If not, swallow that red pill and restructure your hotel website’s technical coding and content asap so that it can be read by those bots!
What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimisation is categorised as a search funnel that starts with guests asking “where should I go” or “which hotels have” type questions that require context and structured data to be understood by AI agents.
Hotels with content that reads in a conversational fashion in short, direct paragraphs that answer these questions will meet the reading mode challenge AI agents face. Behind the scenes, these bots also need your hotel’s content to be structured within schema mark-up so that they can pull the data required quickly and accurately.
AEO is a conversation based on your guest’s needs
Instead of showcasing hotels that meet your potential guest’s individual search queries, AI agents are bringing up suitable hotels and building out user queries until they really understand what the user wants. For example, “I am looking for 4 star hotels in Birmingham that are pet friendly”, then adding “the hotel restaurant must have good vegetarian options”, and so forth.
Previously, these would have been different searches, often relying on the user clicking into each hotel website and finding the information they need one by one. Now, the Agents do that work for you.
Although not possible to book directly through ChatGPT just yet, it is coming. The current paid versions will run users through availability dates and hotel menus, taking them straight to the book now pages (which are often in platforms such as OpenTable).
It goes without saying that if your hotel does not get featured in this selection process, your direct marketing channel will diminish rapidly.
The new ChatGPT agent – from chat to act
The latest release of ChatGPT can open its own browser and do tasks for you, joining up requests to achieve an outcome. According to OpenAI, “it now thinks and acts, proactively choosing from a toolbox of agentic skills to complete tasks for you using its own computer”.
The highest level of functionality is only available on the paid versions, but its output is fascinating. Potential guests will quickly start to use it to direct their travel plans from flights to hotels to activities and restaurant bookings.
The power of this cannot be underestimated. Users will prompt it to find restaurant availability on certain dates for a defined number of people that is within walking or driving distance to or from a certain location and has their preferred food choices.
Putting the bots to work
The agent will do the research, pick out menus with the food choice stipulated, check how far they are from the location you want to travel from and return these in any order you specify. It is also worth noting that if you don’t include all the above information in your initial prompt, it will ask you how many people are going to be dining, if there are any nutritional or food choices to note etc.
Its value is in discovering what the person is looking for quickly and efficiently, doing the deep dive for your guest - freeing up their time in the process and from some of the searches I have done, it will go into more websites and menus that I would doing it manually, all while I went away from the computer to walk the dog!
It is still in testing mode, so does struggle a little with flight journeys, but don’t we all. It's also very pedantic about times and weights and dates – earlier or later times don’t get returned – yet!
ChatGPT partnerships and integrations
Another ChatGPT initiative worth talking about is its partnerships. Its Expedia integration powers up ChatGPT to share Expedia data so that guests can ask travel questions and receive personalised travel recommendations. For your hotel to be featured, it must be within Expedia’s inventory and optimised for all amenities, ratings, features or prices the guest has stipulated.
Expedia has positioned itself as the travel assistant here by streamlining the process through its mobile app’s Chat GTP interface. This is OpenAI's answer to Google Gemini's capabilities. Other partnerships, for example, OpenTable, Booking.com, and Shopify and your listing or usage on these platforms will also impact whether your site is surfaced within ChatGPT - a space we all need to monitor to understand the tech stack we need and the OTAs we need to list on.
This is a major shift in travel planning behaviour as users move away from the major search engines into these closed platforms, but Google has a response with the release of the latest Gemini models.
Gemini
Google’s family of AI models, Gemini, does not get the press ChatGPT does, but Gemini 2.5 Pro, and 2.5 Flash are accessible via the Gemini web portal as well as in the Gemini mobile app. All three models within the Gemini family have improved memory, reasoning, and performance accuracy, which comes from Deep Think, and can handle text, images, and audio, far beyond the capabilities of OpenAI.
The big difference with Gemini is that while ChatGPT relies on integrations and partnerships and is highly conversational. Gemini is deeply embedded across every Google platform with multi-modal capabilities.
For travel, when your guest is planning their trip, Gemini not only provides a list of options based on your prompt, but can also provide a customised itinerary with maps, visuals and a narrative guide, moving beyond chat responses and suggestions to become the travel assistant Expedia aims to be, but it can also provide inspiration and real-time planning. Gemini aims to completely disrupt the travel industry, reshaping how travel is booked by automating and personalising guest plans.
3-step action plan to utilise this knowledge
Understanding these agents, their differences and capabilities is vital to hotel owners and managers because they are driving an urgent adaptation of hospitality and travel digital marketing. From understanding what can be achieved to embracing these AI-driven marketing channels, now is the time to ensure your hotel’s data infrastructure is technically robust as well as beautifully designed.
1. Audit and Optimise your Data
Undertake a hotel visibility audit (also known as an Agent Experience or AX website audit) to understand how integration-ready you are with OTA and AI technical specifications and to review your current SEO strategy. This includes checking OTA listings and social media platforms, along with review sites, to gauge sentiment about your hotel and to check how visible any paid campaigns are across the Google and Microsoft platforms, as well as on the meta search engines.
2. Implement Answer Engine Optimisation
Create an AEO strategy that focused your content on precise, factual, structured property details across all platforms (Business Profile, Maps, TripAdvisor and all OTAs) the AI agents can find them ensuring consistency with your branding and positioning, digging into one niche if this makes business sense, e.g., weddings, pets, spa etc. and that the correct schema markup is in place as well as an up to date availability feed with real-time pricing.
3. Track AI Visibility and Recommendations
Start measuring how often your hotel is seen or selected by AI systems like ChatGPT as a benchmark, and use your analytic data to work out a trajectory of what is being lost and what could be won in terms of bookings.