AI visibility for hotels: how ChatGPT decides which hotel to recommend

What do travellers ask AI about hotels?

Travel questions are specific. They name a venue, a date, a need and a budget, and the engine builds a short list around them.

• Which hotel is closest to SoFi Stadium with free parking?
• Pet-friendly hotels near Disneyland with a shuttle?
• Where should I stay near the convention center for a three-day conference?
• Hotels near the airport with a free shuttle and late check-in?
• Which hotels near downtown have suites with a kitchen for a family of five?
• Is there a hotel within walking distance of the arena that doesn't charge a resort fee?

Why does AI recommend a competitor?

• Online travel agencies describe thousands of hotels in the same format, and engines read them often. If the travel agency page says more about a rival's parking or distance than about yours, the rival is easier to recommend.
• For a franchised hotel, the brand website owns the main page about the property. The owner usually controls little of what it says, and it is often thin on local questions such as the walk to a venue.
• Distance claims conflict. One page says five minutes, another says two miles, a third says nothing. An engine that cannot tell which is true often picks a hotel whose facts agree.
• Fees and policies hide behind booking steps. Parking cost, pet fees and resort fees that only appear at checkout are invisible to an engine answering a question about them.
• Answers depend on where and what the traveller asks. A hotel strong for airport questions can be absent for event questions in the same city.

What should a hotel fix first?

• Measure first: the questions travellers ask about your area, on each engine, and which hotels each engine names instead of you.
• State the facts that decide hotel questions in plain text: distance and walking or driving time to the venues people ask about, parking and its cost, shuttle, pet policy, fees, room types, check-in and check-out times.
• Make those facts agree everywhere: your own pages, the brand page, the travel agency listings and your Google Business Profile.
• For franchised hotels, read your franchise agreement and brand standards before publishing pages about the property, since brands often restrict what owners can publish under the brand name.
• Do not block the AI search crawlers or live fetchers in robots.txt.

How do you measure it?

Count how often each engine names the hotel for the questions travellers ask, how often it is named first, and which hotels are named instead, from the places travellers search from. Hotel questions vary with events and seasons, so compare like with like: the same questions, on the same engines, month over month.

What does an AEO company for hotels do?

It measures each property's share of AI answers against the hotels travellers compare it with, and works to raise it. For a hotel group that means measuring property by property, because each one competes for different venues, airports and neighbourhoods.

Cloute measures each hotel monthly on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews against its local rivals, and its team does the work to move it.