As we move further away from Google search results pages into AI conversations, the challenge has shifted from findability to extractability. If AI can read your website and understand what you offer, then there is a good chance it will confidently recommend you to the right traveler at the right moment.
NB: This is an article from Vikram Singh
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
It is important to note that AI results are about as inconsistent as Google Search was in its early days. Improving AI is not a hotel’s job. There are billions of dollars getting poured into that. All you need to do is continually make sure that your hotel content can be consumed by AI.
The Guest Journey Has Changed
A traveler planning a long weekend in Miami no longer opens twelve browser tabs, cross-references review sites, and digs through OTA listings. They open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and ask: “What’s the best boutique hotel in South Beach for a couples trip?” In seconds, AI delivers a curated, confident answer drawn from everything it has absorbed across the web. No search results page. No ads (yet). Just a clear recommendation.
This is the new discovery moment. If your hotel isn’t represented in the content AI can read, you simply don’t exist in that moment. Think of it like the second page of Google results, which was jokingly referred to as a great place to “hide a dead body” because nobody goes there. A classic dad joke, and I’m fully here for it.
AI assistants are increasingly embedded throughout the trip-planning process: suggesting destinations, comparing properties, summarizing reviews, and handling bookings directly. Major OTAs are racing to integrate AI into their products. Google’s AI Overviews are already reshaping how hotel search results appear. The guest journey is being rewritten in real time.
At the center of all of it is your hotel website, which also happens to be the only thing you can control. The questions every hotel should be asking right now: Does your website actually work for an AI visitor? Is it AI-friendly and accessible? Does the information that AI needs in order to recommend you exist in a format it can read?
Know Your AI Visitors
Before diving into the checklist, you need to know that you have two distinct types of AI visiting your website.
