AEO & AI-visibility glossary for hotels

The vocabulary of AI hotel visibility, in plain English. Each term is defined on its own, so you can drop into whichever one you need.

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

The practice of getting your hotel named and recommended inside the answers AI engines write, rather than ranked in a list of links. The goal is to be in the answer when a traveller asks an assistant where to stay.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

A near-synonym for AEO that emphasises the generative model producing the answer. In day-to-day use the two mean the same thing for hotels: earn a mention in the AI's reply.

Answer engine

An AI system that responds to a question with a written answer instead of a page of links. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews are the ones travellers use most.

Large language model (LLM)

The type of AI model that powers answer engines. It generates replies word by word based on patterns in the text it was trained on and the sources it can read at answer time.

Coverage

The share of relevant guest questions in which your hotel is mentioned at all. If you appear in 30 of 100 tracked questions, your coverage is 30%. It is the headline measure of AI visibility.

Share of voice

How often your hotel is mentioned compared with your competitors across the same set of questions. High coverage with low share of voice means rivals are being named alongside you more often.

Unbranded query

A question that doesn't name your hotel — for example, "best family hotel near the old town". These matter most, because they're how travellers who don't yet know you discover somewhere to stay.

Citation

A source an answer engine draws on and often links to when it recommends a hotel — a review site, a city guide, a blog. Being cited by the sources an engine trusts is one of the strongest ways to get mentioned.

Hotel schema

Structured data (from schema.org) added to your website that tells machines you are a hotel and states your name, address, star rating and amenities in a format they can read reliably. It helps engines describe you correctly.

llms.txt

A plain-text file at the root of a website that summarises the site for AI crawlers, similar in spirit to robots.txt. For hotels it's an emerging way to hand engines a clean, accurate description of the property.

Google AI Overviews

The AI-generated summary that appears above Google's normal results for many searches. It's a separate surface from the classic blue links, and a hotel can be present in one and absent from the other.

Grounding

When an answer engine bases its reply on real, retrievable sources rather than memory alone. Well-grounded answers cite pages; the more trustworthy, consistent material an engine can find about you, the better it grounds.

Hallucination

When an AI states something confidently that isn't true — inventing an amenity, a location or a review. Accurate structured data and consistent listings reduce the chance an engine hallucinates about your hotel.