AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels — 616 prompts across 56 destinations, refreshed every Monday.
+ 44 more
The 11 prompts we ask Perplexity about Gold Coast
Same 11 question patterns asked about every destination — persona (couples, families, solo, business), budget (luxury, mid, budget), and zoom (city-wide, neighborhood, landmark).
Named hotels in Gold Coast — Perplexity
Perplexity's top picks specifically in Gold Coast, AU. Pick a different destination above, or clear to see worldwide.
Where Perplexity pulls hotel information from
Every URL Perplexity retrieved classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.
Chain marriott.com 44% · ihg.com 33% · fourseasons.com 22% | 34.1% | 14 |
Other sydney.intercontinental.com 50% · shangrilasydney.com 33% · capella.gosydneyhotels.com 17% | 26.8% | 11 |
Government / DMO sydney.com 83% · therocks.com 17% | 14.6% | 6 |
Independent Hotel crownhotels.com.au 75% · capellahotelgroup.com 25% | 9.8% | 4 |
Editorial americanexpress.com 33% · forbestravelguide.com 33% · travelweekly.com 33% | 7.3% | 3 |
OTA & Aggregator booking.com 100% | 7.3% | 3 |
Share of citations by source type, week by week, for AU — no city-level source data yet, so this is country-wide. 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.
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: 04-27 330 · 05-04 330 · 05-11 404 · 05-18 455 · 05-25 338 · 06-01 372 · 06-08 336 · 06-15 371 · 06-22 330 · 06-29 320 · 07-06 420 · 07-13 1,179 · 07-20 597 · 07-27 558 · 08-03 622 · 08-10 581 · 08-17 584 · 08-24 611 · 09-07 41.
Top hotel parent groups in Gold Coast — Perplexity
Each Perplexity 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.
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | W/W |
|---|
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.