How to get your hotel recommended by AI

None of this is a trick. Answer engines recommend hotels the way a well-read friend would: from what they’ve read, who they trust, and how clearly the place describes itself. The work below simply makes you easy to read, easy to verify, and easy to vouch for.

1. Make your site readable by AI crawlers

If an engine can’t fetch your pages, it can’t recommend you. Check that your robots.txt doesn’t block AI crawlers like GPTBot, that your key content is real text rather than trapped in images or scripts, and that pages load without a login wall. Our free crawlability check shows which AI bots can reach you today.

2. Add correct Hotel schema

Structured data tells machines, in a format they don’t have to guess at, that you are a hotel — with this name, this address, this star rating and these amenities. Add schema.org Hotel markup to your homepage and room pages, and keep it accurate. It’s the difference between an engine describing you correctly and inventing details.

3. Publish an llms.txt

An llms.txt file is a short, plain-text summary of your property placed at your domain root, written for AI crawlers. Use it to state who you are, where you are, what makes you distinct and which pages matter. It’s an emerging convention, cheap to add, and it hands engines a clean description instead of leaving them to piece one together.

4. Make every listing agree

Engines cross-check you against Google, Booking, Expedia, TripAdvisor and your own site. When those disagree — a different address, an old name, a star rating that doesn’t match — the model hedges or drops you. Pick your canonical details and make every listing say exactly the same thing.

5. Earn mentions on the sources AI trusts

Engines quote third parties far more readily than they quote you about yourself. A place on a credible “best hotels in the city” list, a mention in a local guide, a steady stream of specific recent reviews — these give the model concrete, trustworthy phrases to repeat. Reviews that mention what you’re actually good at (the breakfast, the quiet rooms, the walk to the station) become the exact language an engine uses to recommend you.

6. Measure, then fix in order

You can’t improve what you can’t see. Find out which questions you already win, which you lose, and who gets recommended instead — then work the gaps by impact rather than guessing. That’s the whole point of an audit: turn “are we visible?” into a ranked list of fixes.

If the terms here are new, the glossary defines them, and What is AEO? covers the bigger picture.

Frequently asked questions