What Polytechnique's digital business course does not say

École polytechnique offers a course on Coursera, Digital business, on platforms: the businesses that connect two groups and hold the passage between them, as Booking does between the traveller and the host. Its readings date from 2013 to 2016. Since then, a new passage has opened between the visitor and your website: machines read your pages and answer the visitor, so that the answer often comes without a visit. For a tourist office, a local authority or a service SME, dealing with it still needs no budget: count bookings instead of visits, keep each piece of information in one place, keep your data in your own hands.

Polytechnique's Digital business course: four rules on platforms

École polytechnique offers a course in English on Coursera, "Digital business: grow on digital world": three modules, about ten hours, free to enrol. What does this course say, and what still holds in 2026? It explains platforms, that is, the businesses whose trade is to connect two groups. It describes network effects, the disruption Airbnb caused and the arm-wrestling with regulators. Its readings date from 2013 to 2016. They are still right on the principles.

Four rules stated in this course did not move between 2016 and 2026. One, a platform does not sell a product. It sells one group access to another, travellers to hosts for example, and it subsidises one side to charge the other. Two, it takes off when it removes a real nuisance, and without that nuisance it remains a fad. Three, it starts with a single service, the one that truly matters to both sides, and looks for numbers afterwards. Last rule: some low prices rest on an obligation that the competitor meets and the platform avoids. When the obligation applies to everyone, the advantage disappears. It came from the exemption, not from better organisation.

These four rules also apply to a tourist office, a local authority or a service business, with one important difference. The office is itself a platform. It connects visitors and local providers, and it is funded from one side. But the gateway, the one the visitor arrives through, belongs to others: the regional or national tourism database, the search engine, booking sites such as Booking. The course teaches you to read that position. It says nothing of what has changed since, and that is what matters to you in 2026.

Fewer clicks: two Google searches in three end without a visit

Why does your website get fewer visits than before? Your website gets fewer visits because the visitor gets an answer before reaching you. From January to April 2026, between 62 % and 70 % of Google searches ended without a single click in the four European countries measured: 69.5 % in the United Kingdom, 65.3 % in France, 63.4 % in Italy, 62.1 % in Germany, according to the Similarweb panel analysed by SparkToro (study of 16 June 2026). About two searches in three stop on Google's own page.

Answers written by AI push this further, and the figure I have comes from the United States. There the agency Seer Interactive followed 3,119 searches made to find information, from June 2024 to September 2025. When Google shows a generated answer, the click rate to websites falls from 1.76 % to 0.61 %, which is 61 % less (summary published by Search Engine Land, 4 November 2025). The same study notes that clicks also fall, less sharply, on questions with no generated answer. For Europe I have no comparable figure. The European Commission records publishers' concern in its staff working document of 28 April 2026 on the Digital Markets Act. It does not measure it.

The consequence fits in a few words, and it changes how you read your statistics. The page that used to inform is read by the machine. The machine answers the visitor. The visitor no longer comes to you. Your visit count will fall without your activity necessarily falling. Anyone who watches visits alone will decide on a number that has lost its meaning.

Booking by AI assistant: announced, not open in Europe in 2026

Will assistants book in place of your visitors? In September 2026, assistants do not book in place of your visitors, and it pays to be precise about what they can do. Since late 2025, several can complete a purchase without leaving the conversation. The movement advances in fits and starts. ChatGPT launched the feature in September 2025. A year later, Shopify's documentation says that a buyer coming from ChatGPT finishes the order on the merchant's own shop, that is, outside the conversation. Payment inside the conversation exists elsewhere, in Gemini or Copilot for example, and it is an American affair. On each channel Shopify opens to its merchants, the shop must sell to customers in the United States. Copilot's payment is shown only to them.

For your trade, accommodation booking is announced, and it remains closed in September 2026. Google has published a standard for hotel booking by its assistants and invites professionals to join a waiting list. Activities and ticketing are not in it. I found no case in service in Europe.

So there is no rush, but the direction is set. The technical rules that connect assistants to business software are published as open standards. Several were handed to independent foundations in 2025 and 2026. I infer that access will be open to all. The difference will be made elsewhere, on two points: who holds the up-to-date information, and who holds the relationship with the customer.

Digital Markets Act: two rights to ask for in writing

What can you demand from the large platforms? You can demand two things from the large platforms, provided you ask for them yourself. The Digital Markets Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/1925) applies across the European Union and targets the very large platforms the Commission has designated. Google, Apple and Booking are among them. The regulation does not apply to your organisation. It gives you rights against these platforms when you sell or make yourself known through them.

The first right: to propose your offers to customers you acquired on the platform, and to conclude the sale with them outside it, free of charge (Article 5(4)). The Commission has enforced it. On 23 April 2025 it fined Apple 500 million euros for preventing businesses from steering their customers to their own channels. The second right is free access to the data your activity produces on the platform (Article 6(10)).

These rights are exercised only if someone asks the platform for them, in writing. In an organisation with no lawyer, the whole question is who. What I write here is a reading of the text, not legal advice, and it does not cover the United Kingdom, which has its own rules.

Four moves with no budget for a tourist office or an SME

What can you do now, with no budget? You can make four moves now, and none asks you to build an assistant, a chatbot or a platform. Money is not the brake. In 2025, 17 % of small businesses in the European Union (10 to 49 employees) used AI, against 55 % of large ones. Among those that considered it without adopting it, the first reason given is lack of expertise (Eurostat, data of December 2025).

First move: count bookings, calls and quote requests, and leave visits aside. One reading a month is enough.

Second move: keep each piece of information in one place, whether it is opening hours, prices, availability or conditions. One reference record feeds the website, the Google listing and the booking tool. Search engines and assistants read it, and purchases made by assistants will rely on it if they open in Europe.

Third move: write in plain words the facts the machine will quote. These are the hours, the prices, the capacity, the area covered, the names of people and the current dates. If the generated answer quotes someone, it may as well be you. Choose also which robots are allowed to read your website. The services that deliver websites offer that setting, often at no charge.

Fourth move: keep the data and the relationship with your customers in your own hands, whatever the software of the moment. At each renewal, ask in writing for an export in an open format. The customer list, the bookings and the invoicing stay in a tool whose access your organisation holds.

A world where the visitor clicked

The course is worth recommending to anyone who wants to understand why booking sites such as Booking take a commission without producing anything. Yet it describes a world where the visitor clicked, and that world is closing. The temptation is to buy something in response: an assistant on the website, a redesign, one more subscription. The opposite is what should be done. Machines read your information. If it is entered in three places and contradicts itself, no tool will correct that, and the machine will quote the wrong version with confidence.

There are several cases where you need nobody, and you can recognise them on your own. If your bookings and calls hold from one year to the next, the fall in visits costs you nothing: note it and move on. If your hours and prices are the same on the website, on Google and in the printed brochure, your information is already well kept: keep the person who keeps it. If your website comes from a shared platform run by a region or a national body, these questions are for that platform. The check also has its limits: comparing three displays shows that a gap exists, without saying where it comes from.

If you are in the situation where the same information is entered twice, in the regional database and on the website, and the screens show something else, the architecture diagnostic is what answers it. It draws on one page the map of your tools, the flows between them and who holds each access. It names the dependencies that expose you. It leaves you a ranked action plan that your team or your current supplier can carry out. It sells nothing to build. Its price is set out in the written note that follows the first call.