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As of 12 August 2026, AI can plan your wedding seating chart.
Most people should do this themselves; the prompt is on this page.
Can you do it?
5 minutesto a draft.
15 minutesto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£0
Skill needednone
Who has to check ityou
What the alternative costsA wedding planner folds the seating plan into a wider package; doing it by hand commonly costs an evening or three of index cards and negotiation.
If this goes wrong: the worst case is an awkward table discovered over the starter, and the chart can be quietly fixed right up to the day the stationery prints.
What to actually do
Do it yourself
The route this page recommends
A chat interface, no skill needed, and roughly 15 minutes until you can act on the result.
Prompt
Seat these 40 guests at five tables of eight. Hard rules: Sarah and Pete are divorced and never share a table. Jean and Frank know only the bride's family. The top table is Emma, James, Priya, Dan, Margaret, David, Patricia and Colin. The six university friends may split three and three but nobody sits at a table where they know no one. Output the chart as a printable table, name every rule you could not satisfy and why, and list every guest seated with no one from their own group. Guests by group: couple: Emma, James. bride's family: Sarah, Pete, Margaret, David, Sophie, Tom, Grace, Ruth. bride's cousins: Ellie, Nathan. groom's family: Patricia, Colin, Laura, Mark, Eileen, Stephen, Nicola, Craig. university friends: Priya, Dan, Katie, Rob, Hannah, Sam. work: Aisha, Ben, Carys, Josh, Megan, Paul. school: Lucy, Jack, Amy, Gary, Zoe, Will. neighbours: Jean, Frank.
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
Use a tool built for this
Second choiceHand it to a person
The distant thirdA person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.
What it gets wrong
- When the rules cannot all hold it drops one silently and presents the chart as clean; ask it to declare every unsatisfied rule and it becomes honest.
- It loses count: tables of eight quietly seat nine, and a guest vanishes between drafts, so the final headcount check stays yours.
- It optimises the puzzle, not the room: it cannot know that two names who look unconnected have history, which is exactly the knowledge the chart exists to encode.
Even on a YES, the friction has a name: context depth.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 2 |
| Inputs | 1 |
| Verification | 2 |
| Liability | 2 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 9 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can ChatGPT do my wedding seating plan?
- Yes. The answer here is YES. Given your guest list and the real constraints, who cannot sit together, who must, it solves the puzzle in minutes, and you can check the result against your own rules in one pass before anything prints.
- How do I give AI my seating chart constraints?
- List guests with their group, then state the hard rules plainly: never together, must be together, table sizes, the top table. Ask it to name any rule it could not satisfy rather than hiding it, and to flag guests seated among strangers. The quality of the chart is the quality of your rules.
- What does AI get wrong in seating plans?
- Three things, all checkable: it drops a constraint silently when the puzzle is too tight, it miscounts seats at a table, and it cannot know unstated history between guests. Count heads, check your hard rules one by one, and keep the family diplomacy for yourself.
- Is there etiquette AI should know for the top table?
- The traditional English top table has a fixed order, and Debrett's guidance is that modern couples may depart from it freely, especially around divorced parents. Tell the model which convention you want; it will follow either, but choosing is a family decision, not a formatting one.
Nearby answers
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