How AI Is Changing Wine Marketing: What Wineries Need to Know
Written by: Katarzyna Ordys, Senior SEO & SEM Specialist
For years, wine marketing has followed a familiar formula: build a beautiful website, optimize it for search engines, stay active on social media, collect email addresses, and make it easy for people to book a tasting or buy a bottle.
All of those things still matter. But the way people discover and research wineries is changing.
Today, someone planning a wine country trip might not start by searching Google and clicking through a list of winery websites. They might ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or another AI tool: “I'm visiting Napa Valley for a weekend. Which wineries have great Cabernet Sauvignon, beautiful views, and tastings under $75?”. They can then ask follow-up questions, compare recommendations, and narrow down their options without ever opening another website.
For wineries, this creates a new opportunity - but also some important questions about visibility, website traffic, and how digital marketing success is measured.
First, What Are LLMs and AI Chatbots?
You may have heard the terms LLM and AI chatbot used interchangeably, but they aren't quite the same thing. An LLM, or large language model, is the technology that allows AI systems to understand and generate human-like text. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude use LLMs to answer questions and have conversations with users. Many of these tools can also search the web, bringing current information and sources into their answers. For marketers and business owners, the important takeaway is simple: people are increasingly using these tools not just to create content, but to discover businesses, research products, compare options, and make decisions.
Wine Enthusiasts Are Searching Differently
One of the biggest changes AI is bringing to marketing is the way people ask questions. Traditional search often starts with a few keywords, such as “Sonoma wineries” or “Napa wine tasting.” AI search allows people to be much more specific and conversational. They can explain what they are looking for, add preferences, ask follow-up questions, and compare options within the same conversation. That changes the customer journey.
Instead of visiting several winery websites to research their options, a potential guest can ask an AI tool to do much of that research for them. They might ask which winery has the best views, which offers private tastings, how much a tasting costs, or which location is closest to their hotel, all without leaving the AI conversation (and without going to your website).
What Can Wineries Do?
What you need is to make sure your business is recommended by AI chatbots to potential visitors.
Traditional SEO remains extremely important. A well-structured website with useful content (regularly posted, relevant blogs!), strong local SEO, clear business information, and a solid technical foundation gives both search engines and AI chatbots more information to work with. This is the foundation of your online visibility.
Everything else changes, and it changes fast. ChatGPT will prioritize Bing one day, and move to Google the other. Reddit was a big source of information for ChatGPT until just this week, when Reddit sources dropped by 80% in one day. Because of the fast, sometimes unexpected changes, sticking to the basics is that much more important.
That doesn’t mean you forget about AI visibility. What we at Astra recommend and implement for our clients is expanding the existing SEO strategies. Instead of abandoning the basics, we want to go a step further. This includes more research for blog topics and structures to make sure that your content is fresh and AI-friendly. Increasing your brand mentions across different internet sources (backlinks are still relevant, but the way people talk about you across forums, Facebook groups, and in reviews (!) is gaining importance). Staying on top of recent recommendations for website optimization is crucial.
Keep in mind that not all big trends actually work. Mark Williams-Cook, a great authority in all things SEO, proved recently that the LLMs.txt file does not actually help with AI visibility through a fun, cat-focused (or rather, cats.txt-focused) experiment. You can read more about it here.
So there isn't a single “AI SEO strategy” that wineries can follow and expect to work forever. For now, the best approach is to continue investing in proven SEO fundamentals while paying attention to how AI search develops.
Start Asking: “What Does AI Say About Our Winery?”
There is no magic tactic that guarantees a winery will appear in an AI recommendation. Instead, wineries should focus on becoming the kind of business that is easy to understand and recommend.
One simple way to start is to test AI search yourself. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, or another AI search tool questions your potential customers might ask:
“What's a great winery to visit in Sonoma for Pinot Noir?”
“What are the best wineries near Paso Robles for a couple?”
“Which Napa wineries have beautiful vineyard views?”
Is your winery mentioned? Is the information accurate? Are competitors being recommended for reasons that also apply to your business?
This kind of monitoring is still evolving, but it can provide useful insight into how your brand is represented in the new search landscape.
Website Traffic Doesn't Tell the Whole Story
This shift also changes how marketers think about website traffic. With traditional search, someone might search “Napa Valley wine tasting,” click a winery's Google result, visit the website, and eventually book a tasting. But what happens when an AI tool provides the recommendation instead?
A customer might ask ChatGPT for winery recommendations, see your winery mentioned, and then open your website in a separate tab. They might remember your name, search for it later, or visit your tasting room without ever clicking the original source link.
From an analytics perspective, that visit could look like direct or branded traffic rather than a customer who discovered the winery through AI. In other words, AI may influence the customer before the website visit, while traditional analytics are generally better at measuring what happens after someone clicks.
This makes AI visibility harder to measure. There isn't a universal AI ranking where you can see that your winery is “number three” for a particular question. AI answers can vary based on the wording of a query, the user's location, previous conversation, platform, available sources, and other factors.
For marketers, this means success needs to be viewed more broadly. Website traffic and conversions still matter, but so does understanding whether your brand is appearing in the conversations your potential customers are having.
AI Is Changing Search — Not the Fundamentals of Good Marketing
AI is changing how people discover businesses, research their options, and decide where to spend their time and money.
For wineries, that means the traditional goal of getting someone to click a Google result is no longer the entire picture. A potential customer may discover your brand through an AI recommendation, research it without visiting your website, and only arrive on your site once they're ready to take action. That makes brand visibility, reputation, useful content, and accurate information more important than ever.
The good news is that wineries don't need to chase every new AI trend.
Keep investing in good SEO. Create useful content. Make your business information clear and consistent. Build your reputation across the web. Explain what makes your winery different. And pay attention to how AI tools describe and recommend your brand. Think of traditional SEO as the foundation. AI visibility is another layer built on top of it.
The technology will continue to change. The wineries that make themselves useful, trustworthy, and easy to understand will be in the best position to be discovered, wherever their customers choose to search.
If you have any questions, and especially if you are ready to embrace optimizing for AI Chatbots but need some help, our Astra team is here to help! Read our Blog on SEO.
AI Visibility Checklist for Wineries
Don’t forget about traditional SEO! Make sure your website meets the modern requirements, loads fast, and is mobile-friendly.
Keep your business information complete and current on your website and across social media, third-party sites, and others.
Regularly post important, informative blogs and build your authority. Make sure your posts answer questions potential visitors might ask.
Maintain strong local SEO and an accurate Google Business Profile. Build your reputation through genuine reviews.
Test AI search to see whether your winery appears and whether the information is accurate.
Check how your brand is seen outside of your website. Monitor backlinks, Reddit, and Facebook groups.
Bibliography:
Southern, Matt G. “Why Reddit's ChatGPT Citation Drop Isn't Fully Explained.” Search Engine Journal, 19 August 2026, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-reddits-chatgpt-citation-drop-isnt-fully-explained/586479/. Accessed 21 August 2026.
Williams-Cook, Mark. “How Cats.txt Showed LLMs.txt Evidence Is GEO Astrology.” Search Engine Journal, 7 August 2026, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-cats-txt-showed-llms-txt-evidence-is-geo-astrology/584653/. Accessed 21 August 2026.
Deda, Yulia. “LLMs.txt: Why Brands Rely On It and Why It Doesn't Work.” SE Ranking, 7 November 2025, https://seranking.com/blog/llms-txt/. Accessed 21 August 2026.
