AI is redefining SEO for hotels and resorts: Here’s how

Search has entered a new chapter. Generative AI is changing how travelers discover destinations, compare hotels and resorts, and make booking decisions. Traditional SEO still matters, but it no longer operates alone. AI-powered assistants now influence the answers travelers see before they ever click a link. For any property focused on hospitality marketing or on increasing direct bookings, this shift requires a new approach.

At GCommerce, we view this change as an opportunity. As a hospitality marketing agency and digital marketing agency built for hotels and resorts, we are helping brands adapt to what comes next in search.

From SEO to AEO: Where intent meets intelligence

For years, SEO optimized for rankings, traffic, and blue link visibility. Today, AI engines summarize, interpret, and synthesize information rather than simply listing it. This introduces AEO, or AI Engine Optimization.

AEO focuses on shaping how AI tools understand your brand and how often they reference your content within generated responses. Instead of optimizing only for clicks, AEO optimizes for citations, clarity, and semantic depth. It guides how AI describes your property and which details it elevates when travelers ask questions about hotel locations, amenities, or booking options.

Clicks are no longer the only metric. The mention is.

Why AEO matters for hospitality brands

AI-powered discovery impacts three essential areas for hotels and resorts.

• Visibility: AI tools increasingly act as travel research assistants. You want them to surface your property when travelers explore options.
• Accuracy: AI summaries must reflect your brand correctly, especially when describing amenities, pricing structure, or booking value.
• Conversion: AI often guides the last step before travelers click into a site or begin comparing hotel metasearch channels such as Google hotel ads.
• AEO complements SEO. SEO builds reach. AEO shapes perception and guides the right travelers to your content.

Content structured for AI, not just humans

Generative engines pull short, self-contained passages rather than full articles. AEO requires content that is modular, clear, and easily lifted into AI-generated answers.

For hotels and resorts, this includes concise descriptions of amenities, booking benefits, location advantages, or metasearch value. These passages serve as building blocks that help AI accurately reference your information when travelers ask questions such as “best property for families in [destination]” or “how do Google hotel ads work for booking direct.”

How AI changes your SEO strategy

This evolution shifts how hotels and resorts build their content portfolios.

Long-form content still adds value, but properties now benefit from creating more focused, question-based pieces that answer specific traveler needs. These smaller sections inform both SEO and AEO performance.

Measurement will also evolve. Beyond traffic, properties should evaluate:

• How AI tools describe your brand
• How accurately does AI represent your property’s benefits
• How often does your content appears in AI generated response
• How travelers convert after engaging with AI-influenced channels

These insights help refine both your organic strategy and your paid channels, including Google hotel ads and hotel metasearch programs.

The future of SEO for hotels and resorts

AI is reshaping how travelers discover information, evaluate choices, and take action. SEO and AEO now function together. SEO expands visibility. AEO shapes how AI interprets your content and whether it directs travelers to book with you.

At GCommerce, we see this as a powerful opportunity for any property wanting to increase direct bookings. The brands that thrive will be those that build structured, clear, evergreen content that speaks to travelers and machines with equal precision.

AI is not replacing SEO. It is redefining it. And for hotels and resorts ready to move toward a more intelligent search strategy, the path forward is already here.

Discover top ways your property can show up in GEN AI search results here.

Hotel visibility in AI search results: Where to start

Visibility in AI search results is a vital piece of your hotel’s success within the current marketing landscape. AI search results become more relevant every day, but it’s not always clear how to improve your hotel’s standings. 

Overview

AI models assess a variety of factors when digesting data and generating responses, prioritizing information that satisfies their built-in content preferences. Though visibility in AI search results is never a guarantee, aligning with these preferences across various marketing channels is the most effective way to make an impact for your hotel. 

Here are the main factors that AI models assess when generating search results. We’ll dive into more detail on each category in the rest of this article:

Website content

The content of your hotel’s website is arguably the most important factor behind AI search visibility. It’s vital that your website includes pages that are easily digestible for AI models, seamless to incorporate into AI search results, and applicable to the searches you want to rank for.

• Relevance: Your content should match what users are actually searching for. Consider FAQs, guest reviews, and your own AI searches to see what your guests want to know.
• Breadth/variety: A wide range of content provides your hotel with more opportunities to show up in AI search results. The more information you provide to an AI model, the more likely you are to appear.
• Uniqueness: If your hotel’s website provides information that no one else does, AI search models have no choice but to incorporate your data. Unique content reduces competition, improving your AI search visibility.
• Freshness: While certain AI models have a cutoff date for training data, all AI models prefer the content that is most recent within their database. Fresh, up-to-date information is most likely to show up in AI search results.
• Tone: AI models strive to reduce the amount of friction required to generate a response. If your content already matches the more conversational tone used in AI search results, your hotel is more likely to appear.
• Citations: Including quotes, sources, and citations improves your website’s credibility, which is an important factor considered by AI models.

Local business listings

Local business listings such as those on Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Tripadvisor are another significant source of information for AI models. Because this data is incorporated into AI search responses, accurate and in-depth listings across a variety of websites are likely to improve your hotel’s visibility in AI search. Also impactful are your hotel’s reviews within these listings, as social proof is another factor considered by AI models.

• Quantity: A wide variety of local business listings across the internet can improve your hotel’s visibility in AI search due to the large volume of data thereby made available to AI models.
• Accuracy: When business information is consistent across the web, including multiple local listings and even normal website content, this increases your hotel’s credibility and likelihood of appearing in AI search results.
• Depth: The more information that’s included in your listings, the better. Fully fleshed out local listings provide more opportunities for AI models to incorporate your data, and proves your reliability as a source for AI responses.
• Number of reviews: AI models tend to see popular businesses as having higher credibility, with high review counts often increasing visibility in AI search results.
• Review rating: Judging a business based on real human feedback allows AI models to provide quality recommendations, and positive reviews are a powerful form of social proof.

Schema

The use of schema is another factor that can significantly impact visibility in AI search. Well-structured, neatly coded schema makes information about your hotel incredibly easy for AI models to digest, improving visibility in AI search.

• Type of variables: Schema variables cover a wide variety of businesses and web content. Using the correct types of schema for your hotel and website ensure that AI models can easily find your hotel and correctly interpret your information.
• Depth: Highly detailed schema with a large quantity of relevant data is more likely to be used by AI models when generating responses.
• Tone: Similar to on-page content, using a conversational tone in applicable schema variables such as descriptions may increase the likelihood of your hotel’s information being incorporated into AI search results.
• Relevance: Make sure that your hotel’s schema reflects the topics that you want to appear for. Where applicable, incorporate focus keywords and relevant topics into your schema to maximize your visibility in AI search.

Website structure

Though website structure isn’t a make-or-break factor behind visibility in AI search results, a clean and optimized website structure can improve your hotel’s visibility by making it easier for AI models to digest and interpret your content.

• Bot-friendly documentation: llms.txt, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt documents all assist with webpage discoverability, making it easier for AI models to use your hotel’s content in AI search results.
• Lack of technical errors: Excessive technical errors such as 404 pages, duplicate content, or outdated webpages can slow down AI models, decreasing their ability to find and digest your hotel’s information.
• Well-optimized code: Intuitive sub-folder structure, neat and organized code layout, and quick load times streamline the AI training process, making your content easier to understand and potentially improving your hotel’s visibility in AI search.

Link network

Incoming links, outgoing links, and external brand mentions can improve your hotel’s visibility in AI search by boosting your hotel’s credibility and providing positive social proof. While this is another factor that won’t make or break your visibility, a strong and credible link network will only increase your hotel’s chances of appearing within AI search results.

• Internal links: Linking to other pages within your website makes it easier for AI models to find new pages and understand the connections between your content.
• External links: Linking to outside sources suggests that your content is well-researched and well-connected, improving credibility.
• Incoming links and brand references: When outside sources link to or mention your hotel, that acts as a form of social proof which can improve both credibility and prestige, increasing your hotel’s likelihood of being shown within AI search results.

Social media

Posting on social media isn’t immediately linked to visibility in AI search, but your hotel’s presence on these channels can still have an impact. AI models often source from social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, to determine the overall impression of your hotel.

• Sentiment: Just as business reviews can guide AI models towards quality recommendations, general sentiment from social media comments and customer posts can influence which businesses appear in AI search results.
• Reach: Online buzz with a wide audience reach indicates business credibility and quality to AI models, increasing the likelihood of your hotel being recommended.
• Engagement: When customers are highly engaged with your hotel, this suggests that your business is a quality recommendation that is likely to resonate with users, improving your hotel’s chances of appearing within AI search responses.

Takeaways

AI models use information from a variety of sources across multiple marketing channels when generating responses. However, there’s a common thread among most of these factors: to improve your hotel’s visibility in AI search, focus on the guest experience.

• Develop relevant, thorough content that resonates with your guests. 
• Keep your information up-to-date across all channels.
• Ensure your website is easy to navigate and understand, for both human and robot users.

For tips on getting started with AI search, see our practical action guide to improving AI search visibility or reach out to GCommerce for more information.

How to write AI Search optimized content for hotels

Getting your hotel’s content and brand included in generative AI answer engines for relevant prompts comes down to ensuring it’s crawlable, well-structured, answers questions concisely and directly, and is contextually rich. But how does your hotel produce or revise its content to ensure it’s best structured for visibility in AI search engines?

Our team has put together this guide on how to write content that is well optimized for AI search engines, but doesn’t ignore the importance of traditional search engine optimization, which is still an essential tool for brand success and bookings. 

1. Ensure each page is focused on a specific topic or intent focus

LLMs prefer clearly presented and specific content that answers a question. Prioritize developing pages focused on a specific topic, then answer that question directly and thoroughly.

Examples of pages with a clear, specific focus:

• Location page: focuses on specific information, providing direct answers about where this hotel is and what is nearby, including attractions, demand drivers, the airport, and more.
• Amenities page: what does this hotel offer, and who is it best for
• Pet-friendly page: highlights the policies and reasons why your hotel is a great choice for people travelling with pets

Tip: Avoid mixing sales copy, policies, and other content that doesn’t directly answer that intent

2. Consider using a standard, repeatable content format designed for LLMs and humans

Well-formatted content is not only beneficial for LLMs and AI visibility but also preferred by humans! It’s critical not to lose sight of optimization for people as well as bots. This structure enables AI engine bots to crawl and consume content in chunks while allowing humans to quickly scan and find the information and answers they are looking for on the topic.

An example of great LLM (and human) structured content could look something like:

These are a few examples of hotel page content structure types that do this well:

• Prompt: luxury Aspen hotels
  • Sources Cited by LLMs:
    • https://avantgardeaspen.com/blog/the-best-luxury-accommodations-in-aspen-colorado-5-star-hotels-and-exclusive-vacation-rentals-or-avant-garde-aspen-luxury-real-estate
    • https://www.aspentraveladvisors.com/luxury-ski-hotels 

• Prompt: Hotel near Point Loma San Diego
  • Sources Cited by LLMs:
    • https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/california/san-diego/neighborhoods/point-loma-and-coronado/hotels
    • https://point-loma-inn-suites.thesandiegohotels.com/en/
    • https://all-boutique-hotels.com/san-diego_point-loma/ 

• Prompt: Historic Nashville Hotel
  • Sources Cited by LLMs:
    • https://thehermitagehotel.com/historic-hotel-nashville/first-5-star-hotel/
    • https://www.unionstationhotelnashville.com/historic-hotel-in-downtown-nashville-tn/
    • https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/bnaak-the-union-station-nashville-yards-autograph-collection/overview/ 

3. Your page intro paragraph should stand alone as an answer

A great start to an LLM (and human) structured content page is to use your opening paragraph as a standalone answer. Follow these guidelines:

• Strong intro paragraph rules for your hotel’s page
  • 2–3 sentences max
  • Clear, specific language (avoid vague, marketing language)
  • Directly answers what, where, and who

• Example (for your hotel’s location page intro paragraph)
  • ❌ “Experience the perfect blend of comfort and convenience in the heart of the city.”
  • ✅ “The hotel is located in downtown Denver, two blocks from Union Station and within walking distance of restaurants, museums, and public transit.”

4. Treat each H2 section as an “answer node”

LLMs prefer a direct and clear response to a specific question. Use your page’s H2 header tags to do just that. Here’s how you can approach using your page’s H2s to answer specific questions or topics:

Here are some good H2 examples for your hotel’s content:

• “Where the Hotel Is Located”
• “Parking and Transportation Options”
• “Who This Hotel Is Best For”
• “Nearby Attractions and Distances”
• “What Guests Should Know Before Booking”

Here are some poor H2 examples for LLMs:

• “Why You’ll Love Staying With Us”
• “A Truly Unique Experience”
• “Luxury Redefined”

Optimizing page content for LLMs can produce similar concerns as optimizing for search engines. These bots prefer direct, informational text, which can conflict with a hotel brand’s preferred language and brand voice on the page. It’s important to consider this impact from both an AEO/SEO perspective and a brand voice perspective. 

Tip: If an H2 cannot be phrased as a question, it’s probably weak for AI search optimization.

5. Keep paragraphs short and to the point

Just like humans in today’s short-attention-span world, LLMs prefer short and concise answers. Use this to guide your page’s paragraph length.

• Keep your page’s paragraph content to 2–3 sentences max
• Focus on answering just one idea per paragraph
• Utilize concrete details over adjectives or marketing jargon

Here’s an example showcasing a poorly crafted paragraph for LLMs vs a well-optimized one:

• ❌ “Our hotel offers convenient access to Nashville attractions while providing guests with a peaceful and comfortable stay thanks to our attentive staff and thoughtful design.”
• ✅ “The hotel is within a 10-minute walk of downtown Nashville attractions. Many guests choose the property for its quieter rooms compared to other downtown hotels.”

6. Use lists and tables

LLMs prefer content that is easily consumable in the format of tables, bullets, and numbered lists. This is because content formatted as lists helps LLMs identify attributes, steps, and groupings. As a human, it also makes the content much easier to scan, consume, and find what you’re looking for.

Here are a few ideas on the best uses for lists on your hotel’s pages:

• Amenities
  • Room features
  • Policies
  • What’s included / not included
  • Itinerary steps

Here’s a specific example for a hotel’s amenities page list section:

• Amenities Include:
  • Complimentary Wi-Fi throughout the property
  • On-site fitness center
  • Underground self-parking (daily fee)
  • Pet-friendly rooms (fee applies)
  • This format makes it easy for AI to extract and restate.

7. Include a list of FAQs at the end of the page

Tieing into the understanding that LLMs prefer concise answers to specific questions, tap into this by adding a short FAQ content block to the end of your hotel’s page. When adding FAQs to your page, make sure to:

• Add around 3-5 FAQs
• State the question followed directly by a specific, informative answer
• Make sure the FAQs are related to answering questions about that page’s specific intent or topic

8. Use a natural language URL structure

The impact of keywords within URLs has diminished over time when it comes to traditional SEO. Interestingly enough, the use of natural language and specific keywords in URLs is proving to be more important for LLMs and AI search. Make sure to incorporate the full title of your content piece and use semantic URLs. 

Here are a few good semantic URL structure examples:

• /best-family-friendly-activities-san-diego/
• /things-to-do-san-diego-mission-bay/
• /2-bedroom-san-diego-hotel-suite/

Here are a few examples of poor URL structure:

• /post?categoryid=18456
• /page13
• /product/roomtype1

9. Update past content and the publish date

Recency of content and publish date influence visibility in AI search. This includes revisiting and updating past content, such as itinerary guides and blogs, to reflect new information. Along with updating the content, make sure to update the publish date on the page. 

10. Avoid JavaScript for rendering important page content

JavaScript-heavy pages are less likely to be cited or summarized in AI search engines. LLMs and AI crawlers prefer static pages and more often extract content from HTML. While JavaScript is acceptable for uses such as UI, form validation, and analytics, it should be avoided for rendering main content on the page or loading your hotel website’s primary navigation. 

11. Incorporate citations and quote sources

Answer engines like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT prioritize fact-based, well-sourced, and contextually reliable content. Citations and direct quotes support your content and signal credibility. For hotels, this can include:

• Quoting and linking to guest reviews
• Trust signals from awards like Conde Nast or TripAdvisor, and linking to the award page on the publisher
• On-property policies, certifications, and features that are verified by a 3rd party organization 

Bonus tip: Looking for new content ideas, such as itineraries, features, amenities, and demand drivers that are important to your potential guests? Dig into your guest sentiment analysis to extract real guest insights on the likes, dislikes, reasons to stay at your property, and more.