What does ChatGPT tell people about your place?

Something. Often out of date. Almost never what you would have written yourself.

Ask any AI assistant where to stay, where to work or where to book a treatment in your city, and it will name five or six places in one sentence. Those names come from what it can read. Most independent places return almost nothing to a machine. This report shows you what yours returns today.

Written and delivered by Alberto Rocha. ALIA Studio, Valencia. Eight client sites live. Winner of the GENERA72 Film Challenge.

Why does this matter now?

In July 2026, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode both recommended a Miami hotel to travellers. The building had been demolished 108 days earlier.

That is not a glitch. It is what happens when an assistant answers from whatever it managed to read, and nobody at the property has ever checked what that is.

Three things are true at the same time right now, and each one was measured by someone with nothing to sell you.

Over half
of the citations in AI hotel recommendations point to an OTA rather than to the hotel itself. Cloudbeds, 90 million bookings, 2026
51% to 36%
the share of US travellers planning a trip on a traditional search engine, in the space of one year. Cloudbeds, 2026
78% against 20%
restaurant operators already optimising for AI discovery, against diners who use AI to find a restaurant at all. Popmenu, 328 operators and 1,000 consumers, 2026

Most owners have never run the query. It takes ninety seconds and it costs nothing. Do that before you read another word of this page.

What do you actually get?

Five working days. Everything below is a fact on the day it is delivered, and every one of them can be checked again afterwards, by you.

The answers, word for word
What ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI say to ten real questions about your category and your city. Dated screenshots. You can run the same queries yourself and get the same thing.
What your website hands a machine
Most sites send a crawler an empty shell and load the content afterwards, so the crawler reads nothing. We show you the raw response from your own site, on screen.
Your structured data, validated
Rooms, hours, location and prices, checked against the public validator while you watch. This is the one part of the field every serious source agrees on.
Someone trying to book a room
On a phone, on mobile data, at night. Screen recording, with the number of seconds it took, or the exact point where it broke.
Who gets the credit for you
When an assistant recommends your place, it names a source. We show you whether that source is your website or a booking site charging you commission.

What is this not?

AI referrals are under 1% of hotel website traffic today. That is not our figure. It belongs to Lighthouse, and they sell the tooling.

Nobody has independently shown that this work produces bookings. The firm that sells the sector its own research says so in print: the link between AI visibility and revenue is assumed in the literature and not confirmed in their data.

In June, the chief executive of a hotel data company published a piece titled Why AI SEO for Hotels Is Snake Oil. On the tactics being sold, he is right.

So here is the honest version. We are not selling you more bookings. We are selling you the answer to a question you cannot answer today: what the machines say about your place, and what your website gives them to work with. If the answer turns out to be that you are fine, we will tell you so, and you will have spent $490 to stop wondering.

And if it is not fine?

We build the whole website. No template underneath, in every language your guests book in, and built so a machine can read it without running a line of JavaScript.

Then the structured data, which is where your rooms, your hours and your prices actually live as far as an assistant is concerned.

Then it stays true. A site goes stale about a year after launch because nobody owns it. The care plan is who owns yours.

Why not just use a platform?

A platform siteA site we build
If you leaveCloudbeds’ own website terms, checked 31 August 2026: “Site export or data transfer of any kind is not supported.” Ask yours, in writing, what its clause says.You keep the site, the domain, the repository and the database. Thirty days’ notice, no penalty.
What a machine readsWhatever the template emits. You cannot add a field the platform does not expose, however much you need it.The whole page, no JavaScript required, and any field your listing actually needs.
LanguagesUsually one. Often a paid add-on.Every language your guests book in.
Rebuilding in three yearsYou start from nothing.You already hold the repository.

Questions

What is this, in plain English?

A report on what AI assistants say about your property today, and on what your website gives them to read. You get screenshots, a validated technical audit, and a video of someone trying to book a room on a phone.

Is this the GEO thing everyone is selling?

The field has not agreed on a name. For one vendor AEO means Agent Engine Optimization; for another it means Answer Engine Optimization, both published in the same trade magazine four months apart. We do not use the acronyms, because they tell you nothing and they change every quarter.

Will this get me more bookings?

Nobody can honestly promise that, so we will not. No independent study has shown that this work increases bookings for a hotel or a restaurant, and AI referrals are under 1% of hotel site traffic today. What we can show you is what the machines say now and what your site currently returns.

Then why would I pay for it?

Because you cannot answer those two questions today, and the answer is occasionally alarming. Assistants have recommended properties that no longer exist. And because whatever fixes the machine-readability problem also fixes a site being slow and hard to book on a phone, which costs you money right now.

How much does a website cost?

Quoted per market inside a proposal, and the report is credited against it in full. We do not publish prices, because the number only means something next to your scope.

I already have a website. Someone built it two years ago.

That is the common case, and usually the problem. Ask whoever built it what your site returns to a request with JavaScript switched off. If they cannot answer in one sentence, you have your answer.

What kinds of places do you work with?

Retreats, coworkings and community spaces, wellness studios, event brands, and design-led product brands. The common factor is not the sector: it is that people decide about you before they ever arrive, so the website is doing the deciding.

Who actually does the work?

One person. Alberto Rocha, in Valencia, working in English and Spanish. You will not be handed to an account manager, because there is not one.

Order the report

$490

Delivered in five working days. Credited in full against a website if you go ahead.

Order the report