Why visit-your-town.ca loses to Google Maps, and what to do about it

What the traveller actually sees

Open a private browser window and search for “things to do in” followed by the name of any town in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland and Labrador. Note what appears before you scroll.

For most towns, the order goes something like this. An AI-generated overview summarizing the main attractions, often with a short list and links. A map pack showing three or more places with ratings, photos and hours. A carousel of attractions pulled from Google’s own place data. Then, somewhere below, a large travel publisher, a review site, perhaps a provincial tourism site, and at some point the local destination site.

That destination site may be the most accurate, most lovingly maintained source of information about the town. It is still the sixth thing the traveller sees, if they see it at all.

This is not a design failure and it is not fixed by a redesign. The search results page has been restructured around surfaces that Google controls, and the question for a destination marketing organization is not how to beat those surfaces but how to be what they are built from.

You are not the destination, you are the source

A reframe that helps: your website is no longer the primary place a traveller plans a trip. It is one of several, and for first-contact discovery it is rarely the first. What you uniquely have is authority over the facts. You know which attractions are open, which operator moved, which festival changed its dates, which trail was closed after the storm.

The map pack, the AI overview and the attraction carousel all run on data. Much of that data comes from Google Business Profiles, from structured markup on websites, from listings in directories, and from pages that search engines and AI models have judged reliable. If your organization becomes the most reliable, most consistently updated source of place data for your area, those surfaces will reflect your information, and some of them will cite you.

That is a stronger position than a top-ten ranking. It is also, in our experience, a position most DMOs in the region have left vacant.

Google Business Profiles for every attraction

Start with the map. Every attraction, trail, beach, museum, market and viewpoint that a traveller might search for should have a Google Business Profile, and that profile should be accurate, claimed and maintained.

The problem is ownership. A privately run brewery will usually manage its own profile. A municipal beach, a community-run lighthouse or a provincial park trailhead often has a profile that nobody claimed, with hours someone guessed years ago and a photo contributed by a passing visitor. The DMO is the natural party to coordinate this, either by claiming the profiles of public assets directly or by working with the operators who should.

For each profile, the basics matter more than anything clever: correct category, correct address and pin location, seasonal hours set properly so the listing does not say “closed” in July, a phone number that is answered, a link to the right page on your site, and recent photos. Reviews help, and responding to them helps more. Posts and updates about events and seasonal changes keep the profile active.

A town with twenty well-maintained attraction profiles has a map pack that sells the destination. A town with twenty neglected profiles has a map pack that quietly tells travellers the place is closed.

Structured data on your own pages

Your website is read by machines as well as people, and the machines want structure. Schema.org markup is a vocabulary that lets you label what a page is about in a way search engines and AI systems can parse without guessing.

For a destination site, the types that matter most are the ones for attractions and places (with address, geographic coordinates, opening hours and images), for events (with dates, location and ticketing), for local businesses and for the organization itself. Marked up correctly, your attraction pages become machine-readable entries that can feed carousels and overviews. Unmarked, they are prose that something has to interpret.

Events deserve special attention. Travellers frequently search for what is on during their dates, and event markup is how a festival in Lunenburg or a market in Saint Andrews shows up in event surfaces with the right date and location. It also means your events have a chance of appearing when someone asks an AI assistant what is happening in town this weekend.

Consistent listings everywhere

Search engines cross-reference. If an attraction’s name, address and phone number differ between your site, its Google profile, the provincial tourism directory, a review site and a map app, the inconsistency reads as uncertainty, and uncertain data is ranked lower or dropped.

The fix is unglamorous: maintain a single authoritative record for each place and push it out consistently. Many DMOs in Atlantic Canada already feed a provincial tourism database. Make sure the data you feed it is the same data on your site and on the Google profile, including how the name is written and whether the French name is included.

Photos are part of consistency. The map pack and the carousel are visual, and a listing with a crisp, current photo of a place in season will outperform the same listing with a dim phone picture from a decade ago. A single day of professional photography across your top attractions, distributed to every profile and listing, is one of the better investments a small DMO can make.

Being the source AI assistants cite

AI overviews and chat assistants summarize and, increasingly, cite their sources. What they cite is content that answers a question directly, is structured clearly, is consistent with other sources, and comes from a site that looks authoritative on the topic.

For a destination site, that means pages that are organized around the questions travellers actually ask: what to do with kids, what is open in October, where to eat near the waterfront, how to get there from Halifax. It means plain headings, short factual paragraphs, and the specifics (hours, addresses, prices where you have them, seasonal notes) stated outright rather than implied. It means an “about” page that makes clear who runs the site and why it is reliable.

It also means letting go of a certain kind of writing. Long, atmospheric descriptions of the light on the water make for a nice brochure. They do not get cited. A page that says which lighthouses can be visited, their hours and whether there is parking will.

The surfaces that replaced your homepage still need somebody to tell them the truth about your town. That can be you.

What to do first

Make a list of the fifteen attractions a traveller is most likely to search for in your area. For each one, check three things: does it have a claimed Google Business Profile with correct seasonal hours, does your site have a page for it with structured data, and do the name and address match across both. Fix whatever fails. That single exercise, repeated each spring before the season opens, will do more for your destination’s visibility than any redesign of the homepage.