"AI search visibility" can sound abstract until you see what it does to a real business. This is the data from one hospitality engagement — Arros QD, the Fitzrovia restaurant of seven Michelin-starred chef Quique Dacosta — before and after a structural GEO fix. No projections, no modelling. Google Analytics and a third-party GEO audit, read directly.
The GEO score: 29 → 65 in seven days
A GEO audit scores a site across AI Citability, Content E-E-A-T, Technical health, Schema markup, and Platform consistency. Brand Authority — Wikipedia presence, Wikidata entries, external editorial links — is excluded from this figure, because it's a long-term signal no short engagement can move. On the remaining, controllable factors, Arros QD moved from 29 to 65 out of 100 in seven days. Schema markup alone moved from 10 to 85 — the largest single gain, and the most direct effect of implementing Restaurant, Menu, and Organisation schema where there had been none.
New users nearly doubled the week the fixes went live
Daily new users on arrosqd.com had been running in a steady 100–200 range through May and early June. In the days immediately following the site's June 25 relaunch, that baseline spiked toward 400 a day. Over the full 1 May – 7 July window, the site logged 6.5k new users and 6.8k active users total — with the visible step-change landing exactly on the technical fixes, not before them.
A new channel appeared: "AI Assistant"
Google Analytics attributes 25 sessions in this window directly to an "AI Assistant" channel group — small in raw volume, but notable because that traffic category barely existed for a restaurant of this kind before. It's the first measurable trace of AI search visibility converting into actual visits, sitting alongside Direct (6.9k), Organic Search (2.3k), and Paid Search (463) sessions.
The citation shift
Before the rebuild, asking Perplexity for the best paella in London surfaced TripAdvisor, TimeOut, and OpenTable — not arrosqd.com. After the fixes, Perplexity's citation behaviour shifted to name arrosqd.com directly as a primary source. That's the practical meaning of "AI search visibility": not a ranking position, but whether the AI engine trusts your own site enough to quote it instead of a third party.
Why this matters beyond one restaurant
Hospitality is a research-heavy, reputation-driven category — restaurants, hotels, clinics, members' clubs — where customers already ask "best X in Y" constantly. As that research behaviour moves from search bars to AI chat interfaces, GEO becomes less optional. This data point is small — one business, one seven-day window — but the mechanism behind it (crawler access, schema, extractable credentials) applies to any hospitality brand with genuine credentials and a site that isn't built to prove it.
See exactly what was fixed in the hospitality GEO checklist, or read the full engagement in the Arros QD case study.