Trust, interactional consistency, and site immersion: How AI tour guides shape cultural heritage experiences

Cultural heritage institutions are increasingly adopting AI tour guides to enhance visitor experiences, yet limited research has explained how such technologies shape visitor satisfaction through psychological mechanisms. Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, this study develops and tests an integrated model linking AI tour guide service quality, visitors' psychological states, and visit satisfaction. Survey data were collected from 178 visitors who used AI tour guides at the Nanjing Museum, and the proposed model was examined using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results show that AI tour guide service quality significantly enhances visitors' trust, interactional consistency, and site immersion, which in turn positively affect visit satisfaction. Among these psychological states, trust exerts the strongest effect on satisfaction and shows the strongest mediating role. Interactional consistency and site immersion also significantly mediate the relationship between service quality and satisfaction. In contrast, the moderating effects of individual differences were generally weak. Residential area showed an unadjusted moderating effect on the relationship between interactional consistency and satisfaction, but this finding should be interpreted cautiously because the moderation analyses were exploratory and involved multiple tests. These findings suggest that the value of AI tour guides in cultural heritage settings depends not only on functional service quality but also on their ability to foster trust, contextual interaction, and immersive place-based experiences. This study extends S-O-R research to AI-assisted cultural heritage tourism and offers practical implications for designing more trustworthy, context-sensitive, and experience-oriented AI tour guide services. This provides practical insights for further optimizing the design of AI tour guided services for cultural heritage sites, enhancing the digital visitor experience, and strengthening cultural heritage preservation and cultural education outreach.