MC Fireside Chats – March 25th, 2026

[00:00:45] Brian Searl: Everybody to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks and Modern Campground. We’re on week three of the intro stuttering and I can’t figure out why and don’t have any time to troubleshoot it’s a good intro. If it plays normally, it did for like a year, and then they just changed their platform and now it’s stuttered for you guys, didn’t it?

The intro? No? Oh well it stuttered on my end. Everybody was saying it was stuttered on their end, so. Anyway, maybe it’ll just fix itself and I have an excuse to not do my job.

So, welcome everybody. We’re excited to have another fourth week episode here of MC Fireside Chats. This is the week where we talk about all things AI and technology.

We have a couple guests with us today. Peter Pilarski, I’m gonna let him introduce himself in a second. And Mike, who I don’t know your last name from Campsite Tonight. What’s your last name, Mike?

[00:01:26] Mike Lee: Lee.

[00:01:27] Brian Searl: Mike. Well that’s even easier. I think I can remember Mike Lee without it being displayed in front of me. Hopefully I’m not that old. But briefly gentlemen, do you wanna introduce yourselves? Peter, do you wanna start?

[00:01:37] Peter Pilarski: Sure. Thanks for, having me. I am Peter Pilarski and I am the founder of the Tourism AI Network, organization focused on helping the tourism industry adopt AI. And then I also run a marketing agency called CIPR Communications, which is transforming, I would say, into an agency that’s focused on what I call helping tourism with digital authority.

So I can unpack that in a little bit, but so really AI adoption and digital authority, those are my two, my two games that I play every day. 

[00:02:06] Brian Searl: Yeah, you and I can unpack that too, ’cause I’m a marketing agency that was there for like 15 years and I’m running as fast away from that as I can into other stuff, like still marketing, but not anywhere close to the same. Mike, please introduce yourself.

[00:02:19] Mike Lee: Sure. I’m a tech worker turned entrepreneur. And so I am the solo developer, owner, camper, advocate for a mobile app called Campsite Tonight. It primarily operates in the US and focuses on two things.

One is aggregating availability across numerous sources. As many of you probably know, availability is very fragmented from various public entities, private entities. And so I do a good job of trying to aggregate that.

And then the feature that, you know, most of my premium users love is something called add to cart. And so I’ll monitor for cancellations and then I will put it into your cart so you can check out.

Don’t check out for you, but that’s, that’s been incredibly helpful for folks who are trying to visit the US National Parks, which are perennially sold out. And the cancellations are hard to actually pick up unless you’re attached to your phone, which many of us are, but you really need to be attached to it.

[00:03:15] Brian Searl: Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, I’m excited to dive into what your app does. I notice that your background is the same as many of our other guest backgrounds.

Is that like the Silicon Valley house where you guys all build your tech products all together? Or is that just a generic Google Meet background that I’m making a bad joke about? 

[00:03:31] Mike Lee: This is just the, this is the only background that’s stock on this. 

[00:03:35] Brian Searl: Is it really? I didn’t even know that. Okay.

[00:03:38] Mike Lee: So that’s nice.

[00:03:38] Brian Searl: That’s why everybody uses it then. Okay.

All right. Yeah, everybody’s in the nice house with the pool and I’m like, I haven’t made it to the pool yet. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong in my life, but. So, okay. So let’s start with you, Peter. Let’s briefly talk about what you, just tell us what you do. Let me give you a softball.

[00:03:52] Peter Pilarski: Sure, yeah. So, I really kind of help companies specifically in tourism on again what I call the two sides of AI adoption or adaptation. And so as I mentioned, Tourism AI Network really focus on helping with AI adoption.

And what that means is either helping people just learn about AI tools and understand how to implement them in their businesses to building AI strategies, to building custom AI solutions. So just depending on kind of the need of the company and the size of the company.

And then on my marketing agency side, it’s really what I call digital authority. And so, you know, what I’ll say is I started off as a PR agency. I’ve been running a PR agency from day one. We eventually added digital marketing to our PR agency.

And kind of we’re in this interesting full circle moment where all of a sudden PR is important again, even though it always was important. And so it’s kind of funny timing, but for me it’s like digital marketing and PR, you bring those things together and it’s really about digital authority.

And really, making tourism, either destinations or tourism operators, really the authorities, in their industries, obviously digitally so that they’re, so that they’re basically, it’s whether you’re doing Google search or you’re searching through AI tools or you’re, you know, whatever way you’re looking for information about that destination or about that, about that operator, they’re basically being, they’re they’re what’s being served up and what’s being recommended.

So to me that’s kind of what digital authority is, it’s really PR and digital marketing kind of brought together into one discipline.

[00:05:23] Brian Searl: I wanna unpack that more with you little by little, but first I wanna ask like, the authority’s angle is interesting. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody, I think about it the same way, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anybody package it as neatly as you just did. ‘Cause I think that’s really important for a lot of people to understand.

And here’s where I, I, take it from and I’m not saying this is your opinion, this is mine, right? Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. But like, I view it as, as authority is the single source of what you need to be working on for the next, well, however long this, whatever we’re going into, excuse me, sorry. Because like, you’re you’re nearing a future now depending on the survey you look at 40, 50, 60%, 40, 50% of website traffic is all bots already. Some regular bots, some Google search, some ChatGPT searching from ChatGPT, some agents browsing websites. But by all intents and accounts, that’s probably gonna be at least 55, 60% by the end of the year and only climb from there, depending on who you believe.

And then at that point, the button design and the curves and the call to action you’re agonizing over for 18 hours in your meeting doesn’t matter anymore. It collapses into authority, which shows in AI systems, which causes you to be the answer to more questions, and then causes people to consider you to purchase or uses as a travel planner or whatever your business is, right?

[00:06:35] Peter Pilarski: Yep. Yep. Yeah, very well pointed and I would say you’re absolutely right. And so, you know, and it’s not only authority in terms of, you know, traditional authority from a digital marketing perspective. So, you know, website authority is kind of the the digital marketing term, but it’s authority beyond that.

So to me authority is also, you know, what are people saying about you off your website. So that’s your Reddit posts or, you know, do you have editorial content i.e. are you being published by newspapers or magazines or third-party, you know, credible third-party sites, right?

To me, authority is a lot of things beyond just your website. But obviously you have to also have the content on your website that proves that you’re the authority on the topic on whatever whatever you know, your piece of the world is, right? And you have all of the answers in your content that the AI systems and the humans are looking for.

Right, right? So essentially we’re we’re away from this old SEO game of just writing content and writing content. Now we’re answering questions. And then now we’re also making sure we’re credible businesses so that when the AI systems search us, they they’re saying yeah these these are really good answers from a really credible organization. So to me all of that makes up digital authority.

[00:07:44] Brian Searl: Do you feel like, let’s start with the website and unpack this for the people who are who are watching, right? ‘Cause if you’re a, most of our audience is campground owners, operators, some big groups, some small groups, suppliers, vendors to the industry, real estate people, stuff like that. If you’re a campground owner or operator like most of the last 25, 30, however many, what do you want to peg the internet to starting when people started putting websites online, right? 95-ish. Has been search and social. That’s how everybody discovered everybody.

And so I think it’s fair to say that most people who are watching and have a campground business in some form or fashion, some terrible and some good, maybe more terrible than good. have some form of a website presence and some form of a social media presence.

And so as you look at the future of, let’s start with websites first. Do websites need to expand or do they need to contract or how to, what does the future of a website look like in Peter’s mind?

[00:08:36] Peter Pilarski: Yeah, so the future of the website in my mind absolutely needs to expand. and really, you need to think about, again, to me, it’s just answering questions. So answering questions. If you’re at the campsite level or campground level, answering questions about everything related to your campground and the experience of your campground and what to expect at your campground and where to get information about your firewood and this and so again, it’s all about answering the questions.

But it might be beyond just your campground. So it might be your campground and the immediate I don’t know, 30 kilometer radius, so maybe the fishing and the lakes and the whatever you know, whatever kind of is part of your campground experience. And so to me the website has to be the authority on everything related to that at your level, right? And so that’s kind of in my opinion where the websites are gonna go. But in addition to that, the website also needs to be searchable by AI tools. And so there’s a lot of we can unpack that, there’s a lot of technical things that have to happen. It has to be easily understood, indexed easily by AI tools. and and eventually it has to also be able to do the transaction itself, right? And has to be be able to kind of work with and and and connect with other AI tools because we’re gonna get to a point where the humans are not even gonna be involved anymore.

[00:09:46] Brian Searl: Google UCP and stuff like that.

[00:09:48] Peter Pilarski: Sorry?

[00:09:49] Brian Searl: Google UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol and stuff like that where they…

[00:09:52] Peter Pilarski: Yeah, yeah, things like that, yeah. Not there yet, but coming.

[00:09:55] Brian Searl: Yeah, it’s it’s coming. I saw the other day, what was it, The Gap is doing a trial with Google, where they’re gonna make purchases I think in in Google Search. Because it’s not, they haven’t released travel for that yet, but it’s a stated goal that it’s coming.

[00:10:06] Peter Pilarski: It’s coming.

[00:10:06] Brian Searl: So yeah, it’s a couple maybe a couple years off, right? Depending on if it’s adopted, but… yeah. So let’s let’s look at websites ’cause and just one one question added to this because…

[00:10:15] Mike Lee: Yeah, please Mike. Brian, can I pop in? 

[00:10:18] Brian Searl: Yeah.

[00:10:18] Mike Lee: You know what’s funny is I’ve spent a lot of time talking to campers and at least for me, I I don’t believe they’re looking to buy through AI. And maybe that’s because it hasn’t become good enough, but…

[00:10:32] Brian Searl: Buy or discover? Two different things.

[00:10:34] Mike Lee: I certainly mean buy. Discover, I think they they love AI and they’d love to have help, but you know, buy, they love to be specific.

And what I mean by that is some users want to be close to the bathroom, some people want to be under trees, some people want to have site ABC. Some people don’t want those sites. And the criteria in which they are trying to decide what they want seems to differ, you know, quite a lot from camper to camper. I haven’t found much standardization.

And so for me I’ve just gone kind of the opposite path and just saying, hey, I’ll give you power users who love to go camping like as many choices as possible. So you can control your own destiny. I did originally think that hey, you know what, people are just looking for ease. I wanna go camping here, help me go. But that wasn’t actually enough. They wanted to have much more control and, you know, they wanted to look at photos, they wanted to have a better understanding without being beholden to something doing it for them.

[00:11:36] Brian Searl: I think I agree with you like I think it gets there. I think it’s gonna take a couple years and I also think, and Peter I wanna hear your thoughts on this too. I think for the next 20 years we’ll have people who love to do the trip planning and who are maybe boomer generation or something like that, hanging onto websites for a long time visually browsing speaking wise. But I think it just inches up. I think it hits like 70, 75 and then it inches up.

[00:11:58] Peter Pilarski: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I, and and so first of all Mike, I agree with you as well. I I I’m I’m probably talking about more of a future state in terms of like the AI tools aren’t there from a commerce perspective and a buying perspective. Society’s not there yet, but that’s where it’s gonna go. I think it’s just a matter of time.

But what I’m saying is your point exactly, Mike, in what you’re saying there is exactly the point is so, you know, I wanna be under a tree in the shade next to the bathroom. All of that is content that needs to sort of live on the website or be there for the for the AI to help people discover that information or the context or and for the human.

So when I say the website, you know, we need to kind of expand our websites, it’s actually for both the human and the AI. So it’s really we need to just answer people’s questions. So if people have a lot of very specific things they want, we need to provide them with the information so that they can make a a very nuanced decision based on their preferences and what they want.

And I think that’s what’s missing currently. You know, we write all these content about, I don’t know, top 10 things to do here and all this kind of like fluff content, where it’s really people want the specific information about this campground or this campsite or this, right? What am I, how am I gonna plan my day if I’m over here and I’m gonna spend three day or three days over in this in this campground, what am I gonna do, right? So I think that’s kind of you know, we’re getting away from that short form sort of keyword to much more nuanced longer form, you know, type questions ’cause we can ask our AIs all of that now.

[00:13:20] Brian Searl: And it is it is a problem in the industry, like specifically in campgrounds. I’m sure it’s a problem in other industries too, but we’ve talked about this on the show before and I’ve talked about it to many of my clients, like the booking engines they use, third party, doesn’t matter what booking engine you use, Campspot, Newbook, ResNexus, RMS, whatever, they all have that date picker that you have to go through and they usually load the thing in JavaScript and they load it, they load everything basically in a dynamic way so where the AI can’t read all that information about the site.

So when you’re searching in ChatGPT alone, it’s for one that’s not using agentic tools right now, it’s not filling out a date picker to get that information. So many campground owners are burying their pull through, back in, patio site, furniture, 50 amp, 30 amp, has wifi, doesn’t, all behind that booking engine that the AI can’t read.

So when someone asks, hey I wanna go camping near Austin, Texas or Calgary, Alberta, and I want a site that’s under $70 a night, that’s pull through, it has no idea that you offer that because it’s not on your website anywhere. It’s on your booking engine.

[00:14:13] Peter Pilarski: Yeah. And so, and so it’s important then that’s a very important distinction, Brian, in terms of the information that needs to also be on your website or accessible by for search and I’m just going to call it search. It’s AI search, it’s Google search, it’s all search. I just think we’re kind of in this, we’re in the answer game now, more than just the content for the sake of content game.

[00:14:34] Brian Searl: Which I think is a better world honestly, like I was kinda sick of the content fluff game from a marketing perspective. So.

[00:14:41] Peter Pilarski: I 

[00:14:42] Brian Searl: Alright, so we’ve unpacked websites, but and how does that impact people like Mike? Like so Mike’s running Campsite Tonight, do we have any data or evidence on how AI is treating apps or discovering apps or can it dig deep into apps or do you have anything, I, I don’t, do you have anything on that Peter or Mike that you know?

[00:15:00] Peter Pilarski: I’ll let Mike answer first. I’d be curious to hear what he says but I have some information or thoughts on it as well. 

[00:15:08] Mike Lee: Yeah, I mean before I fully jump into it, what I’d kind of say is like if you’re if you come from the other side, you’re either Google or you’re these AI machines, the thing that Peter is saying is very crucial but I’d call it out differently, which is you want to make sure they can easily digest the information.

And what I mean by this is like actually writing a blog post or writing some of these things isn’t easily digestible for the machines. It actually needs to be in a very specific structured format. Otherwise they’re not going to take it.

And the reason why they’re not gonna take it is largely I think although camping is popular, the long tail of campgrounds is very large and so they’re not going to spend all this excess compute effort to tweeze out the details from a blog post. Or to tweeze out something from a web page that’s not structured in a way for the machine to read easily.

Now if it’s structured in a way for the machine to read easily, they’ll read it all day long. Because it’s essentially just teed up for them. And I think that’s really crucial and Brian you kinda touched on that earlier talking about how the data is hidden behind, but even if the data’s not hidden behind it, it it just needs to be teed up ’cause these companies are not IT.

[00:16:31] Brian Searl: Well yeah, I mean I think that’s why, and I want you to finish, but I think that’s why Peter and I and I’m not gonna put words in your mouth, Peter, so you can tell me if I’m wrong. I think that’s why we’re kind of sick of the marketing fluff. Like we know that nobody ever read that shit anyway. I don’t know if I can say shit on this podcast, it’s my later podcast where I swear. But nobody read that anyway.

Like we’re creating these plans for campgrounds now where we’re creating individual like amenities pages. A page on your playground that describes your playground. And we have clients emailing us back like, this is too dense, nobody’s going to read this. I’m like, look at your heat mapping, 78% of people don’t scroll past your hero image. So we can win both ways, right? So go ahead, Mike.

[00:17:07] Mike Lee: Yeah, so I mean look I think that’s gonna be the the crucial thing to try to stand out. I think the other thing is just thinking about what your edge is if you’re a campground host.

And so you know if you’re in Austin, Texas and you have a I don’t know a lazy river because you’re a humongous you know RV campground, like trying to play that up in the right way I think will will go much farther than trying to just even structure the data as I just talked about.

Because that’s not necessarily gonna distinguish you from some other player. I think it’s going to be really important to distinguish you and you know again having those data points and questions in a structured way for, you know, AI and Google to consume.

[00:17:52] Peter Pilarski: I think you’re completely right. So the way we present this to our clients to help them easily understand it is the playground example I gave. We say like I mean you already know how ChatGPT can remember your name and a little bit of details about you and that memory’s only gonna get better in the very near term like I can already do it with like an open clod or something like that, but you have your own personal assistant on ChatGPT that knows and remembers everything about you ’cause it’s connected to all your things. And you can say you won’t give that to people but convenience always wins. You will connect it to everything.

And so at some point, right? You’re gonna get these agents that go out on behalf of, and Peter I’m just gonna give you a seven-year-old daughter. I don’t know if you have one but I’m gonna give you one for my example. So Peter has a seven-year-old daughter who loves playgrounds. Time to book the camping trip, whether you do that or the agent reaches out to you proactively in the future.

Goes to research campgrounds, we’ll just use Austin ’cause we’ve been talking about it, finds an amenities page with 20 bullet points, one’s a campground, check, little girl’s happy.

Goes to the competitor website, that has a dedicated playground page that’s fleshed out more as you talk about Mike, with more details and information and has the photos of the playground and says I have a plastic slide instead of a metal slide so your kid’s butt won’t get burned on an 80 degree Texas day and if they fall off the teeter-totter it’s mulch and we have two swings and here’s some activities that people can do on our little merry-go-round thing.

Where do you think the AI is gonna pick for that little girl?

[00:19:11] Brian Searl: Like we don’t know, neither does Sam Altman, but we think everybody will, that the AI should probably choose the one that has more details and information because it’s gonna be able to guarantee that little girl has a better experience, right? Do you agree, Peter or…

[00:19:28] Mike Lee: I think it’s, it depends on all the other pieces of information held equal. So you know, an example would be that if you looked at Google reviews and one is a three and a half and one is a four and a half, that’s a pretty big difference. So it doesn’t matter how great your playground structure data is if you’re not providing the service, I think that’s that’s what’s still crucial.

[00:19:49] Peter Pilarski: I agree with that. Yeah, everything intertwines with each other. So I’m gonna go back to kind of where I started which is like it’s so funny to me because I’ve been a PR agency first and PR has been kind of my foundation of my career for a long time and then we added digital marketing and now we’re kind of in this full circle moment and and I kind of always tell people and I think what Mike just said just nails it here.

Is like at the end of the day, every brand in the world needs to just do good work and communicate well about the good work that they do. And then you know really have their reputation sort of take do the heavy lifting right? So to Mike’s point it’s like if you have a if you have a four and a half star Google rating and you know 300 reviews and recency in your reviews and people are talking positively about you that’s gonna have a massive impact on those AI tools basically refer you instead of instead of your competitor and and and recency matters…

And so like what I kind of tell my clients all the time is like, it doesn’t really matter what you say about yourself. What matters is actually what people say about you and what people believe about you. Now you still have to do the work and have the right content and have all of the information and have it fleshed out and have it structured properly.

So a couple things that we recommend to people on their websites is you know, the Q&A shouldn’t just be a Q&A page somewhere on your website. There should be a Q&A on every page of your website that’s relevant to the section, you know, whatever content is on that website, right? So again, we’re building out FAQs more than we have, almost everything needs an FAQ at the bottom.

Schema markup, Mike brought up structured data, super important. A lot of platforms do it somewhat well natively, some not at all, so you have to really understand it’s not the sexy fun creative stuff, but the technical part of a website matters a lot. For humans, yes, but almost even more now for these AI agents to be able to actually easily just, you know, sort out what they want to know and and it all comes down to just having a great user experience.

And then ultimately just being a good company that does good work that people will talk about. So what’s cool about this for me if I think about tourism and campgrounds and everything else is hopefully the AI tools can help the operators spend less time in front of their computers and more time providing great experiences in wow moments, which actually will help that reputation and actually will probably lead to better results in reviews, which will actually lead to them becoming more referenced by Google and AI tools the like right? So it’s sort of this kind of whole full circle piece to me.

[00:21:47] Brian Searl: Yeah, somewhere along the line we hospitality became 75% of our staff sits on the other side of a computer screen. And I think we can now reverse that and I think AI is gonna help long term. In the long term 10 years, 5, 10 years, help bring more of that community back to where we can spend more time on actual hospitality.

[00:22:06] Peter Pilarski: I hope so. That’s my my hope out of all of this, yeah.

[00:22:10] Brian Searl: So Mike, you never answered, then you were going to get to the app question right? Do you have any, like how, how does Campsite Tonight function in a world where we have AI discovery? I mean it does, it has a place right, but how do you view that? 

[00:22:25] Mike Lee: So certainly with AI discovery I think again you have to find your edge. Is I think where where I view it and my edge is really from a data background and so you know if you look at one of my website pages that I fleshed out and built.

I push, you know, a lot of I’d say ideally helpful information for serious campers that want to go to National Parks or very popular parks. It won’t just tell you like here’s what we have, here’s what’s there, here’s what people do.

It’ll tell you hey you wanna go in July, you don’t have a spot. Historically here’s how many spots were re-reserved less than seven days before checking in July. Here’s how many were done in two weeks before, here’s how many were done you know a month before. Do you wanna look in August? Do you want to look in June? This is what I’ll give you. And I can split it by a site type and all these different dimensions, you know site length, and then that way you know what people get is hey, what’s my chance to go? Because particularly for some of these in-demand places they’re their supply is far exceeded by demand.

And so you know there are always cancellations and if you don’t know that or you don’t feel confident about it this will help get you there. And so you know again I take that data, I structure it in a way for AI to use and I’d say that like when I made some of these pages and I probably updated about 40 or 50 I saw my search impression traffic from Google triple.

It was nothing. I did no different things other than, you know, present the data and restructure in a way for Google to consume and use. And then now it shows up more in, you know, review snippets, it shows up more in just general search results. And all of these things I think are the things that you can do as you think about, you know again, how AI will help you with your discovery.

Now, I would switch gears and say like you know we did talk a little bit about AI and like agentic buying. You know again I think these things are all fine when competitive dynamics are not too high. sure Peter, you know, you live in Canada, I thought you said Calgary. I’m very positive that the National Parks in the summer going to Canada are supremely competitive. And so agentic buying actually won’t help you unless you’re, you know, trying to pick up a cancellation…

[00:25:10] Brian Searl: Wait wait wait wait wait. But what if that you you built an agent that just hammers the National Park over and over again for a subscription fee. Right? And then make sure they get their site. There’s a 20% chance but we’ll have an agent check every 35 seconds for you for $2. $2 a try.

[00:25:30] Mike Lee: I mean largely that’s what my app does.

[00:25:33] Brian Searl: Okay.

[00:25:33] Mike Lee: For the US National Parks. There is a lot of different complexities there. But but checking is only part of the thing, right? And again you know we’re talking about picking up a cancellation. That’s a little bit different than booking in real time because in real time when the sites are released you’re talking about hundreds or maybe thousands of sites being booked in two seconds.

And you know, as AI and people’s bots and that type of stuff get better and better, so does detection. And so you know the host site isn’t gonna just let you run an API call or run some type of automated looking bucket. It’s gonna say, well you know, I haven’t seen this this Brian’s account login like this before ever. This seems strange. Brian has accessed my website 54 times in two months and this one looks nothing like the other 54. I’m not gonna let it through. And so you know…

[00:26:36] Brian Searl: Can I finish and then I want your thoughts on that Peter. Finish and then I want your thoughts on that ’cause I have my own thoughts on it. Go ahead, Mike. 

[00:26:41] Mike Lee: I think that’ll get particularly tough particularly for public lands, because public lands are very different than private land. Private land I don’t think people will mind minus even if you create some kind of turn style feature where people come in first come first serve. But public land has a little bit of a different um service that they have to provide. They can’t really provide a pay to play service. That’s not in their, you know, mandate I’d say.

[00:27:14] Brian Searl: Yep. But you could. If you had an agent that used, so my thing is my thing with bots is this. You’re you’re not wrong, like there are companies like Cloudflare who are aggressively trying to block these bots in different ways, in some ways making terrible decisions on behalf of business owners, blocking all AI bots, but that’s another conversation. and you’re right. Like there’s like we’ve seen on ModernCampground.com or even on our InsiderPerks.com and many of our client sites, traffic from I I can’t pronounce the city wrong, Lanzhou, China, has gone up like 800,000% year over year and there’s constantly like 18 to 50 bots or whatever browsing my website from this single city and I know that they’re probably training all the open source models.

But that’s fine. Like I wanna be in the open source models, so I don’t block it. But then the question becomes is, you’re right, they can block some of these headless browsers, but if I’m an agent using real Chrome on your computer, how do you block that and call that a bot? Is the interesting thing.

[00:28:13] Mike Lee: Hmm. That’s an interesting question.

[00:28:16] Brian Searl: Like I I don’t know that you can. You’re right, you can flag the pattern, but that have to be a really aggressive delicate balance pattern to make sure you’re not blocking an actual user. Because eventually everybody’s gonna have these agents working on their behalf. And we know that the government is, well they took 15 years to regulate Facebook and they still haven’t done it properly. Right? So I I agree with you, Mike. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying that it’s gonna be interesting to see how this plays out.

[00:28:44] Mike Lee: Well, you know, I think there’s a couple different things. First off, at least in the US, we’re seeing experiences where releasing all the sites at a specific time creates some of these perverse dynamics in terms of booking. People overbook, people may use these bots.

And you know what you are seeing is like at Olympic National Park, there’s a few campgrounds that are just staggered, you know, so one third of the sites get released six months in advance. You know, one third of the sites get released one month in advance, and one third of the sites get released two weeks in advance. And that’s you know, again aimed to fulfill their mandate of making sure people who want to go can go. Because not everybody can either plan so far in advance or not everybody can book right when it opens.

You know, I think in terms of what you’re saying of, you know, agentic purchasing on device, I’d say I’ve spent time doing it. It’s still not easy. It’s not easy to guarantee success. You know what I’d probably tell you is, again, as as technology evolves to evade, the technology to, you know, prevent undesirable behavior improves too.

And so, you know, one of those things is something called reCAPTCHA. And so I think most people can be familiar with this which is if you browse a website too crazily, you get told to say like, choose a sidewalk or choose a bridge or choose a car and there’s a whole bunch of these that actually also exist more silently.

And instead of asking you to choose something, they just return back this looks strange. This type of behavior. And to be honest even running some automated behavior on a local computer can get flagged like that. Because it just looks non-human. And so if their mandate is to say hey, we want to block automated behavior. It could be a real user behind it, but they’re using automation and that publisher has decided, you know, I don’t want to really allow that, for whatever choice they’ve determined.

[00:31:03] Brian Searl: Yeah, I’m just wondering where that balance is. Like, where do you end up being too aggressive versus less aggressive? Because if I want to be aggressive, knowing the tech, like I there’s already companies out there. I can name five off the top of my head that have reCAPTCHA solvers in place that the AI can already do this, right? So there I’m not I’m gonna take it down that rabbit hole. I’m just asking like what is the balance between like if you’re a business owner or a national park or public land or whatever else, or whoever, what’s that balance where I where do I dial it in the middle to make sure I’m getting enough people and blocking enough bots? 

[00:31:36] Mike Lee: I think those are, the middle is different based on the party you’re talking about. I think the middle for a national park is different than the middle for a private campground owner. And so I agree, I’d be way more permissive on it as a private campground owner. In terms of national park and other items like that, I I think it’s possible you may get there, but anytime I’ve talked to anybody from any public and Peter’s probably the best person for this, public entity, that’s really against their mandate. If you had said something like, hey I’m going to help underrepresented groups get access to AI tooling, maybe you have a better shot. But if you’re talking about just general users, don’t see that happening for a while. I think that their mandates won’t change that quickly even if AI does.

[00:32:33] Brian Searl: Okay, so then to the then circling full circle or coming full circle I guess to your to your app, right? Lots of people still download your app in the app store. You said you have a website too that lists the peop lists… or you just everything’s on the app?

[00:32:47] Mike Lee: All the all the core actions are on the app. There is some cross posting of data back to the website. More for discovery purposes.

[00:32:56] Brian Searl: Okay, so I have no doubt that the people you’re talking about that are the power users that you explained more eloquently than I could ever repeat in the beginning, and I have no doubt that people like me who are obsessed with travel planning and wanna choose all the little details will continue to use an app like yours. Is that enough to get Campsite Tonight by long term or as the discovery shifts, I think it shifts off apps. I don’t have any data that says that yet, right? Does it become harder for a Campsite Tonight to thrive?

[00:33:28] Mike Lee: You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about that and I’ll I’ll choose a different travel parallel if that’s okay.

[00:33:34] Brian Searl: Yeah.

[00:33:35] Mike Lee: So you know, if you had been buying plane tickets on the internet for a while, there was a period of time where you really probably went to Kayak first, and you went to other websites later to search for prices because the prices weren’t all unified for you so if you wanted to check, you know, Air Canada’s price, you wanted to check WestJet’s price, you wanted to check, you know, United’s price, they just weren’t all in one place. And so as a user it wasn’t convenient for you.

And so for me I think on Campsite Tonight it will continue to be okay one because I don’t think camping is a large enough vertical that the machines will spend enough time on and energy to make agentic buying as easy as possible. And I think second, for a lot of that to change, we’d have to go to a different non-fragmented or some type of unified availability system that I just can’t see happening.

If you look inside the US, and I’ll just take where I live, which is near San Fran or in San Francisco. There’s 100 campgrounds within 100 miles. That inventory is spread across 50 websites.

[00:34:52] Brian Searl: Yeah. Terribly.

[00:34:53] Mike Lee: Largely due to private campgrounds. But like even if you look at public ones, within about a 100 miles from me, there’s I think five different county websites for five different counties. There’s a state, and there’s federal. If if I believed that all those systems would push inventory into a singular unified place for the user to benefit, yeah, I think I’ll run into a lot of trouble. But do I think that six different government entities would align on something like this? It just seems unlikely.

[00:35:35] Brian Searl: To be to be clear like I’m playing devil’s advocate. I’m not I’m not saying I’m I have a problem with your business model. I think it’s fantastic. I think that and I think I don’t know, I think that you eventually take the data from the app. I think the app is the issue, and you take the data and you either pipe it into ChatGPT so people can search all in one place and you become that source of truth, or you put it into UCP or you put it into what Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses or I just think the interface changes for your data. I don’t think your business model is in trouble at all.

[00:36:07] Mike Lee: Yeah, I mean I think that’s totally possible. I I have looked into, you know, making connectors for ChatGPT. But you know, I think the other issue is I could provide the supply, but if the demand isn’t there at the moment, it doesn’t really matter.

[00:36:26] Brian Searl: Agree. Yeah, this is a future thing. This is not a you should do it now thing.

[00:36:30] Mike Lee: Yeah.

[00:36:32] Brian Searl: What do you think from a tourism perspective, Peter? What are you seeing?

[00:36:35] Peter Pilarski: Yeah, I mean it’s an interesting conversation. So first of all, you know, I’ll just talk to some changes Google made recently, which are kind of interesting in the sense of much more focused on benefiting kind of local businesses. so they’ve made a couple changes recently that have kind of taken the power a little bit away from the websites and I’m not saying talking specifically about Campsite Tonight, but I’m talking more of the Expedias and those types of guys out there. So and so they obviously they added their core update in December which is prioritizing local first content over aggregators, and then they did a discovery update which is prioritized regional storytelling and feeds, and then obviously the real world data, which is maps and business profiles. So what I see happening here is Google’s under threat for the first time in a long time. And so Google is looking at their assets and saying, what do we need to change in our text stack and our app, like how do we leverage the assets and what we have that makes us unique. And I think there’s a lot that Google has, maps and Google business profiles and other things that make Google very unique. And so you know they’re prioritizing that local first content and so I think that matters a lot for tourism. I think that matters a lot for campsites and it kind of goes back to the conversation we started with is that at the end of the day we don’t know what’s gonna change out there and who’s gonna win this game.

At the end of the day, if I’m a business owner and I need to think about basically how do I make sure that I’m answering all the questions and and again we’re talking about technology and making sure we’re set up for a success for technology to find us. But at the end of the day, if we do this well for technology, we do this well for humans as well, right?

So you know, what are the common questions I I get asked? What what are the details that people are looking for? Back to Mike’s point about I wanna camp under a tree next to the river and away from the toilet. It’s like, okay, well how do we structure our data and our information to make that information available to people so we can actually answer people’s questions and give them what they want?

I think if we do that well as business owners we will succeed for our humans and we will succeed for our AI tools. We will succeed for Google, et cetera, et cetera, right? So you know, I think kind of… Again it’s sort of this like it’s like a full circle moment for me in terms of just being a good business and answering and and and giving people what they’re looking for and not sort of hiding information unnecessarily making it as transparent as possible. That’s, that’s the, that’s the path forward no matter what.

[00:38:58] Brian Searl: So if I’m a small business, whether I’m a campground or a tourism operator or whoever, right? We’ve talked about the website. We’ve talked about the need to expand it. Maybe do frequently asked questions on individual pages. If I’m a, if I’m a small business owner, there’s a very good chance that I’m overwhelmed by everything that the three of us are talking about right now, right?

I’ve got a website designer but I don’t know what they do. I don’t know what SEO actually means to them. Whether that’s a plugin that they’ve ignored for three years or, right? So where do I start? Because what I tell my clients is like after you talk or the prospective clients I talk to, is after you talk to me go to ChatGPT and ask if Brian is full of shit. Right? ‘Cause you can now. But where do they start?

[00:39:40] Peter Pilarski: Yeah, I mean that’s a great question. I mean I’d say first of all just asking ChatGPT questions and seeing what comes up is a great place to start and just kind of getting an understanding of things.

But you know I’m gonna go back to Google still matters a lot and fundamentally people still use Google. So I if, you know, if I had limited budget, limited time I would start actually with making sure my Google properties are up to date. So Google business profile super important right?

So Google is prioritizing that again. So making sure your Google business profile is 100% full out, it’s accurate, has all the information is up to date, all your hours are up to date, your phone number, all that kind of stuff, right? Reviews. Getting reviews, really matters a lot. Interestingly photo velocity is starting to matter. So Google’s actually prioritizing recency a lot more now and so just making sure that there’s photos constantly so you know treat your Google business profile like a social media account and post often on there post content on there. Make sure everything’s up to date. That’s like really easy low hanging fruit and that will serve you well in the in the Google world.

[00:40:40] Brian Searl: So before we, before we go to number two, yeah. Can we show the Maps video what they’re doing to Maps because I think that fits in really well with the Maps feature? It’s open right here, Jessica, if you wanna share the screen. No, the maps. It’s the sixth one down. Yep.

We played it last week on Outwired, but we’re gonna play it on this show ’cause nobody’s seen it yet. So this is a little promo video from Google about their new Maps feature which is relevant to all the campground owners and tourism operators too. Go ahead.

So I think that hits to the heart of a little bit of what you were talking about Peter like the the number of reviews like this is we’re gonna get we talked about website but number one updating Google Maps because that single sort of truth is gonna pull from the more reviews you get the more people talk about you the more photos you have the more the AI is gonna either structure data, extract all that stuff or eventually see it right?

[00:42:40] Peter Pilarski: And having compute power so really important I guess to point out. Really important, and then I think similarly having as well that information on your website yes will make sure you’re visible to not just Google but others as well.

So back to I love Mike I love Mike’s sort of early example of I wanna campground under the tree away from the bathroom next to the river or whatever it’s like it’s like well that information has to somehow exist somewhere digitally in order for somebody to be able to actually find something like that right so you know the photos the maps the details the you know all that information has to somehow be thought of in terms of how do I make that available digitally right and how do I answer questions as much as possible.

[00:43:20] Brian Searl: Alright, so that was your number one, what’s your number two? 

[00:43:23] Peter Pilarski: Number two is you know really I think answering questions is really on your website. I think that is the job of a website now. It’s just answering questions and really restructuring your content in a way that gets into more of a Q&A and short answers and short form. But in addition to answering questions there’s also some technical things you can do on your website this is getting a little technical but for example schema. So for those who don’t know what schema is, schema is essentially you know directions to digital tools as to what’s on your website. So you know when an AI, when an AI tool’s looking for an answer to something, they’re scanning a website to see if the answer exists on that website and then they might go and they might go and check reviews and third party information to see if this is a credible website and then come back.

And so making sure you have not only the the the content structured in a way that’s easy for the AI tools and the humans to parse and make sense of, but also you have some instructions on the backend in your code to tell the AI tools what’s actually on your website so it can scan it and make it make it easier to find. So those are I think kind of two really important things and then the other thing the other component that AIs really like and I’ve done a lot of AI search visibility audits recently is is specific verifiable numbers and I’m gonna give you an example.

I have a heli-skiing client who has the largest heli-skiing tenure in the world. And the largest heli-skiing tenure in the world is sort of a hard concept to get your head around a little bit other than you know it’s a lot of heli-skiing area right. But when I did an AI search visibility audit, it said, oh, the AI’s really quote that you have 10,100 square kilometers of heli-skiing terrain.

That’s saying the same thing as the largest heli-skiing tenure in the world, but it’s saying it differently and that’s a very quotable verifiable number. And AI tools really quotable verifiable numbers so as much as possible is thinking about your language and what’s quotable verifiable that can be consistently put across the internet as again, kind of what Mike was talking about, that’s a very unique component of that business um that the AI tools will quote all day long.

And they’ll quote it with largest heli-skiing tenure. And that’s something that makes that business very unique. And when people are searching, they’re looking for unique heli-skiing experience, well here’s the largest heli-skiing tenure in the world, it’s 10,100 square kilometers, right? And so that’s something that will then be surfaced by the AI tools a lot.

[00:45:51] Brian Searl: And sort of to frame this in a way that a campground owner would understand, let’s take something super simplistic like the headline on your website, the H1, I’m a campground near Austin, Texas or I’m a campground 35 miles from downtown Austin or something like that.

[00:46:06] Peter Pilarski: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:46:10] Brian Searl: Alright, so that’s a pretty good start for people then. So talk to your website designer, well talk to ChatGPT first and then have ChatGPT tell you what to talk to your website designer about.

[00:46:19] Peter Pilarski: Exactly. 

[00:46:20] Brian Searl: And then when he gives you the answers which is probably him talking to ChatGPT while he’s on the meeting with you, then go back back to ChatGPT and just make sure it’s all kosher.

[00:46:28] Peter Pilarski: Yeah. 

[00:46:29] Brian Searl: Don’t, don’t, like, you need to know, like what ChatGPT I think has given people the ability to do and I’ve always said this to people like know 5% enough about everything to be dangerous enough to ask questions. Now you have the ability to be 30, 40% of that just by asking ChatGPT. But just be 5%. Like don’t believe your website designer when they tell you they say they’re all in on AI. Ask, well give me specifics.

[00:46:54] Peter Pilarski: Exactly. You gotta know that stuff because this is the future of your business that you’re talking about here.

[00:46:58] Brian Searl: In a more existential way than I think it’s ever been in 30 years.

[00:47:01] Peter Pilarski: I think so. And and I’ll just add one more point Brian, in terms of things for people to consider what’s important is I call it entity consistency. So making sure that all digital places are consistently talking about you the same way.

So back to your, you know, I’m a I’m a campground 35 kilometers from downtown Austin, Texas. That should be on your LinkedIn account, on your Facebook account, on your, you know what I mean, and like having it consistent everywhere. If you write press releases, that should be in the in the about section of your press release.

So the more places certain things are repeated that are very verifiable, the more likely then it’s gonna be surfaced by the AI tools and Google and AI tools are looking kind of at the same in a very consistent way.

And I’m gonna use myself as an example of this and this a very heartbreaking example real example. And so I’ve I’ve run obviously I have Tourism AI Network really shows up well. And I have CIPR Communications. And the challenge we’ve had with CIPR Communications always from day one is that we started off as a general purpose marketing agency and we started specializing in tourism.

And so I did this digital authority audit on my website recently and I gave it some parameters in terms of like where I’m going and the direction and all this kind of stuff. And what it came back to and said, well, you said that you wanna specialize in tourism, but right now what I’m seeing online across all digital assets is a general purpose agency that serves tourism.

And so are you a general purpose agency that serves tourism or are you a tourism focused agency that has other clients? And it was like, that was like the fundamental question to me, which we have work to do, obviously. But that’s an example of entity consistencies. Like, okay, well what are you? And what is that sort of claim in the world that you’re making about you?

And that’s where Mike’s talking about sort of, you know, what makes you identified you know differentiated and and special. And then how do you make that consistent across the whole internet so basically that’s kind of what’s known about you when the search comes back.

[00:48:58] Brian Searl: And sometimes it’s just such a small change like near Austin to 35 kilometers to I’m serving tourism versus I am a tourism…

[00:49:05] Peter Pilarski: Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Yeah.

[00:49:09] Brian Searl: Mike I have a quick question about your your app again. Are you just working with national and state parks or are you working with private campgrounds at all or…? 

[00:49:16] Mike Lee: So, I do have private campgrounds on there. So I’ll show results from Hipcamp and Campspot if you’ve input dates.

[00:49:25] Brian Searl: Okay.

[00:49:25] Mike Lee: Then I’ll go fetch it for you. If you haven’t input dates I won’t show the result on the map. I also have some of the KOAs in the US too. Also if you put in dates. You know, I’d love to put in more, honestly, but it hasn’t been the highest priority for me.

[00:49:41] Brian Searl: Most of the demand has been for the National Park, which makes sense with the amount of demand and all that stuff and the where you’re going with like the cancellations and things like that.

[00:49:52] Mike Lee: That’s right. I mean I think I had started with discovery that’s why I had brought them those various sources in, ’cause I thought, you know, I’d love to just be aware of all the possible choices. But that wasn’t something people were willing to pay for. They’re actually okay to do at that time discovery across many different systems, and that was okay with them.

[00:50:11] Brian Searl: Yeah, I mean, own what you’re really good at, right? That makes sense. I think those we just talked about AI would like it too, so.

[00:50:18] Peter Pilarski: Nicheing and being specialized helps a lot actually. As it turns out.

[00:50:23] Mike Lee: I would say again, you know, just to emphasize what Peter said about, you know, making it consistent. So if your message is about being close to Austin, you know, it’s not even just about having that message probably be consistent but it’s about weaving that through someone’s, you know, experience.

And so it’s saying, well we’re really close to Austin, like and maybe you are suggesting a bunch of things people can go do in Austin on a day trip. And those types of items that play into your strength and so it’s not just, hey we’ve put this text everywhere, it’s leaning into that and weighing that experience in and saying, you know, we’re the closest and you wanna go down to South Congress? We can get you there in 25 minutes or whatever the number is.

[00:51:13] Brian Searl: Yeah, I think I, that’s a great point, yeah. And it’s a living breathing machine as as we think about this and move forward it’s at a rapid pace. But even just your website, it’s not a somebody designed my website and then they pay for my hosting and I don’t talk to them but once a year. This is a whole different thing now.

This is, this is thinking through what Mike just said. This is thinking through the tourism versus whatever, the Austin versus kilometers. This is, and maybe you don’t do this ’cause you don’t have the time to do this as a campground owner, but you’ve got to make sure somebody is on your behalf. Which is probably gonna mean budgeting more for your website and your marketing. But I don’t control the world, that’s just the way the world is, right? So.

[00:51:52] Peter Pilarski: Yeah. Well to make, to kind of broaden this out a little bit and this is back to kind of what I maybe started with is around that whole PR and being a good corporate citizen. So if I think about the 35 kilometers from Austin kind of piece to to it, right?

And so if I’m gonna write content around we’re 35 kilometers away from or miles sorry I’m in Canada, but miles away from Austin, maybe I’m writing content pieces about, hey, we’re 35 miles away from Austin and these 18 other things to do around us. And so now we’re giving people sort of a bit of a, hey, you’re staying at our campground, but here’s all the things to do around here.

And now imagine I create partnerships with all 18 of those different providers and I have some kind of, you know, either a discount or just some kind of referral or whatever, whatever that looks like. Now all of a sudden I have a natural link on my website to this other property.

And so that’s kind of what I talk about when I talk about the sort of full circle PR moment of like being a good corporate citizen and and, you know, this is the role that destination management and marketing organizations play in terms of like tying all of these pieces together. But also every individual business has these partnerships, it has these different relationships and how do we surface all of those to again provide a better user experience for people, right? Ultimately.

So that’s kind of how it all comes together full circle in my mind and a lot of those things I think campground owners probably do do, but they just don’t put it on their website and don’t make it available to people to people.

[00:53:18] Brian Searl: Well and then what it becomes is is not just a I’m 35 kilometers from I don’t even know if there’s a natural history museum in Austin, but we’ll just say Austin Natural History Museum, right? If there isn’t, somebody should build one. So but it becomes like we’ve partnered with the Austin Natural History Museum to offer a 15% discount and then oh, you can stay here and look at this glamping experience and look at these unique cabins.

And that’s something unique because the AI is already gonna be able to connect a little bit to the fact that you’re near Austin, that you’re near the Natural History Museum, but the discount and the distance are unique things to that site.

[00:53:56] Peter Pilarski: Exactly. And now think about the think about the traveler that’s sort of thinking about planning their trip and they might be using AI tools to start the planning of their trip, but they’re they’re using long tail search queries and they’re asking all kinds of questions.

And this is kind of how it all kind of comes together for them and you know maybe ultimately the booking doesn’t happen on platform but they’re, you know, they’re at least sort of figuring out the starting point and figuring out all the connections and by creating those connections yourself you know you become the hub basically and you become the answer, right?

[00:54:27] Brian Searl: Yep. All right, we’ve only got a couple minutes left here. Final thoughts Mike? And where can they learn more about Campsite Tonight and download your app, obviously. 

[00:54:36] Mike Lee: Well to find more about the app you can just go to my website campsitetonight.app, or you could probably search for Campsite Tonight and it should show up. You know, I I think the tough thing is, look I run a small business too. Trying to do everything is very very tough. so my only guidance to the campground owners would be try to think about what your biggest problem is. Right? Is your biggest problem on-site experience, is your biggest problem discovery? And then making sure you’re spending the right amount of time and energy focused on improving that area. That’s what I’ve often seen pay the most dividends. And trying to do everything isn’t going to help you. Focus on the biggest needle mover.

[00:55:26] Brian Searl: Okay. That’s it. Thank you Mike. I appreciate you joining us. Peter, final thoughts and where can they find more about…

[00:55:31] Peter Pilarski: Yeah I mean I I actually love the advice of focus as well because I think to the point of this kind there’s lots of different things we talked about and it’s all very technical and it’s all very hard to understand.

But like you know again if you wanna if discovery is a problem or a challenge you know focusing on just your Google Business Profile and a little bit of your website will go a long way, right? Maybe focusing on the partnerships and creating experiences. So again depending on your situation, but I love the idea of focus.

I think that’s really good advice ’cause for me too it gets overwhelming and I’m actually in a place now where it’s like okay I know exactly which pain points I want to solve and I’m gonna put all my attention to those pain points and then I’ll move on to the next one, right? Whatever that problem is, just focus on that singular thing, get it done, knock it out and then move on to the next thing.

[00:56:44] Brian Searl: Exactly. Alright, well thank you guys for joining us for another episode of MC Fireside Chats. If you are not sick and tired of hearing from me, will be on Outwired in about, I don’t know, an hour, something like that, with Scott Bahr, we’ll be talking about data and research in the campground industry, all things AI and tech that that podcast covers.

If not, we will see you next week on another episode of MC Fireside Chats. Thank you Peter and Mike for joining us. Go download Campsite Tonight. Go check out Peter if you, do you want campground clients or PR, Peter? 

[00:57:12] Peter Pilarski: Sure, yeah, absolutely.

[00:57:13] Brian Searl: Where do they find out more about CIPR? 

[00:57:15] Peter Pilarski: CIPRcommunications.com or tourismAInetwork.com. Either, either one will get you to me.

[00:57:21] Brian Searl: Awesome. Thank you guys, I appreciate you. Have a great day.

[00:57:23] Peter Pilarski: Thank you. Take care.