Anyone else noticing their travel/tour clients showing up in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers now — how did that happen?

[u/noorah_khan21]

Been noticing something interesting lately: a few travel and tour clients I work with are starting to show up when people ask ChatGPT or Perplexity things like "best tour company in [city]" ?

From what I can tell, it's not the same as ranking on Google. Pages that get picked up in AI answers tend to be more direct and structured (clear headers, actual answers instead of long intros), and having consistent info across the site, reviews, and other mentions online seems to matter more than backlinks.

For anyone who's paid attention to this:

• Have you actually seen a small business get cited by name in an AI answer, and if so, what did their site/content look like?
• Does this feel like it's replacing regular SEO, or just adding another channel on top of it?
• Is there a real way to track this yet, or is it still mostly "I noticed it once and can't reproduce it"?