent with itself.
Same name, same address, same phone number everywhere: that is the baseline, and it is the highest-return job on the list because it costs nothing but time. We went through that work on the Google side in why your Google Business Profile is worth half a website, and it is worth exactly as much on the AI side.
The tags nobody sees
There is a standard format, schema.org, that lets a page state in its own code "this is a restaurant, here is its address, its opening hours, its price range". Visitors never see it; machines read it without ambiguity. On the sites we deliver, those tags are part of the handover, along with an llms.txt file summarising the business for conversational bots and rules that explicitly allow them to read the site. It is also what we run on our own web agency pages for St Martin and Sint Maarten.
What you can actually measure
Nobody can guarantee a citation in ChatGPT, any more than a first place on Google. Three things, though, can be checked tonight without any tool. Ask two different assistants the exact question your customer asks, and note who gets named. Paste one of your pages into an assistant and ask it for your hours and your prices: if it cannot find them, no crawler will either. Then compare what your site says with what your Google listing says, line by line.
Those three tests cost nothing and tell you exactly where you stand. Measured, not promised.
Our website pricing is public, structured data and machine readability included, or get your quote within 24 hours.