The way guests research travel and book lodging has changed. Instead of logging hours of research and opening dozens of search tabs, travelers are asking one specific question to AI models like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews, such as: “What’s a romantic hotel with the best view of downtown Charleston?”
In turn, the AI returns concise answers, usually offering three or four options that meet their travel needs, or sometimes offering only one.
According to a survey of 300 U.S. leisure travelers released earlier this year by hospitality technology firm TakeUp, 63% of travelers who have used AI for trip planning now rely on it for most or every trip, and many view the answers these bots give as a trusted recommendation, not just a starting point for research. According to the same survey, when travelers get a hotel recommendation from an AI tool they trust, 60% said they would be somewhat more likely to book it and another 23% said they’d be “much more likely.”
Unfortunately, many hotels, including quality establishments with strong service, real amenities and enviable locations, are completely invisible to this high-intent traffic. Hotels are missing these bookings without even knowing it.
Content across websites, travel publications, local guides—even reviews has become critically important to drawing your hotel into that coveted, concise AI answer.
Your Website is Still #1
The sheer volume of content that needs to be optimized to compete for visibility in AI answers can seem daunting, so start with your website. AI crawlers scan publicly available content, and your website will be the first place they look to find more information about your brand.
Many hotels build websites like digital brochures, featuring beautiful pictures surrounded by thin, generic copy. Unfortunately, an AI bot has nothing to pull from if it’s looking at a picture of a pool with the copy: “a premier destination for your leisure travel.” When it comes to website content, specificity wins, especially when AI-driven traffic is your goal. If a line in your content isn’t likely to answer a specific question posed by a potential guest, consider whether it’s adding any value at all.
If your content isn’t specific, if it’s laid out in dense paragraphs or hidden in confusing site architecture, bots—like people—can struggle to catalog it. However, if a bot has easy access to copy that says something like: “Our hotel is three blocks from downtown Charleston and within walking distance of romantic restaurants including the Peninsula Grill and Circa 1886,” it’s far more likely to return an answer featuring your hotel to the traveler who just asked for that Charleston recommendation.
Adding a well-thought-out FAQ page to your hotel’s site is an easy way to improve your odds of showing up in LLM answers. These pages offer your brand a chance to frame questions exactly the way your customers are asking their AI chatbots, and to answer them in ways that are useful to both the AI and the end user.
All Content is Potential AI Fodder
Once your hotel’s website is optimized, start looking outwards. Tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews will pull information from anywhere it’s publicly available.
Start with the content you can most easily control in-house. For example, Google’s AI Overviews draws on companies’ Google Business Profile listings, so keeping yours updated with the correct phone number and hours and refreshed photos will capture that bot’s attention.
One of the trickier aspects of AI search visibility is the fact that LLMs pay attention to what third-party sources say about you online. The more third-party places where you can show up with authority, the better. Earning mentions in trade publications and tracking the way you’re being talked about on social forums is now part of the job.
Reviews feed the same systems. What guests are saying about you is now content that feeds an LLM’s understanding of your hotel and the experience of staying there.
But reviews aren’t totally out of your hands, and there are two ways you can influence how they’re being read by AI.
First, proactively ask guests directly to review your hotel, particularly guests who seem impressed by a specific amenity or service. If it’s appropriate, encourage them to name the service or amenity they enjoyed. A hotel with tons of reviews mentioning specifics like “walkable to downtown,” “beautiful gym amenities,” “delicious breakfast worth waking up for,” will show up when travelers ask about those exact things.
Secondly, your hotel should respond to guest reviews in thoughtful and specific ways. Responding with “we’re happy you enjoyed your stay” does nothing. Responding with “we hope you enjoyed our newly renovated gym amenities and our five-star-rated breakfast” gets pulled into an AI answer.
None of this requires reinventing how you market your hotel. It requires writing down what actually makes the property specific and putting it everywhere an LLM might look. Your website, your listings, the trades, the reviews. The traveler asking about a romantic hotel near downtown Charleston is doing the same research travelers have always done. They’re just outsourcing it now, and the hotels that get named in the answer are the ones that made the specifics easy to find.
Story contributed by William Wright, head of AI & marketing innovation, DOM.