Nearabouts for councils is in free founding beta. Founding partners get full access at no cost while the product matures.
For Regional Councils & Tourism Bodies
Regional discovery infrastructure
for the independent UK
Nearabouts is a verified, editorially curated network of 0 independent places across 10 categories and 0 regions. Built and operated in the UK.
10 curated guides
Wineries and breweries. Galleries and heritage sites. Makers and studios. Coffee roasters. Restaurants and eateries. Boutique stays. Natural places. Independent retail. Vintage and antiques. Farm shops and food producers.
0 verified listings
Every listing is location-verified, contact-audited, and categorised across the network. No self-serve submissions without review. No paid placement.
0 regions mapped
From St Ives to Salcombe, Padstow to Totnes. Bounding-box geographic anchoring means every listing belongs to a real place, not a marketing label.
Why this matters
The independent layer your existing platforms miss
Your region has an official tourism-database presence and a council tourism website. Those platforms cover accredited operators and major attractions. What they typically don’t cover is the independent layer: the tasting room that opened last year, the ceramics studio operating out of a converted barn, the vintage shop drawing weekend visitors from three hours away.
These places are often the actual reason people visit a region. Nearabouts maps them systematically — verified, categorised, and positioned within a national discovery network that connects makers, producers, and cultural spaces across the country.
We’re not competing with your existing tourism assets. We’re filling the gap between what those platforms capture and what your region actually offers.
Discovery Infrastructure
How people find your region is changing
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is still essential. But a new category — generative engine optimisation (GEO) — is emerging fast. Councils that understand both will have a structural advantage.
Search · SEO
Traditional search
Google ranks pages based on relevance, authority, and structure. When someone searches “best wineries Tamar Valley,” pages with verified, well-structured listing data outperform thin directory pages and generic tourism copy.
- ✓Structured data (schema.org) on every listing
- ✓Canonical URLs per venue, per vertical
- ✓Regional pages with geographic anchoring
- ✓Internal linking across 10 vertical sites
AI Discovery · GEO
Generative search
AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews now answer travel questions directly. When someone asks “plan a weekend in the Tamar Valley,” the AI assembles an answer from structured, authoritative sources it can cite.
- ✓Cited-source architecture (AI can reference)
- ✓Entity-level data: name, location, category, description
- ✓Cross-vertical linking increases citation surface
- ✓Verified data preferred over unstructured pages
Strategic
Why early presence matters
AI models build knowledge from the structured data they can access today. Regions with well-organised, verified, consistently cited listing data will be recommended more reliably than regions without it.
Nearabouts provides this infrastructure: verified entities, structured metadata, canonical URLs, and cross-linked editorial content across 10 specialist verticals. Your region’s independent businesses become discoverable in both traditional and generative search.
The councils that move early will define how their regions are described by AI for years to come.
Partnership
What working together looks like
Verified listing data
The verified, categorised record of every independent business operating in your region. Know exactly what’s open, where, and in which category: the tasting rooms, studios, and producers that never reach the official tourism databases or your tourism site. This is the layer most regional data misses, mapped and audited.
Editorial visibility
Your region featured editorially across the Nearabouts network: homepage, discovery trails, regional pages, and the journal. Not an ad — a genuine editorial presence.
Regional content co-creation
Curate editorial trails, regional picks, and seasonal guides for your area. Your local knowledge, published through a platform that reaches independent-minded travellers nationally.
Analytics & reporting
From the day you join, your region builds a performance baseline: weekly trend lines for page views and clicks, visitor origin, search interest — including the searches that found nothing (your demand gaps) — and how your region ranks against every other Nearabouts region. Bot-filtered, exportable, and delivered to your inbox monthly as the Region Pulse.
A live sample built from real Nearabouts data — the actual deliverable, not a mock-up.
Beta access
Free right now, while we’re in beta
Nearabouts for councils is in free founding beta. Founding partners get full access at no cost while the product matures — no card, no tiers to weigh up. One offering, everything included.
What founding partners get — free
You’re set up as a founding partner with full access to everything below — the complete council toolkit, with nothing held back behind a higher tier.
- ✓Your region’s complete verified listing data, with performance (views & clicks)
- ✓A live region dashboard, kept current automatically
- ✓Multiple regions in a single dashboard
- ✓Weekly trend analytics — views, clicks, visitor origin and unique visitors, with period-on-period change
- ✓Search-demand insights — what visitors looked for, and the demand gaps no spend data can see
- ✓A digital presence audit of your local operators, with exportable hit-lists for capability programs
- ✓Benchmarking against every other published Nearabouts region
- ✓The monthly Region Pulse — your region’s numbers in your inbox on the 1st
- ✓Regional content co-creation — trails, editorials, picks and seasonal guides
- ✓An embeddable live region map for your own website
- ✓A councillor-ready white-label report (your branding) to share or print
- ✓Export your region’s full listing data (CSV)
- ✓A direct line to the team for support and feedback
It takes a minute.
Already have an account? Sign in to your council dashboard
Common questions
How does this sit alongside the official tourism databases?
The official tourism databases focus on operator-submitted listings. Nearabouts covers the independent layer that those platforms typically miss: the small-batch vineyard that doesn’t list there, the maker studio without a tourism accreditation, the vintage shop that’s a genuine draw but isn’t on any register. We’re complementary infrastructure, not a replacement.
What does "verified" mean?
Every listing in our network is verified against its source data: confirmed active, correct location, validated contact details. We run automated audits across the full database and flag anything that fails. Venues marked as AI-generated carry a disclaimer and are excluded from editorial content until human-verified.
What commitment is required?
None. While we’re in beta it’s free for founding partners, with full access and no lock-in. You can step away at any time, and we’ll give partners plenty of notice before anything changes.
What regions are already active?
We have verified listings across all four nations, with the deepest coverage in Cornwall and Devon. Regional editorial content is growing, and council partnerships directly accelerate coverage in specific areas.
Can we contribute our own data?
Yes. Founding partners can suggest operators for consideration, with operators opting in themselves, flag corrections, and co-create editorial content for their region. All submissions go through our verification pipeline before publishing.
Who runs Nearabouts?
Nearabouts is independently operated and British-owned. The platform is built and maintained by a small team focused on documenting the independent UK.
Let’s have a conversation
I’m Matt, the founder of Nearabouts. If you represent a council, a tourism body, or a regional organisation and want to talk about what a partnership could look like for your area, I’d like to hear from you.
Not a sales pitch — a genuine conversation about your region and how we might be useful.