Your guide to AI SEO for Hotels

It’s a truly exciting time to be in digital marketing. The rise of LLM’s over the past few years has led to an incredible shift in consumer behavior. AI engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity have introduced a new type of search engine experience that takes away an immense amount of friction compared to the traditional search engine marketing experience. It’s driven Google to rapidly advance its search product to introduce and evolve with features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, to retain market share and keep users on Google products. 

Our team has been researching, studying, and analyzing the user experience of these emerging technologies over the past few years. We have been deeply focused on how they work, how they compare to more traditional search engines, and what that means for helping our hotel clients ensure visibility as more and more consumers engage with these products. We’ve studied ChatGPT Search, from beta to live environments (here’s the webinar in case you missed it), and will soon be launching a webinar around our recent study of AI Mode (sign up for our newsletter to be alerted of the date). 

Our understanding of what drives visibility on AI search engines continues to evolve, as will our services to best support our hotel clients. These new answer engines are adding and ultimately replacing what used to take potential guests a massive amount of clicks to research. Ensuring your hotel is visible on the channels and content that AI engines are sourcing from is critical.

Here’s a breakdown of what we know about visibility on AI answer engines, along with what hotels need to do to best ensure and maximize visibility in these searches.

What is AI search, and how does it work?

Before we dive into what your hotel should do now to maximize chances for visibility, it’s important to understand how AI search works.

1. AI search is powered by LLMs

AI search answers are driven by large language models. The knowledge of LLMs comes from their ability to train on data from a variety of sources. They retrieve and then summarize this data for our searches, called prompts, resulting in a compilation of data it’s learned from countless sources. These LLMs all have a cut-off date for the recency of data they source. They then rely on using established search indexes, most commonly Bing, to do live retrieval for more up-to-date information. You can think of LLM’s like super-powered auto-predict. Their knowledge is based on an understanding of entity linking or the connection between references, in an effort to predict what comes next to answer your prompt or request. This indicates that the more your brand is mentioned/found across sources related to a specific topic, the more likely it is to associate your brand with the answer the users are looking for when they submit a query on that topic. 

2. LLM’s love structured content

The basis of this knowledge comes from the background that the sources LLM’s train on are centered around structured architecture. They love sites with content structured like YouTube, Reddit, and listicles (think top 10 lists). They devour formats like community forms with comments and up/down voting. They give preference for blog content providing distinct headers, lists, and bullet formats. For hotels, they often source and showcase attributes pulled from structured data on sites and sources such as Google Business Profile. They then use these structured sources, schema, and more to provide the best answer they can.

3. AI search reporting is limited

ChatGPT, Perplecity, AI Mode, you name it, reporting is even more limited than what’s been historically provided by search engines for organic search data. While Google has recently included AI mode data in Search Console, you still can’t separate it out to know how much of your organic impressions or clicks come from this feature. ChatGPT offers no search-console-like reporting. The best we have right now is looking in GA4 to find whatever clicks make it to the site. The hard part is, these types of answer engines are designed to drive fewer clicks, so without impression or mention insights, we’re missing out on an important piece of performance insights. 

While there have been numerous AI search reporting tools coming out, the extreme personalization and varied results by user make it incredibly hard to scrape and provide a position ranking report. We predict that this will continue to evolve as the top minds in the industry, driving platforms like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and more, continue to ideate on solutions.

What can hotels do to ensure visibility on AI search engines such as ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity?

While the industry’s understanding of AI search optimization continues to evolve, these are the areas or channels of focus we’ve identified to be most critical for hotels right now:

1. Emphasis on Local SEO 

Each different AI SEO study for hotels that we’ve completed has unveiled elements and sources that overlap with traditional local SEO. This includes:

• Google Business Profile listing attributes
• Google, TripAdvisor, and other guest reviews
• Consistency of hotel descriptions/up to date information found across listing sites on the web

2. Utilization of Schema/Structured Data on your hotel’s website

LLM’s love structured content. This applies to your hotel’s own website as well as other sources they prefer to learn from and source summary information. On your hotel website, this means making sure you’re using schema.org’s structured data markup for applicable information on your site, such as:

• Local business organization
• Product
• FAQs and more

3. Expand and revisit your hotel’s website content

Ensuring your hotel’s website has comprehensive information about different amenities and features of your hotel, as well as the local area, is important to being represented in AI search results. This includes:

• Well-rounded content in multi-modal form - text, image, video
• Conversational text
• Expanded content to fully answer topics and questions
• Structured content, including FAQs

4. Technical SEO and site architecture 

While Technical SEO has been historically important for traditional search engines, its focus is enhanced for AI agents. This includes:

• Reviewing site code for proper markup
• Reviewing site health and page speed, such as Core Web Vitals
• Ensuring to resolve and address other technical seo issues on your hotel’s website
• Internal linking strategies for related content 

5. Social Media content

If it wasn’t already, the new world of SEO is quickly changing to a “search everywhere optimization” definition. Recent updates, such as news of the Instagram indexing controls, are bringing new light to how social media content is surfacing on search engines, including AI search. Make sure your property is:

• Communicating blogs, news, reviews, and features about your brand via organic social media posts. 
• Participating and responding to comments and conversations

6. PR and link building

One metric that continues to be noted with high importance for AI search optimization is the concept of ‘brand mentions’. In traditional SEO, link building has been a long-standing tactic for off-page SEO. In the view of LLMs and AI search, high amounts of brand mentions with context around specific topics increase your brand’s chances of being included in summaries and answers for those types of prompts. It’s essential to be competitive in this space. This includes:

• Building partnerships with local, related organizations and coordinating online mentions or website links
• Local listing sites such as the Chamber of Commerce
• Finding a PR agency to help secure inclusion and brand mentions in top publications
• Working with bloggers, tied closely to your local region and/or affinity audiences, to be featured in their top 10 lists or area guide articles

7. YouTube, Reddit, and community forms

Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine? It’s also one of the favorite sources for LLM’s to learn from. Why? Because of the structured format of the content. From its videos, to titles and descriptions, comments, and thumbs up/down voting, it’s easy to consume and contains an incredible amount of information. Similarly, community forms like Reddit and Quora offer easy-to-consume data for LLM’s to study and learn. These pose additional opportunities for hotels to increase visibility, whether it’s through their own (or influencers') channels on YouTube, related community threads on Reddit or TripAdvisor, and more.

There are numerous facets to visibility and ranking in AI SEO, similar to traditional SEO. As you may have noticed, a lot of them even overlap with tactics that are important for traditional SEO. It can be overwhelming when trying to navigate limited resources or budget. We recommend focusing on the critical ones and testing new ones as you find new resources to support your AI SEO endeavours and, ultimately, building your brand. Lean on partners that specialize in each of these areas of expertise and services. 

Our hotel marketing team is here to support your goals as well as recommend additional resources that can help achieve them. Please reach out with your questions; our team is happy to assist.