Watermelon Ghost is a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) firm for independent hotels. We measure how AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini — recommend hotels in a given market, then ship a 90-day execution plan to move a property from invisible to recommended. Founded 2025. Built on Search in Revolt, the first published GEO framework for hospitality.
Josh and Leslie spent eight years building and consulting on brand visibility for SMBs — Reddit presence, ratings, reviews, AI footprint. They built the first version of the Ghost to guide their own client work.
When Georgina joined, her vision for the hospitality market turned it into the core business — identifying independent hotels as the first ICP, where the AI visibility problem is acute, the pain is commercial, and the timing is now.
From this, Georgina wrote Search in Revolt — the first published GEO framework — before the category had infrastructure or competition. That’s not a credential. That’s a head start.
CMO · Co-Founder
Clio Award winner. Joined a national cannabis brand at $1M, grew it to $7.5M in 12 months — earning global awards and hundreds of national press mentions. Known as the "Redditor Whisperer" for shaping organic community sentiment without it feeling like interference — directly relevant to GEO, since Reddit content is increasingly surfaced by AI as social proof. Architect of the Ghost Language System and WG's GTM strategy.
CTO · Co-Founder
A creative with a hacker's brain. Co-founded a collective of New York City creatives building consumer apps from scratch in 2005 — before the app economy existed. Spent the years since designing for Fortune 500 brands while staying on the bleeding edge of AI development. Built the Ghost's technical architecture from the ground up: a system that runs automatically at scale.
CEO · Co-Founder
Set up and ran Marriott's agency-side creative centre of excellence — working directly with properties and field marketing on property-level advertising. Saw first-hand how hard it is for hotels to market themselves, even with centralised resources. Later built and led the enterprise sales team at a creative tech firm, scaling it from $4M to $15M. Wrote Search in Revolt before the category had a name.
It’s a name with two halves. The watermelon is the loud part — bright, hard to miss, easy to underestimate. The ghost is the part that does the work — invisible until you look for it, present in every place that matters.
We’re a small team that takes the work seriously and the rest of it less so. The audits are rigorous. The deliverables are clean. Somewhere between those two things, there’s a sense of humor — and it shows up in our work whether we plan it or not.
The name does work. It signals to hotel owners that we’re not another faceless vendor shipping quarterly reports into a dashboard nobody checks. It tells them there’s a real team behind the audit — rigorous enough to trust, strange enough to remember. In a category where every competitor will eventually say “AI-powered visibility solutions,” the watermelon ghost is the one you can’t unsee.