Travellers are asking AI where to go. Independents should be in the answer.

Why I started ExactSite

About fifteen years ago, mobile changed how people discovered places, planned trips and booked travel. It opened new ways for businesses to reach customers and changed what those customers expected.

I see AI as another turning point.

A traveller can describe the kind of stay they’re looking for, ask follow-up questions and explore options they might not have known to search for. For an independent business, that creates a possibility worth paying attention to: being discovered because of how well you fit someone’s needs, even when they’ve never heard your name.

I believe this transition can create more opportunities for small businesses.

But I don’t think that will happen automatically. Businesses with large budgets and specialist teams have the resources to explore a new channel. An independent owner may be interested in the same opportunity, but have very little time to figure out where to begin.

I started ExactSite to help make that opportunity accessible. A business shouldn’t need the resources of a global brand to give the right customer a chance to find it.

What deserves to be discovered

An independent hotel can carry the personality of the people who built it: the care in its design, the food it serves, the local knowledge of its team and the atmosphere they’ve created.

An experience operator can offer a perspective on a place that comes from years of living there. A retreat can bring together a setting, people and programme that feel exactly right for a particular group.

For the right traveller, those details aren’t extras. They’re the reason to choose that business.

Those differences shouldn’t only be discovered after arrival. They should help the right guest find the business in the first place.

This isn’t about independent businesses always being the better choice. It’s about giving travellers a better chance of finding what genuinely suits them.

A hotel doesn’t need to be right for everyone. But what makes it right for someone should be easier to discover.

Building on what already works

Independent hotels and experience operators have important relationships with booking platforms, marketplaces and distribution partners. Those relationships bring value. We’re not asking owners to walk away from them.

A hotel can have a strong relationship with Booking.com and still welcome another way for guests to discover it. An operator can value a marketplace while also investing in its own presence.

We see AI discovery as an additional opportunity: a way to reach relevant travellers and communicate what makes a business worth choosing.

Our ambition is to help independents build on what they already have.

Making the opportunity practical

The details that make a business relevant to a traveller aren’t always easy to find. They may be buried on a website, missing from a listing or described differently across several sources.

Owners should have a practical way to see how AI represents their business, identify missing or inaccurate information, and publish a reliable account of what they offer.

But showing someone a problem is only part of the job.

I don’t want ExactSite to become another task on an owner’s already full list.

A report can show what needs attention. But if it leaves the owner with a report to interpret, content to write and technical changes to figure out, we haven’t made this opportunity accessible enough.

That’s why we’re building ExactSite to go beyond reporting.

We check how AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity describe a business and whether it appears in answers to relevant traveller questions. We identify gaps and inaccuracies, help prepare business-approved information, and publish it on the business’s own subdomain, alongside its existing website.

Then we keep checking how the business appears across the questions we monitor.

You approve the facts. We handle the publishing and technical work.

Businesses remain in control of the information they publish. AI assistants still decide which sources to use and what to recommend.

Our role is to do the work that helps a business be understood—so its owner can focus on looking after guests and running the business they’ve built.

Our mission

To give independent travel businesses a fair chance to be discovered, understood and chosen in the age of AI.

For me, success means a traveller finding somewhere that genuinely suits them—a place they might otherwise have missed.

It means an owner having a practical way to participate in this change, without taking on another specialist job.

And it means more of what makes independent businesses worth choosing becoming part of how people discover them.

That’s the opportunity I see. It’s why I started ExactSite, and what we’re building towards.

Nahum
Founder, ExactSite