The Visit North Yorkshire website is nearing its first anniversary, with a estimated 1.5M sessions and placement across North Yorkshire search engine results. While we are incredibly pleased with what we have achieved, there is much we plan to add, refine and improve.
There are a lot of challenges in creating a destination website for a county the size of North Yorkshire, and this was something we were acutely aware of from the very start. This county is 100 miles wide, and takes three hours to drive across. It contains some places that are already incredibly well known and popular, and others that we know are fantastic places to visit but have yet to receive the profile and recognition they deserve. It also contains thousands of attractions, businesses, and points of interest.
We are constantly reviewing and examining how our site performs and through 2026 we will be introducing several improvements.
Revising our place page content and design
The pages for places, be it Harrogate and Scarborough or Hawes and Danby need to do a lot of different things for different users. We will be making changes to our place page design to make the content easier to interpret, and add new pages and content to further illustrate what our amazing places have to offer visitors.
Further improving our AI compatibility
The way people search and receive information has been changing faster than ever in the last two years. It is important to realise that AI is not magic, but an efficient and sophisticated tool for interpreting information. Our web providers work closely with Google and have been refining how our website, and the data it contains can be accessed by large language models (AI chatbots and search tools). New features introduced recently mean we can offer you and your business a way to feed your content and information into these popular new tools.
New food and drink criteria and features
We will be introducing new fields and searchability for Food & Drink businesses, that will detail cuisine, price band and dining style to help users explore our incredible food and drink offer. There will also be the option to include reservation management on compatible platforms.
New FAQs feature
Our new FAQs feature answers those regular questions people have about your business in a quick clear and simple way. Plus, this content will also help detail your business to AI chatbots, and AI search tools.
You will be asked for FAQs when we next renew or update your listing, but if you can’t wait – please contact us.
Accessibility Criteria
VisitBritain has introduced a standard set of criteria around accessibility to help users search for and find businesses that meet specific needs. We will be gathering data to enhance listings of Silver and above with this detail over the coming months using a new data capture tool, AccessIndex.Â
These new criteria will sit alongside and work with our existing universal support for Accessible North Yorkshire and AccessAble.
Availability Search
We will be asking accommodation businesses who use TXLoad, Freetobook, SuperControl or bookalet to let us know and make their availability visible to use to display for visitors, with more providers on the way.Â
If your provider is not one of those listed above you may still be able to send us availability using TXGB, if your provider offers a connection to the service.
Experience Listings
Our website has a new Experiences listing feature, you can promote Experiences you offer these using dedicated standalone listings, rather than this details being buried in your main text.
We are looking to add more experiences and will now be including experiences in our marketing output for 2026 so if you offer your visitors the chance to get hands on, behind the scenes or try something new we want it in our Experiences section.
Behind the scenes we will also be working with our providers to make the site more efficient, more effective in marketing and promoting North Yorkshire and its businesses.
Find our more about the options available for being listing on the Visit North Yorkshire website.
