Following up my last post on AI and hotel commercial optimization, I want to share some insights on how to make hotel websites discoverable to the newest wave of robots.
As we move further away from Google search results pages into AI conversations, the challenge has shifted from findability to extractability. If AI can read your website and understand what you offer, then there is a good chance it will confidently recommend you to the right traveler at the right moment.
It is important to note that AI results are about as inconsistent as Google Search was in its early days. Improving AI is not a hotel’s job. There are billions of dollars getting poured into that. All you need to do is continually make sure that your hotel content can be consumed by AI.
The Guest Journey Has Changed
A traveler planning a long weekend in Miami no longer opens twelve browser tabs, cross-references review sites, and digs through OTA listings. They open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and ask: “What’s the best boutique hotel in South Beach for a couples trip?” In seconds, AI delivers a curated, confident answer drawn from everything it has absorbed across the web. No search results page. No ads (yet). Just a clear recommendation.
This is the new discovery moment. If your hotel isn’t represented in the content AI can read, you simply don’t exist in that moment. Think of it like the second page of Google results, which was jokingly referred to as a great place to “hide a dead body” because nobody goes there. A classic dad joke, and I’m fully here for it.
AI assistants are increasingly embedded throughout the trip-planning process: suggesting destinations, comparing properties, summarizing reviews, and handling bookings directly. Major OTAs are racing to integrate AI into their products. Google’s AI Overviews are already reshaping how hotel search results appear. The guest journey is being rewritten in real time.
At the center of all of it is your hotel website, which also happens to be the only thing you can control. The questions every hotel should be asking right now: Does your website actually work for an AI visitor? Is it AI-friendly and accessible? Does the information that AI needs in order to recommend you exist in a format it can read?
Know Your AI Visitors
Before diving into the checklist, you need to know that you have two distinct types of AI visiting your website.
- AI Bots (Web Crawlers for Model Training)
These crawlers visit massive swaths of the web to gather training data. Unlike the traditional search engine crawler (like GoogleBot), which gathers data for future retrieval and ranking, AI crawlers (like GPTBot) collect data for knowledge and language reasoning. They’re building a picture of your hotel that may inform recommendations now and in the future. - AI Agents (Task-Oriented Virtual Visitors)
These are virtual visitors using simulated browsers, keyboards, and cursors to complete a task. That task might be to compile a research spreadsheet of possible hotel partners, or it might be to submit a booking form. Agentic AI is still young, but it’s growing fast. It will be a significant part of your traffic picture sooner than most hoteliers expect.
AI Optimization Checklist
There are things you can do right now to stay on track for current and future AI discoverability. In this post, let’s get started by outlining six steps for optimizing your hotel’s cornerstone digital asset: your hotel website.
1. AI Does Not Understand Hotel Speak
AI is sold as an all-knowing oracle. In practice, it reads your hotel website like a very literal-minded intern who just started today. Counter to the keyword-focused era of Google SEO, AI doesn’t care about keywords or adjectives. It only cares about specifics.
Most of our hotel websites are currently being built by a small cluster of vendors. A lot of them have the same keyword stuffed and adjective-heavy headers, followed by sparse bullet points and drone video shots. Less content and bigger images became the new beautiful in recent years. Unfortunately, it has made many of our websites useless for the new breed of robots looking for a specific kind of factual information.
Consider how these two hotels perform when an AI is asked to recommend “the best boutique hotel in South Beach.”
Hotel 1: “Escape to Neon Paradise. Experience the heartbeat of Miami. Where Art Deco glamour meets modern luxury, and the ocean breeze whispers through the palms.”
Hotel 2: “The Beachcomber: 4-star oceanfront boutique hotel at 1198 Ocean Drive, South Beach. 50 ocean-view suites with king beds, high-speed Wi-Fi, and rainfall showers. 5-minute walk to Lummus Park. On-site Mediterranean restaurant, rooftop bar, heated pool, and daily beachfront yoga. Fully ADA-compliant and pet-friendly.”
Hotel 2 wins in every scenario. AI can’t catch “the feels” from your website. It needs location markers, factual amenity descriptions, and language it can extract and use.
You need to audit your key hotel website pages and make sure the following are written in plain, direct language:
- Every service you offer
- Who you serve
- Your precise location and nearby landmarks
- Credentials, certifications, and affiliations
- Detailed descriptions of room types, dining venues, spa offerings, and meeting spaces
Please note: AI’s opinion of your hotel doesn’t stop at your website. It also trains on press coverage, OTA reviews, and social media. A great website is necessary, but your entire digital footprint is on trial. Stay tuned, as we will discuss all of these topics in future articles.
2. AI Cannot See Your Hotel Website Images
Hotel website vendors have largely shifted their focus to showcasing beautiful photography over content. Sadly, AI bots don’t look at pictures (yet). They read the text around them. Even awards, certifications, and key selling points (Forbes, Conde Nast, etc.) displayed on the website as images are effectively invisible to AI. The fix is straightforward:
- Add Alt text on every image (like old school SEO).
- Add supporting body copy that puts into words what the image is showing.
- Any award, certification, or credential that exists only as a graphic will need to also exist as actual text somewhere on the page.
Photos remain essential for your human visitors; that doesn’t change. We just need to make some content adjustments to stay discoverable to the new army of robots.
3. AI Cannot Watch Your Hotel Videos
I’m old enough to remember the drone video invasion that swept hotel website homepages a decade ago. Load times be damned, design agencies went all-in on homepage drone footage with zero text. Many of the websites were stunning. But as someone who actually reads content…I was quietly disappointed.
Fast forward to today, and it turns out AI shares my frustration. It can’t extract meaning from video footage. It can read text wrapped around it, and it can try to digest the spoken words. Here is how to make your videos talk to AI effectively:
- Narrate Bookable Details, Not Just Vibes:
Talk about room types, bed configs, gym equipment, F&B outlet names. Then a guest asking AI “which hotel has a Peloton gym and a rooftop bar?” will get an answer. If it isn’t said on camera, it doesn’t get recommended. - Chapter Videos Like a Pre-Booking FAQ:
AI reads chapter headings and can send guests directly to their answer. Try something like this:
0:18 – Workspace & Wi-Fi
0:45 – Fitness Center
1:10 – Dining Hours
1:45 – Meeting Spaces Upload Your Own Transcript:
Auto-captions mangle hotel language. “The Founder’s Suite” becomes “founders sweet.” A clean .srt file means every room type and brand name is spelled correctly and properly indexed.- Bonus Quick Fix for YouTube Videos
Click Show Transcript,* copy the text, and post it on your website as a companion page or collapsible section. That turns invisible video content into readable, indexable text instantly.**
* This is only a shortcut. I recommend using a human-verified transcription for accuracy.
** YouTube has a setting that lets AI train directly on your channel’s content. Go to Settings > Channel > Advanced Settings. One click opens the door for AI to index everything you’ve ever published.
4. Build an AI Training Page
Think of it as a How to Train Your Dragon scenario… except the dragon is an AI LLM (large language model) and you’re trying to get it to recommend your hotel to guests.
Step 1: Create a dedicated “AI Information” page and link to it from your footer. This becomes your hotel’s structured briefing for machines. Everything goes here: location details, room specifications, dining concepts, accessibility features, nearby attractions, brand affiliations, awards, sustainability practices, etc. No marketing fluff, no adjectives. Write it for a robot, not a human.
Step 2: Layer in schema markup. Structured data tags break your content into labeled categories like address, room types, amenities, price range. This is something AI systems can parse without guessing. Direct evidence that LLMs read schema is still emerging, but hybrid systems like Gemini and Perplexity lean on search engine indexing as part of their process. Since search engines absolutely use schema, I think this step is worth doing.
Pro tip: Why not use AI to build it? Ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to draft this page for your hotel. AI-written content optimized for AI comprehension is a delightfully circular solution. Cue in the circle of life, Lion King.
5. Mo’ JavaScript, Mo’ AI Problems
Many hotel websites are simply too fancy for their own good. There are text elements that only appear when a visitor clicks, hovers, or scrolls. Magical, hidden dropdowns, an accordion/hamburger nav, a tabbed panel…basically built to be hidden from AI crawlers.
LLM crawlers generally don’t execute JavaScript. They only read the raw HTML that your server delivers on the first request. If your essential content (ex: room descriptions, location details, dining hours, etc.) only loads after a user interaction, please be aware that AI may never see it!
This process will likely improve as AI infrastructure matures and billions of dollars continue to pour into the technology. However, the best practice right now is to minimize JavaScript-dependent content delivery wherever possible. What’s good discipline for traditional SEO remains good discipline for AI optimization. Read the manuscripts, they already exist!
6. Track Your Website AI Traffic
Once your hotel is indexed and referenced by AI systems, you’ll want to know which platforms are actually sending guests your way. Set up your Google Analytics (GA4) properly and go in with realistic expectations. Perfect data tracking isn’t on the table, and I don’t see it happening for a while.
What you can see:
Traffic from browser-based AI apps like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini will often appear as Direct traffic in GA4. Building a custom exploration report to isolate AI referral sources is a very useful starting point. It’s imperfect, but informative.
What you cannot see:
AI Agents browsing your site on behalf of a guest don’t show up in GA4 at all. Unlike Cookie Monster, AI agents don’t accept cookies. They research, compare, and shortlist hotels without leaving a single trackable footprint. This is a genuine ghost in the machine and the analytics industry hasn’t solved it… yet.
Tracking what you can builds a baseline. As AI referral traffic grows, even imperfect data will reveal which platforms are driving discovery and whether your optimization efforts are moving the needle. With both Perplexity and Chat IPOs on the horizon, you know paid ads and placement cannot be far behind.
Measurement infrastructure for AI-driven hospitality traffic is still being built. Get into free GA4 now, document your baseline, and you will already be ahead of every competitor who waits until the data is “cleaner.”
Conclusion
The hotel industry went through the same kind of reckoning in the late 1990s when Google arrived and hotels had to learn to write for a machine. Many resisted, but the ones that adapted early thrived. A new wave is now underway. Our challenge has shifted from findability to extractability. The good news is that the fundamentals haven’t changed: be present, be structured, and be specific. Don’t hide important information in formats AI can’t read. The manuscripts are already here… the only question is whether your hotel reads them in time.