How a hotel gets recommended by AI assistants
Travellers now ask an AI assistant for “the best hotel for a family weekend” before they search. Assistants that look things up build their answer from pages they can read: hotel websites, booking and review sites, travel articles. A hotel is named when those pages clearly answer the traveller's question. Nobody can buy or guarantee a place in an answer, but there is plenty a hotel controls.
A OneHorizyn guide. Updated .
Let the assistants read your website
Assistants send bots to read pages. If your website turns them away, in its settings or at its firewall, the assistant has only what other sites say about you. The bots that fetch pages for AI answers include OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot.
- Open yourhotel.com/robots.txt and look for lines that block these bots.
- Ask whoever hosts your website whether its firewall blocks AI bots by itself. Some do, whatever your settings say.
- Check your booking engine too: it often sits at another address, with its own settings.
Answer the questions guests ask, on your own pages
An assistant recommends a hotel for what its pages plainly say. If a traveller asks for a hotel that can host a wedding for 200 and your website never gives a number, the assistant has nothing to go on.
- Write down the questions guests ask before booking, by kind of trip: families, couples, business, weddings, groups.
- Give each a clear answer in words on a page, not only in a photo or a brochure to download.
- Use real figures: distances, capacities, times, what is included.
Make your facts agree everywhere
Assistants repeat what they find. If your check-in time or pet policy is right on your website and wrong on a booking site, the wrong one can end up in an answer. Check your Google listing and each booking site against your own website, and correct the listing where a mistake started.
Be where the answers come from
Most assistants show the sources behind an answer. Ask the questions your guests ask and look at which sites are cited: review sites, a city guide, a travel article. Those are the places to be listed, reviewed or written about. Reviews matter here too, because assistants read what guests say.
How to check where you stand
- 1Write ten questions a guest of yours would ask, without your hotel's name in them.
- 2Ask each one of an assistant, more than once: answers vary from one asking to the next.
- 3Note which hotels are named, in what order, and which sources are shown.
- 4Do it again next month, after you have changed something, and compare.
