AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels — 616 prompts across 56 destinations, refreshed every Monday.
Named hotels in Kyoto — Grok
Grok's top picks specifically in Kyoto, JP. Pick a different destination above, or clear to see worldwide.
When Grok hands out a hotel link, where does it go?Worldwide
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 / …), or other. Chain folds into direct in the headline number because chain pages are still brand-controlled.
Where Grok pulls hotel information from
Every URL Grok cited classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.
OTA & Aggregator booking.com 64% · expedia.com 23% · hotels.com 14% | 27.3% | 479 |
Other google.com.bz 36% · classictravel.com 34% · amimagazine.global 30% | 19.0% | 334 |
Editorial travelweekly.com 56% · guide.michelin.com 28% · cntraveler.com 16% | 16.0% | 281 |
Review Site tripadvisor.com 85% · yelp.com 14% · m.yelp.com 1% | 10.3% | 181 |
Chain fourseasons.com 40% · marriott.com 37% · hyatt.com 23% | 7.5% | 132 |
Social Channel facebook.com 48% · reddit.com 27% · youtube.com 25% | 6.9% | 121 |
Independent Hotel cordishotels.com 34% · hotelmonteleone.com 34% · marinabaysands.com 32% | 6.7% | 118 |
Meta-search kayak.com 67% · trivago.com 18% · google.com 14% | 3.4% | 59 |
Top hotel parent groups by Grok mentionsWorldwide
Each Grok 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.
| 1 | Belmond | 10 → 13 | +30% |
| 2 | Oberoi | 14 → 18 | +29% |
| 3 | Hilton | 76 → 92 | +21% |
| 4 | Rocco Forte | 12 → 14 | +17% |
| 5 | Marriott | 239 → 255 | +7% |
| 1 | Mandarin Oriental | 51 → 44 | -14% |
| 2 | Minor | 22 → 19 | -14% |
| 3 | Langham | 22 → 19 | -14% |
| 4 | Hyatt | 101 → 93 | -8% |
| 5 | Radisson | 16 → 15 | -6% |
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | W/W | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marriott | 255 | 141 | ↑ 6.7% | |
| 2 | Accor | 149 | 91 | ↑ 4.2% | |
| 3 | Four Seasons | 122 | 37 | ↓ 1.6% | |
| 4 | Hyatt | 93 | 45 | ↓ 7.9% | |
| 5 | Hilton | 92 | 56 | ↑ 21.1% | |
| 6 | IHG | 64 | 50 | ↓ 1.5% | |
| 7 | Mandarin Oriental | 44 | 15 | ↓ 13.7% | |
| 8 | Shangri-La | 35 | 14 | ↑ 6.1% | |
| 9 | Kempinski | 34 | 9 | · 0% | |
| 10 | Peninsula | 29 | 9 | · 0% | |
| 11 | Rosewood | 28 | 10 | ↑ 3.7% | |
| 12 | Taj | 19 | 7 | · 0% | |
| 13 | Langham | 19 | 5 | ↓ 13.6% | |
| 14 | Minor | 19 | 12 | ↓ 13.6% | |
| 15 | Oberoi | 18 | 6 | ↑ 28.6% | |
| 16 | Capella | 17 | 5 | ↓ 5.6% | |
| 17 | Radisson | 15 | 11 | ↓ 6.3% | |
| 18 | Meliá | 14 | 9 | · 0% | |
| 19 | Rocco Forte | 14 | 5 | ↑ 16.7% | |
| 20 | Belmond | 13 | 4 | ↑ 30.0% |
Of the hotels named this week: how many resolved to a chain (Marriott / Accor / …), an independent property, a vacation rental, or stayed unmatched.
The 616 prompts we ask Grok every week
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 week.
- 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).
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.