AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels: 616 prompts across 56 destinations, a monthly edition checked before it is published.
+ 44 more
The 616 prompts we ask Google AI Mode each edition
56 destinations × 11 templates. Each prompt has structured dimensions: city, country, region, persona (couples / families / solo / business), budget (luxury / mid / budget), and location zoom (wide city vs neighborhood vs landmark). Control prompts are unmodified baselines.
Every destination below gets the same 11 question types — just with the city name swapped in. That's how 56 destinations × 11 templates = 616 prompts per platform per edition.
- luxury hotels in <city>
- family friendly hotels in <city>
- hotels in <city> with rooftop pool
- hotels near <neighborhood>, <city>
- boutique hotels in <neighborhood>, <city>
- best hotels in <city> for solo travelers
- best hotels in <city>
- affordable hotels in <city> under $200
- best hotels in <city> for couples
- best hotels in <city> for business travelers
- best hotels in <neighborhood>, <city>
- hotels near <city> National Park
africa4 destinations · 44 prompts
americas14 destinations · 154 prompts
Each destination is asked the 11 prompt patterns above (11 prompts × 14 cities = 154 prompts in this region).
asia16 destinations · 176 prompts
europe17 destinations · 187 prompts
oceania5 destinations · 55 prompts
Each destination is asked the 11 prompt patterns above (11 prompts × 5 cities = 55 prompts in this region).
Named hotels of the week — Google AI Mode
Hotels Google AI Mode talked about most in this edition, with movement against the previous edition. Filtered to Google AI Mode only — switch tabs to compare across models.
Most-mentioned hotel by Google AI Mode in this edition.
| # | Hotel | City | Chain | Mentions | vs prev. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai | Mumbai | Taj | 6 | ↑ 4 |
| 2 | The Fullerton Bay Hotel Singapore | 80 Collyer Quay | — | 6 | — |
| 1 | Park Hyatt Sydney | The Rocks | Hyatt | 6 | ↑ 2 |
| 6 | The Ritz-Carlton, Toronto | Toronto | Marriott | 5 | ↑ 1 |
| 5 | The Central House Marrakech Medina | Amssafah 32، Marrakech | — | 5 | NEW |
| 4 | Courtyard by Marriott Phuket Town | Mueang Phuket District | Marriott | 5 | ↑ 4 |
| 16 | Park Hyatt Auckland | Auckland | Hyatt | 4 | ↑ 1 |
| 15 | Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, Cape Town | Gardens, Cape Town | Belmond | 4 | ↓ 2 |
| 14 | JEN Singapore Orchardgateway by Shangri-La | 277 Orchard Rd | Shangri-La | 4 | ↑ 1 |
| 13 | Hotel Vienna | Vienna | — | 4 | ↑ 2 |
| 12 | HOTEL HOTEL | Lisbon | — | 4 | — |
| 22 | Wynn Las Vegas | Las Vegas | — | 4 | ↑ 2 |
| 10 | Crowne Plaza Queenstown by IHG | Queenstown | IHG | 4 | ↑ 1 |
| 9 | Copacabana Palace, A Belmond Hotel, Rio de Janeiro | Rio de Janeiro | Belmond | 4 | ↑ 1 |
| 8 | CERVO Mountain Resort | Zermatt | — | 4 | ↑ 3 |
| 7 | Anantara Convento di Amalfi Grand Hotel | Amalfi | Minor | 4 | ↑ 3 |
| 11 | Eichardt's Private Hotel | Queenstown | — | 4 | ↑ 1 |
| 21 | Villa Bangkok Hotel | Phra Nakhon | — | 4 | NEW |
| 20 | The Silo Hotel | Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town | — | 4 | ↓ 1 |
| 19 | The Leela Palace, New Delhi | New Delhi | Leela | 4 | ↑ 1 |
When Google AI Mode hands out a hotel link, where does it go?
Every URL the AI returned for a named hotel, classified into direct (the hotel's own site), OTA (Booking / Expedia / …), chain page (marriott.com / hilton.com / …), Google Travel (Google's own hotel pages), or other. Chain folds into direct in the headline number because chain pages are still brand-controlled. Google Travel does not: it is Google keeping the booking click.
Week by week. Google Travel is a link to the hotel’s page on Google’s own hotel search (google.com/travel): Google keeping the booking click rather than sending it to the hotel. It is its own line, not folded into direct. From 7 September 2026 Gemini links nearly every hotel this way. Other Google is the rest of google.com (search results, maps), split out of what used to be counted as “other” for the same reason: the assistant keeping the click is worth seeing on its own rather than filed under the vaguest available label. Metasearch (trivago, kayak) stays in other — those are third-party marketplaces, not the engine linking to itself.
One note on the other line, because it used to be the least trustworthy series here. “Other” is every link we cannot place as the hotel’s own site, an OTA, a chain page or Google — so it is partly a measure of our own coverage, not only of engine behaviour. It previously showed a band of 45–65% between 08 June and 27 July that we could not explain. That band was a bug on our side, and it is now fixed. Google AI Mode returns hotel websites as bare domains (ritzcarlton.com) rather than full URLs, and the query that derives the domain for classification expects a scheme — so 16,194 perfectly classifiable links, every one of them AI Mode, were counted as “other” purely for lacking an https://. Those URLs have been normalised, the ingest no longer stores them scheme-less, and every week has been rebuilt: other is now 3.5% across all engines and weeks, and the band is gone. Read direct and OTA as behavioural; still read a move in other as measurement first.
Weekly until 19 Oct 2026, monthly from November 2026
Weeks with no classified links are omitted rather than drawn as zero — a missing run and a genuinely zero week look identical on a chart, and only one of them is a finding. Link volume per week: 04-27 1,749 · 05-04 5,310 · 05-11 2,638 · 05-18 2,357 · 05-25 2,453 · 06-01 2,437 · 06-08 2,481 · 06-15 2,496 · 06-22 2,463 · 06-29 2,481 · 07-06 2,472 · 07-13 2,209 · 07-20 2,408 · 07-27 2,637 · 08-03 2,194 · 08-10 2,141 · 08-17 2,109 · 08-24 2,045 · 08-31 2,786 · 09-07 1,699 · 09-14 1,691 · 09-21 1,561 · 09-28 1,626 · 10-05 1,371 · 10-12 1,268 · 10-19 1,727 · 11-02 1,744.
Where Google AI Mode pulls hotel information from
Every URL Google AI Mode retrieved classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.
100% of the URLs we captured were cited in the answer. A ratio that high does not mean Google AI Mode uses almost everything it finds — it means we are no longer seeing what it discards. ChatGPT sat at 24.8% on 10 August, before the retrieval layer stopped coming through. Publishing 97% as selectivity would invert the finding, so the number is withheld rather than shown. The counts below are what was captured, and are unaffected.
Search engine | 89.3% | 3,030 |
Independent Hotel | 3.4% | 117 |
Chain | 2.4% | 81 |
Editorial | 1.9% | 64 |
OTA & Aggregator | 1.2% | 40 |
Review Site | 0.7% | 25 |
Other | 0.7% | 24 |
Community | 0.1% | 4 |
Hotel Directory | 0.1% | 3 |
Social Channel | 0.1% | 2 |
Government / DMO | 0.0% | 1 |
AI Tool | 0.0% | 1 |
Share of citations by source type, week by week. 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.
Weekly until 19 Oct 2026, monthly from November 2026
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: 04-27 60 · 05-04 98 · 05-11 9,864 · 05-18 9,994 · 05-25 19,723 · 06-01 22,384 · 06-08 15,191 · 06-15 17,434 · 06-22 17,191 · 06-29 17,717 · 07-06 17,672 · 07-13 19,148 · 07-20 21,941 · 07-27 24,117 · 08-03 26,357 · 08-10 19,967 · 08-17 19,894 · 08-24 20,322.
Which domains Google AI Mode pulls most — no longer answerable
Google AI Mode stopped exposing publisher URLs in its citations. The breakdown below is withheld rather than shown as a collapse.
Since the run of 2026-08-31, Google AI Mode routes effectively every cited source through a google.com/searchviewer wrapper and the publisher URL is not present anywhere in the response. There is no publisher to attribute a citation to, so this breakdown would read “google.com 100%, every publisher zero” — which looks like publishers losing visibility and is really the measurement ending. We suppress it rather than publish it. How we decoded the wrapper. Google AI Mode’s brand and hotel data below is unaffected — those come from mentions, not citation domains.
Top hotel parent groups by Google AI Mode mentions
Each Google AI Mode mention matched against Google Places, then rolled up to parent group (Marriott = Ritz-Carlton + Westin + Sheraton + EDITION + …, etc.). Change vs the previous edition. Detection via 175+ brand-domain rules.
| 1 | Taj | 6 → 13 | +117% |
| 2 | Radisson | 10 → 19 | +90% |
| 3 | Minor | 8 → 11 | +38% |
| 4 | Marriott | 148 → 184 | +24% |
| 5 | Hyatt | 42 → 51 | +21% |
| 1 | Capella | 11 → 5 | -55% |
| 2 | Kempinski | 17 → 10 | -41% |
| 3 | Accor | 57 → 45 | -21% |
| 4 | Four Seasons | 40 → 32 | -20% |
| 5 | Langham | 11 → 9 | -18% |
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | vs prev. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marriott | 184 | 136 | ↑ 24.3% | |
| 2 | Hilton | 81 | 69 | ↑ 19.1% | |
| 3 | Hyatt | 51 | 37 | ↑ 21.4% | |
| 4 | IHG | 48 | 34 | ↑ 2.1% | |
| 5 | Accor | 45 | 33 | ↓ 21.1% | |
| 6 | Four Seasons | 32 | 21 | ↓ 20.0% | |
| 7 | Mandarin Oriental | 20 | 13 | ↓ 9.1% | |
| 8 | Radisson | 19 | 10 | ↑ 90.0% | |
| 9 | Shangri-La | 18 | 13 | ↓ 10.0% | |
| 10 | Taj | 13 | 7 | ↑ 116.7% | |
| 11 | Minor | 11 | 6 | ↑ 37.5% | |
| 12 | Kempinski | 10 | 6 | ↓ 41.2% | |
| 13 | Langham | 9 | 5 | ↓ 18.2% | |
| 14 | Belmond | 9 | 3 | · 0% | |
| 15 | Oberoi | 7 | 3 | · 0% | |
| 16 | Rosewood | 6 | 4 | ↓ 25.0% | |
| 17 | Barceló | 6 | 4 | ↑ 100.0% | |
| 18 | Leela | 5 | 2 | ↑ 25.0% | |
| 19 | Capella | 5 | 4 | ↓ 54.5% | |
| 20 | Meliá | 5 | 5 | ↓ 37.5% |
Of the hotels named in this edition: how many resolved to a chain (Marriott / Accor / …), an independent property, a vacation rental, or stayed unmatched.
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 for this edition. 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.
- 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.
Does Google AI Mode send people to Reddit and YouTube?
Share of answers citing at least one Reddit thread or YouTube video, week by week. Worldwide.
Share of answers citing at least one Reddit thread or YouTube video. Counted from the citation domains, so this measures what Google AI Mode showed as a source — not whether it read them.
Weekly until 19 Oct 2026, monthly from November 2026