When a traveler asks an assistant where to stay, five systems handle most of those questions in the United States and Canada: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Each one draws its property names and its rates from travel companies it has signed agreements with. Four of the five can reach a payment, always through one of those partners. Gemini sends the guest to a website to finish. That distinction is worth twenty minutes of your time, because what you can change is different for every one of them.
| Assistant | Where the property names come from | Can it take the booking | What you can change |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Its own web searches, plus the apps OpenAI launched with, Booking.com and Expedia among them | Inside a partner app | Ask your web person to let OpenAI's search crawler through, in the robots file and at the firewall |
| Gemini | Google Hotels listings, matched on location, dates, nights, adults, currency, amenities and brand | No. Google lists booking, canceling and check in as unsupported | The rates and amenity details your system sends to Google Hotel Center |
| Copilot | Its ten Actions partners, among them Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, Priceline, Tripadvisor and Vrbo | Yes, through the partner | Bing Webmaster Tools, which now reports how often Copilot quotes you |
| Perplexity | Tripadvisor property records, with payment run by a booking partner | Yes, inside the chat | Your Tripadvisor listing, and crawler access for PerplexityBot |
| AI Overviews and AI Mode | Pages Google already has indexed, plus ten booking partners inside AI Mode | In AI Mode, through a partner, paid with Google Pay | Nothing special. Rank in ordinary Google results and you qualify |
Checked on September 2026 against each company's own documentation.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's help page for ChatGPT search explains that the assistant does not go looking for the words your guest typed. It rewrites the question into narrower ones first, sometimes through other search providers, and OpenAI says in the same breath that placement is not guaranteed.
OpenAI also names what a site has to do to be usable at all, and it comes down to one message for whoever looks after your website. Let OpenAI's crawler, OAI-SearchBot, through in the robots file. Then check that the company hosting the site is not blocking the addresses OpenAI publishes at openai.com/searchbot.json. At small properties the block is almost always at the hosting end rather than in the robots file. Security software bought to keep strange visitors off a site treats that crawler like anything else it has never seen, and nothing on your website tells you it is happening.
Booking.com and Expedia were among the seven partners when OpenAI introduced apps in ChatGPT in October 2025. A guest who books that way is booking on the platform, at the platform's commission.
Gemini
Gemini works from structured listing data. Google's support page for hotel search in Gemini says it uses public information from Google Flights and Google Hotels, and then lists what it matches on: location, booking dates, number of nights, number of adults, currency, amenities, and hotel brand or description. Gemini is matching on those seven pieces of listing data, none of which comes off your website.
Gemini cannot complete a reservation. Google lists canceling, updating and checking in as equally out of scope. So a guest who settles on your property inside Gemini still has to finish on a website, and yours is one of the options.
Google Hotel Center is where that listing data comes from, and appearing there costs nothing. Google's documentation for free booking links says there is no cost for clicks on them, that bids have no impact on their ranking, and that taking part in Hotel Ads or staying out of it changes nothing either. It also names the signals that do decide the ranking, and one is worth your attention: how accurate your prices have been historically. If Google is sent a rate you no longer honor, the guest lands on a price you have to correct, and that accuracy is one of the things Google weighs when it decides whose link to show. Ask whichever system holds your calendar, whether that is Cloudbeds, Mews, Lodgify, OwnerRez or a booking engine your web designer installed, whether it sends rates to Hotel Center, what it charges for that, and how often the rates refresh.
Copilot
Microsoft named ten launch partners for Copilot Actions in its April 2025 announcement: 1-800-Flowers.com, Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, OpenTable, Priceline, Tripadvisor, Skyscanner, Viator and Vrbo. Seven of the ten sell lodging. Copilot finishes the job on the partner's side, so again there is a commission in it.
Copilot is also the only one of the five that will show you your own record. Microsoft opened AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools on February 10, 2026. It reports how many times your pages were used as sources, how many different pages of yours were used, and what people were actually asking when the system reached for you. That covers Copilot, the AI summaries in Bing, and some partner services. In June 2026 Microsoft added a share figure, so you can see your slice against the other sites being quoted for the same questions. Proving you own the site takes about ten minutes and the report costs nothing.
Perplexity
Perplexity runs a property directory of its own, and it is easy to see what it is built from. The hotel pages sit at perplexity.ai/hotels/, and the identifier at the end of each address decodes to a Tripadvisor property number. Open one and you get the Tripadvisor rating, the review count, the line that ranks the property against every other hotel in its city, and a date picker that goes off to check availability. A small bed and breakfast in Padua sits there with 23 reviews, a 4.7, and a note that it is number 33 of 103 hotels in the city.
Perplexity builds those pages out of Tripadvisor's records, so there is no listing fee and no application. Your photographs, your description, your amenity list and your reviews are doing the work. If you have never claimed the listing, claim it, because until you do, somebody else's photographs of your lobby are the ones on screen. Perplexity's crawler, PerplexityBot, handles the rest of the web and follows robots.txt, so the firewall question from the ChatGPT section applies here too. Payment for a booking made inside the chat runs through a partner called Selfbook, which PhocusWire reported in March 2025. Perplexity has not put that arrangement on a documentation page I was able to read.
Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google is the one place on this list where the words on your own pages decide whether you appear. Its published instructions for that are far shorter than the checklist most agencies sell against them. Google's page on AI features in Search says a page needs to be indexed and allowed to show a short extract underneath its result in ordinary search, and that there are no additional technical requirements. It then rules out the whole checklist: you do not need new machine readable files, AI text files or markup, and there is no special structured data to add. It also explains that one question can set off several searches at once across different parts of the subject, which is why a page answering something very narrow can surface for a question that never used those words.
Booking is a separate matter. On August 27, 2026 Google began rolling out hotel booking inside AI Mode in the United States in English, with ten partners: Booking.com, Choice Hotels International, Expedia, Hilton, Hotels.com, IHG Hotels and Resorts, Marriott International, Priceline, Trip.com and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. The guest picks Continue on Google, chooses a room, and pays with Google Pay, and Google says the hotel or the booking platform takes the payment and handles any customer service afterwards. Google has published no way for an independent property to join those ten. Put your effort into the free booking links and into the pages you write.
What all five have in common
The property names and the rates come out of partner databases. Everything written around them is pulled from ordinary web pages. No partner list is going to add your inn, so the part that stays yours is the guest question no hotel database has a field for. Answer one properly on a page and it becomes the only place an assistant can find that answer. What to put on a page so an assistant can quote it covers how to write one of those pages. Getting named when a guest asks AI where to stay covers the channel as a whole.
What this looked like at our own place
My co-founder and I run MINT @Naschmarkt, a group of serviced apartments in Vienna, and our own record shows how differently these systems behave. Between May and July 2026 the site drew from 1 to 74 assistant sessions in a month. Of those, 62 came from ChatGPT, 8 from Gemini, 3 from Copilot and 1 from Claude. Over ninety days in the same period, Copilot had quoted our pages about 1,100 times and sent three of those visits.
ChatGPT, which sent 62, publishes no citation count anywhere. A monthly visibility tool only measures the quoting, so run one here and Copilot comes out the winner. Acting on that would have meant a quarter of work aimed at the platform sending us three visits.
Five things worth doing this month
- Put the question to all five yourself, on your phone, in the words a guest would use for your town and your kind of property. Note which places come back, whose photographs are on screen, and where each link lands.
- Ask whoever runs your website to check the robots file and the firewall against OpenAI's published searchbot addresses, and against PerplexityBot. Two lines of configuration decide whether either assistant can read you at all.
- Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and open the AI Performance report. It is the only free report from a vendor that tells you which of your pages Copilot is using and what it was asked at the time.
- Ask your booking engine or property system whether your rates reach Google Hotel Center, then check one weekend against what you actually charge. Google counts price accuracy when it decides whose free booking link to show.
- Open your Tripadvisor listing the way a stranger would. Perplexity puts that listing on screen as it stands, thin description, old photographs and all.
Under roughly $350,000 a year of bookings we turn this work down, because the commission saved will not cover a first year of building, and who this is built for explains where the number comes from. All five steps above are free at any size. If you are above that line and want an hour with somebody who reads these reports every week, book a call.
