What changed at
Villa Sermolli.
Four months ago, ChatGPT and Claude had never heard of this hotel.
Villa Sermolli is a historic boutique hotel in Tuscany, the property I ran as General Manager before founding CecilIA. Its owner came to me because wedding inquiries had almost stopped. When I checked ChatGPT and Claude for wedding venues in the region, the hotel did not show up once.
The problem was not the hotel. It was that the hotel was not speaking the language AI systems read: structured data, and facts that stayed consistent across its website, its Google profile and its booking platforms.
TUSCANY, ITALY
We worked through the K.L.A.R. method.
The same framework I teach in the AI Visibility Workshop.
Structured data and schema markup, so AI systems can read the property correctly instead of guessing.
One consistent set of facts everywhere, including a room count that had been wrong in several places.
Rewritten descriptions on TripAdvisor and other platforms, replacing vague language like 'luxury' with a specific, checkable positioning: a historic boutique hotel and wedding venue.
A Google Business Profile brought in line with everything else.
The hotel became findable.
ChatGPT now ranks Villa Sermolli first for specific wedding capacity questions, and finds the hotel's own wedding page without being prompted.
Claude moved from third place to first place for the same test queries.
Wedding inquiries through the website roughly doubled, from about one a day in May and June to about two a day from July onward, and have held steady since. In August alone, the hotel received 84 inquiries: 56 through the website form and 28 by direct email.
When we asked guests in August how they had found the hotel, ChatGPT came up almost as often as Google: about 21 percent to about 25 percent. Those figures come from 18 and 21 mentions respectively, a small sample, worth stating plainly rather than dressing up as more than it is.
The shift in inquiries began the week of July 5, roughly a month after the work above was finished.
Villa Sermolli still does not appear on the major wedding portals: WeddingWire, The Knot, Zankyou and Matrimonio.com. These are exactly the sites AI systems often check before recommending a venue, and closing that gap is the next phase of work.
I am including this because a case study that only shows the wins is not useful to anyone, least of all to me.
A short quote from Martin Pleiner, the owner of Villa Sermolli, will be added here once available.
See what AI says
about your hotel.
If you run an independent hotel and have not checked what ChatGPT and Claude actually say about it, that is the place to start.