How to Get Your Hotel Recommended by ChatGPT

Ask ChatGPT "where should we stay in your town?" right now. It will name three to five properties, confidently, with a one-line reason for each. If your hotel isn't one of them, every traveler who asks that question — and trip planning is one of the most common consumer uses of AI — gets sent to a competitor before they ever see your website or your booking-site listing.

Here's how the answer gets made, and how to get into it.

1. Understand what feeds a lodging answer

When an assistant answers a "where to stay" question, it draws on a blend of training data and (for browsing assistants like Perplexity and Gemini) live sources: local "best places to stay" guides, travel publications, review platforms, blog roundups, and your own website's content. It is synthesizing a consensus. Properties that appear consistently across those sources make the shortlist; properties that exist only as a booking-site listing usually don't.

2. Check your baseline before changing anything

You can't fix what you can't see. Find out which assistants mention you today, on which questions (romantic weekend? family trip? pet-friendly?), and who gets named instead. This per-question detail matters: it's common for a property to win "pet-friendly inn in ___" and be invisible on "where should we stay in ___" — those are different battles.

3. Get into the sources AI actually reads

• Local and regional "best of" guides. The single highest-leverage placement. If your destination's tourism site, regional magazine, or a well-known travel blog lists "the best places to stay in ___" and you're absent, you're invisible at the source.
• Your Google Business Profile and TripAdvisor presence. Complete, current, photo-rich, with your property type and amenities stated plainly. Assistants lean on these for facts.
• Press and roundups that get indexed. A single mention in a travel publication's "weekend in ___" piece can outweigh months of social posting, because it's exactly the kind of source an answer engine cites.

4. Make your own site quotable

Models lift specific, factual sentences. Say what you are in plain language — "a nine-room oceanview inn two blocks from the village, with wood-fired breakfast included" beats "an unforgettable escape." Add lodging schema (room types, amenities, location), keep your pages fast and crawlable, and answer the questions travelers ask (parking? kids? dogs? minimum stay?) directly on your site.

5. Win the occasions, not just the generic query

"Best romantic hotel in ___", "where to stay in ___ with kids", "inns in ___ with hot tubs" — each occasion-specific question is a separate answer with a separate shortlist, and the occasion queries often have less competition. Make sure the sources above describe you with the occasions you want to win.

6. Monitor it — answers move

Model updates reshuffle lodging recommendations regularly. A property that's reliably mentioned in June can quietly vanish from the answer in September. Continuous monitoring is what turns this from a one-time audit into a managed channel — you make a change, watch your mention rate respond, and get alerted the day you drop out. That's exactly what MentionedOn for hotels, inns & B&Bs does, daily, across all four major assistants.

Run a free AI visibility scan to see exactly what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity tell travelers about your town — and whether your business is in the answer. About 30 seconds, no signup required.