Nicolas Sitter
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Live · refreshed weeklyUpdated October 5, 2026

AI Hotel Landscape

How leading AI assistants recommend hotels — 616 prompts across 56 destinations, refreshed every Monday.

Data is directional. Some prompts retry due to upstream variance, so absolute counts can shift ±5% week to week.
PROMPTS

The 11 prompts we ask Copilot about Punta Cana

Same 11 question patterns asked about every destination — persona (couples, families, solo, business), budget (luxury, mid, budget), and zoom (city-wide, neighborhood, landmark).

best hotels in Punta Cana
zoom: widecontrol
boutique hotels in Bávaro, Punta Cana
zoom: near
luxury hotels in Punta Cana
budget: luxuryzoom: wide
family friendly hotels in Punta Cana
persona: familieszoom: wide
best hotels in Punta Cana for solo travelers
persona: solo_leisurezoom: wide
hotels near Bávaro Beach, Punta Cana
zoom: near
affordable hotels in Punta Cana under $200
budget: budgetzoom: wide
hotels in Punta Cana with rooftop pool
zoom: wide
best hotels in Bávaro, Punta Cana
zoom: near
best hotels in Punta Cana for business travelers
persona: solo_businesszoom: wide
best hotels in Punta Cana for couples
persona: coupleszoom: wide
HIGHLIGHTS

Named hotels in Punta Cana — Copilot

Copilot's top picks specifically in Punta Cana, DO. Pick a different destination above, or clear to see worldwide.

Hotel of the Week
4 mentions
—

Most-mentioned hotel by Copilot this week.

Top 20 hotels by Copilot mentions — week of October 5, 2026
#HotelCityChainMentionsW/W
51Four Seasons Resort Maldives at Kuda Huraa—Four Seasons4↑ 1
184Villa Nautica, Maldives——3↑ 2
101Excellence Punta CanaPunta Cana—3↑ 1
155Puntacana ResortPunta Cana—3—
160Sanctuary Cap CanaPunta CanaMarriott3↑ 2
213Conrad Maldives Rangali Island—Hilton2↑ 1
319Majestic Elegance Punta CanaPunta Cana—2↑ 1
328Meliá Caribe Beach ResortPunta CanaMeliá2NEW
329Meliá Punta Cana Beach Wellness Inclusive - Adults onlyPunta CanaMeliá2NEW
241Gili Lankanfushi Maldives——2↓ 1
373Secrets Cap Cana Resort & SpaPunta Cana—2↑ 1
315Lopesan Costa Bávaro Resort, Spa & CasinoPunta Cana—2↑ 1
434The St. Regis Maldives Vommuli Resort—Marriott2NEW
637Eden Roc Cap CanaPunta Cana—1↓ 1
632Dreams Royal Beach Punta CanaPunta CanaHyatt1NEW
649Excellence El CarmenPunta Cana—1NEW
539Barceló Bávaro Beach - All Inclusive Adults OnlyPunta CanaBarceló1—
540Barceló Bávaro PalacePunta CanaBarceló1—
526Ayada Maldives——1NEW
1069Punta Cana PrincessHigüey—1NEW
This is the top 20 of this week, so the W/W column skews upward by construction: a hotel that fell simply drops out of the table rather than showing a ↓. Read it as “what rose into the top 20”, not as a balanced gainers-and-losers view — the risers and fallers below are computed over every hotel, not just these twenty.
SOURCES

Where Copilot pulls hotel information from

Every URL Copilot retrieved classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.

Chain
38.0% (30)
Independent Hotel
27.8% (22)
Other
26.6% (21)
Review Site
5.1% (4)
Editorial
1.3% (1)
OTA & Aggregator
1.3% (1)
Top categories
Chain
barcelo.com 38% · hyattinclusivecollection.com 33% · melia.com 29%
38.0%30
Independent Hotel
a2.adform.net 46% · lopesan.com 31% · palladiumhotelgroup.com 23%
27.8%22
Other
allinclusiveoutlet.com 36% · transat.com 36% · nowdestinations.com 27%
26.6%21
Review Site
tripadvisor.ca 50% · tripadvisor.com 25% · tripadvisor.es 25%
5.1%4
Editorial
luxurylink.com 100%
1.3%1
OTA & Aggregator
wotif.co.nz 100%
1.3%1
Has that changed over time?
22 weeks · 2026-05-11 → 2026-10-05

Share of citations by source type, week by week, for Punta Cana. Search engine is its own bucket rather than part of metasearch, and covers Google (every regional domain), Bing and the rest. Google AI Mode routes its cited sources through google.com/searchviewer instead of linking the publisher, and those citations were landing under “meta-search” alongside trivago and kayak — which made the mix read as competitive pressure from metasearch when actual metasearch is under 1%. The dashed rule marks the week that started.

ChainIndependent hotelOtherReview siteOTAEditorialSocialSmaller categories
0%20%40%60%searchviewer05-1106-0106-2207-1308-0308-2409-1410-05

Which categories get a line is decided once over the whole window by total citations, not week by week — otherwise a category dropping out of the top N would look like it collapsed to zero. Everything below the cut is summed into “smaller categories” rather than dropped, so the lines always account for the full week. Citations per week: 05-11 41 · 05-18 67 · 05-25 61 · 06-01 82 · 06-08 67 · 06-15 56 · 06-22 25 · 06-29 64 · 07-06 51 · 07-13 73 · 07-20 110 · 07-27 94 · 08-03 72 · 08-10 73 · 08-17 94 · 08-24 71 · 08-31 160 · 09-07 69 · 09-14 98 · 09-21 67 · 09-28 76 · 10-05 79.

REDDIT & YOUTUBE

Does Copilot send people to Reddit and YouTube?

Share of answers citing at least one Reddit thread or YouTube video, week by week. Worldwide.

How often does Copilot cite Reddit or YouTube?
24 weeks · 2026-04-27 → 2026-10-05

Share of answers citing at least one Reddit thread or YouTube video. Counted from the citation domains, so this measures what Copilot showed as a source — not whether it read them.

RedditYouTube
0%10%04-2705-1806-0806-2907-2008-1008-3109-2110-05

Latest week (2026-10-05): 0 of 1,232 answers cited Reddit (0.0%), 0 cited YouTube, across 4,828 citations.

BRANDS

Top hotel parent groups in Punta Cana — Copilot

Each Copilot mention matched against Google Places, then rolled up to parent group (Marriott = Ritz-Carlton + Westin + Sheraton + EDITION + …, etc.). WoW delta vs last week. Detection via 175+ brand-domain rules.

#BrandMentionsHotelsW/W
1Meliá64—
2Marriott53↑ 66.7%
3Hyatt33↑ 200.0%
4Barceló22· 0%
Chain vs Independent

Of the hotels named this week: how many resolved to a chain (Marriott / Accor / …), an independent property, a vacation rental, or stayed unmatched.

Chain44.4%↑ 166.7%
Independent52.8%↑ 35.7%
Vacation rental0.0%
Unresolved2.8%· 0%
DEFINITIONS

What every metric means

Plain-English definitions for each number on this page. For deeper visuals + examples, see the annual landscape report linked at the bottom.

Captures
Number of AI responses we collected this week. Target = 616 per platform (one per prompt). Less when there are upstream errors.
Web search
Did the response trigger a live web fetch? Detected from the underlying response stream’s search-result events, not the unreliable top-level flag. We do NOT force web search — this is organic model behavior.
Map widget
Did the response render a hotel-card map (the Google-Maps-style widget ChatGPT shows for travel queries)? Each card is a "map entity" with its own provider.
Sponsored placements
Paid sponsor placements. Detected from real single-advertiser ad units in the response stream. Excludes ChatGPT’s organic shopping cards (which are unpaid product carousels). US/AU/NZ/CA only as of May 2026.
Sources / response
Distinct URLs the model consulted while answering — the URLs that show up in its retrieval log, regardless of whether it cited them inline. Computed only over web-search responses (otherwise the answer is from training data, no sources to count).
Citations / response
Subset of sources that the model rendered as inline footnote pills in the answer. A source becomes a citation when the model explicitly references it.
Fanouts / response
Number of sub-queries the model spun up internally to answer the prompt (e.g. "best hotels Paris" might fan out to "hotels Paris Marais", "luxury hotels Paris", "rooftop hotels Paris", …).
Map entities / response
Hotel cards inside the map widget. Each carries a provider (Google Places, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Foursquare, SERP) and a place ID where applicable.
OTA
Online travel agency (Booking, Expedia, Hotels.com, Agoda, Trip.com, Priceline, etc.) — commission-based booking sites.
Direct
A hotel’s own website. Computed at request time by matching the cited domain against Google Places.
Chain
A hotel chain’s brand website (hilton.com, marriott.com, ihg.com, …). 175+ chain-domain rules.
Editorial
Travel media (Condé Nast Traveler, Time Out, Lonely Planet, Forbes Travel Guide, NYT, etc.) and city-specific travel blogs (santorinidave.com, theurbanlist.com, etc.).
Directory
Multi-property hotel consortia / brand collectives (Small Luxury Hotels of the World, Design Hotels, Preferred Hotels, Virtuoso, …). Aggregate hotels under one umbrella but aren’t a single OTA.
Review
TripAdvisor, Oyster, Yelp, Trustpilot, Holidaycheck — review-first platforms.
Want a deeper read? See the in-depth annual report