AI Has Already Decided Which Venues Get Found. Is Yours One of Them?

Thirty years in this industry and I've watched plenty of trends come and go without changing much day to day. This one's different. Right now, a potential guest is searching for somewhere to hold their mum's 60th birthday party, and they're not typing it into Google. They're asking ChatGPT, or Claude, or Gemini, and whichever clubs show up in that answer are the one's getting the enquiry. The rest never even make the list.

I sat down with Kenny Ridgell, founder of Ridge Media, to talk through what this actually means for hospitality venues and the practical shift already happening in how potential guests find you. Some venues are ahead of it without realising. Most aren't even aware it's happening.

What Does It Actually Mean When a Venue Gets Left Behind by AI?

Kenny put it plainly when we spoke: AI tools now send people straight to a specific answer, skipping the homepage almost entirely. Someone searching for a venue doesn't land on your welcome page and click around. They land on the one page that answers their exact question, or they land on a competitor's.

This isn't about your venue being worse. Your service might be better, your grounds might be nicer, your function room might be the best in the region. None of that matters if the AI never surfaces you in the first place. Being left behind here doesn't look like losing a comparison. It looks like never being in the running at all.

Why Your Function Enquiry Form Is Doing All the Work Now

For most venues, the moment that matters isn't a booking engine. It's the function enquiry form, or the events page, or whatever page answers "can I book this venue for my event". Kenny's point was that AI is routing people straight past your story and your history and dropping them right to where they can get their answer.

If that form is buried three clicks deep, or the events page hasn't been updated since March 2025, the enquiry doesn't wait around. It goes to the next venue on the list, the one whose page answered the question fast and clearly. Your homepage story might be excellent. It just isn't what's getting read anymore.

What Is the Hub and Spoke Model, and Why Do Venues Need It?

Kenny builds what he calls a hub and spoke structure, a dedicated page for each type of visitor rather than one page trying to speak to everyone. For a hospitality venue, that might mean a page built specifically for birthday celebrations, another for corporate golf days, another for trivia night regulars.

One general events page, updated occasionally, competing against venues with dedicated pages for exactly what the member is searching for, isn't a fair fight. Guests search differently depending on what they want, and AI matches content to intent. A page written for everyone reads, to both a person and an AI model, as a page written for no one in particular.

What Metrics Venues Should Be Tracking

Branded search, direct traffic, and how fast a form enquiry gets a response, are the metrics that your leadership team should be checking weekly rather than waiting for the month to close out.

A monthly report tells you there's a problem after it's already cost you a month of enquiries going elsewhere. Weekly numbers catch the dip while there's still time to do something about it. This isn't about adding more admin. It's about watching the two or three numbers that actually move before revenue does.

Where Does AI Actually Help, and Where Does It Fall Short?

AI can help draft a fast first reply to a function enquiry, and speed absolutely matters because people now expect a response within hours, rather than days. But Kenny was clear that AI drafting a response and a real person following up are two different jobs, and skipping the second one shows.

A fast, generic reply that never gets a human follow-up reads as exactly what it is, and guests can absolutely tell! The venues getting this right are using AI for speed and a real person for trust, not asking one tool to do both.

Guests are already using AI to decide where they go. The question isn't whether that's happening, it's whether your venue is one of the ones it's finding.

To watch the full conversation with Kenny and dive deeper into the numbers, click here: https://youtu.be/_WTnneKirq8