AI visibility for IHG hotels: 226 IHG property pages tested

What we found on IHG property pages

• None of the 226 IHG property pages answered a plain automated request with a block or a bot challenge.
• 226 of 226 could be read, with a median of about 14,815 characters of readable text in the page the server sent.
• Across every hotel page tested, 63.9% could not be read: 76.8% of pages on a hotel brand's website and 13% of hotels on their own website.
• Where we could read a host's robots.txt, none blocked an AI search crawler.

What travellers ask AI about IHG hotels

• Which Holiday Inn Express near the airport has a free shuttle?
• Is there a Staybridge Suites within walking distance of the convention centre?
• Which Candlewood Suites near me allows dogs, and what is the fee?
• Best IHG hotel near the stadium with parking included?
• Which IHG hotel in the area has the best recent reviews for cleanliness?

Why one IHG hotel gets named and another does not

A brand website describes every property in the same template. That tells an engine a hotel exists, not why a traveller should choose it over the same brand two miles away. Engines also read booking sites and review sites when they answer. What separates properties is how plainly the facts travellers ask about are stated, and whether they agree everywhere the hotel is described. Across 64,441 AI answers about local businesses, engines named a business 84% of the time when they had opened one of its own pages while answering, and 16% when they had not.

What a IHG owner or operator should check

• Ask the AI engines the questions travellers ask, many times, from the cities guests travel from, and count which hotel they name.
• Check that parking cost, shuttle hours, pet policy, breakfast and distance to nearby landmarks are stated on the property's page in plain text.
• Check that the same facts match on Google and on the booking sites.
• Ask the brand how its website treats verified AI crawlers. It is the brand's setting, not the property's.

How this was measured

Each hotel's own page, as linked from its Google Maps listing, was requested once in October 2026, identifying as an ordinary web browser, without running JavaScript, from one network location. A page counts as not read if the answer was an HTTP 403 or 429, a bot-challenge page, or no answer within 10 seconds. We never sent a request pretending to be an AI crawler, so these figures describe how a site treats automated clients in general. A brand can let verified AI crawlers through while refusing other automated clients. A page was counted under IHG when it is hosted on that brand's website. Cloute is not affiliated with IHG.