Travellers now plan with AI before they search, and the shortlist is written from sources you do not own

What is measured

McKinsey and Skift reported in 2025 that more than half of travellers now use AI tools in trip planning, with the share using them extensively roughly doubling year on year. Seer Interactive measured what an AI Overview does to the results beneath it: click-through to ordinary listings falling from 1.76 percent to 0.61 percent when one appears. Whitespark, reported by Search Engine Journal in July 2026, found that 77 percent of what engines cite when answering a local business question comes from off-page sources — reviews, guides, forums, listicles — rather than the business's own website.

Put those together and the shape is clear. A growing share of travellers form a shortlist before they reach a search results page at all, that shortlist names two or three properties, and it is assembled mostly from what other people have written about you.

Why hospitality is more exposed than most categories

Three reasons. The purchase is researched heavily and booked in advance, which gives the assistant a long conversation to shape. The category is already intermediated, so the answer often links to a marketplace rather than to you, meaning a "win" in the answer can still arrive as a commission-bearing booking. And the sources engines prefer — guides, review platforms, editorial round-ups — are exactly the sources most independent properties have never worked on deliberately.

What we see in prompt panels

When we run twenty guest questions across three engines for a property's market, the pattern repeats. Ask an open question — where to stay in a city, for a couple, for a long weekend — and the property is usually absent. Ask about the property by name and the engines are warm, quoting the property's own website accurately. The gap is retrieval, not perception: the engines can describe you well once they are pointed at you, and they are not pointing at you unprompted.

What to do, in order of payback

1. Find out whether you are named

Twenty questions, three engines, repeated runs, recorded. Most properties have never done this, and it is the first point of our free Business Scan.

2. Fix what the engines read

Because most of the evidence is off-page, the work is unglamorous: a steady review programme with responses, presence in the guides and round-ups that cover your market, consistent property details everywhere you appear, and a complete Google Business Profile. Four fifths of this is search, local and reputation done properly.

3. Answer the questions your own pages avoid

What the room actually is, what the view actually is, how far things really are, what a rate really includes and what cancellation really means. Specific, verifiable content is what an engine can quote and what a careful guest is looking for anyway.

What this does not yet justify

AI-referred traffic is still a small share of arrivals in absolute terms. The case rests on the growth rate, on the winner-takes-most shape of a two-or-three-name answer, and on the low cost of being early, not on today's volume. Any supplier presenting AI visibility as a majority traffic channel today is overselling it, and we would rather say so than take the budget on a false premise.