AEO Insight Hotels.com Upper Funnel: What Travel Brands Should Measure

An AEO insight hotels.com upper funnel reading asks what AI answers say at the inspiration and planning stage, when a traveller has not chosen a property, and whether they name your hotel or only marketplaces such as Hotels.com. Measure who is named, which pages are linked and whether your own facts are stated correctly, then repeat the same questions.

This guide is for hotels, destinations and travel brands. It uses Hotels.com as a familiar example of an online travel agency (OTA), and it relies only on what Expedia Group, OpenAI and Google publish. Prime AI Visibility publishes this site and appears later with its limits.

AEO insight Hotels.com upper funnel: the short answer

• Upper funnel means questions with no brand in them. "Where should we stay in Lisbon with two kids?" is upper funnel. "Hotel X cancellation policy" is not.
• At that stage the names in an answer are often marketplaces, chains and destination guides. Whether a given answer names your independent property is something you test, not something to assume.
• A marketplace in the answer is a channel fact, not an error. The commercial question, direct versus OTA, is yours to decide. The measurement question is whether the facts about your property are right wherever they appear.
• Four readings matter: who is named, who is linked, whether facts are correct and whether anything arrives as a visit. Keep them separate.
• Booking happens elsewhere. Expedia's own page for its ChatGPT app says travellers finish booking on Expedia. An answer is a planning step, so judge it by accuracy and referral, not by bookings alone.

For the full framework, start with generative engine optimization, then return here for the travel case.

What the phrase means

Three terms are doing work, and each can be misread.

AEO insight is an observation taken from a saved AI answer: a brand named or missing, a link shown, a fact stated. It is evidence about one question on one day. It is not a ranking and it does not say why an answer was written that way.

Hotels.com is one of Expedia Group's consumer brands. It appears here as a named example of a marketplace a traveller might see in an answer.

Upper funnel is the early part of a trip decision: where to go, when, what kind of stay and which area. The later stages, comparing named properties and shopping by date and price, behave differently and need different questions. Our AI search visibility guide defines the underlying measures.

In our judgement, a small hotel's upper-funnel risk is less about a marketplace being named than about the answer lacking any property-level fact the traveller can use. That is a hypothesis built from the sources below, and the test later in this guide is how to check it for your own market.

What the primary sources document

Marketplaces are building their own AI. Expedia Group's May 19, 2026 announcement from its Explore 26 conference describes "AI Property Compare" and "Property Expert" from Hotels.com. AI Property Compare lets travellers compare properties by factors such as vibe, location, amenities and trade-offs. Property Expert answers detailed property and neighbourhood questions using "trusted property information and guest reviews". The release says both were coming later in 2026. Those features live inside Hotels.com's own experience, not in public AI answers, so a tool that tests ChatGPT or Gemini will not see them.

Marketplaces also appear inside ChatGPT. OpenAI's October 6, 2025 announcement of apps in ChatGPT named Booking.com and Expedia among its pilot partners. Expedia's product page for the Expedia app in ChatGPT says it returns flight and lodging results with pricing and availability in the chat, and that a traveller clicks to finish the booking on Expedia. It also lists the markets where it is live. The page describes the Expedia app, not a Hotels.com app.

Google lists no special requirement. Google's guidance on AI features in Search says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and lists no additional technical requirements. Its structured data policies say markup must match visible content, so a rich schema block cannot state an amenity the page does not show.

What none of them document. No source we cite says how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini choose between a property's own site, a marketplace and a guide when answering an inspiration question.

The upper-funnel question ladder

Build your question set from how travellers actually ask. Use search terms, front-desk and call-centre questions, review themes and the questions your concierge team hears. Then sort them by stage.

Stage	Example question	Fact to read
Inspire	Where to go for a quiet March beach week?	Which places named
Narrow	Best area to stay in Lisbon with kids?	Which areas and stays named
Fit	Hotels near the old town with a pool?	Properties and amenities
Compare	Hotel A or hotel B for couples?	Facts about each
Shop	Rooms in Lisbon for two nights in May?	Prices and availability

The first three rows are the upper funnel for a property. The last two depend on live prices and availability, which an answer may take from a marketplace feed or send the traveller to a marketplace to see. In practice, a hotel's own site rarely controls those rows, but it controls the facts that the first three rows draw on.

Step 1: write questions with no brand in them

Create ten to twenty questions per market, using the Inspire, Narrow and Fit rows. Remove your hotel name, and also remove marketplace names, so the answer has to choose. Add a second version for each question that includes the traveller type, such as families, couples or business, because the answer you want may differ by segment.

Keep the wording fixed across rounds. If you rephrase between rounds, you cannot tell a change in the answer from a change in the question.

Step 2: record the role each name plays

For every answer, list each lodging option, marketplace, review site or guide that appears, and the role it plays. This is the second original asset in this guide.

Role	What it means	Typical action
Property named	Your hotel appears by name	Check facts
Property linked	Your own page is linked	Check the page
Marketplace only	OTA named or linked, not you	Review listings
Guide only	Destination or editorial page	Earn coverage
Absent	Nothing useful for the question	Add content
Wrong fact	Named, with an error	Fix the source

Count the roles per question, not per answer sentence. An answer can fill several roles at once. Record the full text and every link so a reviewer can check the evidence later.

Step 3: score facts against your pages

For every answer that names you, compare each stated fact with your own source pages: location, distance to landmarks, amenities, policies, accessibility, family features and seasonal closures. Mark each fact as correct, outdated, wrong or unsupported. Accuracy is correct facts divided by facts stated, and absent answers are reported separately.

If an error appears, trace it to the linked source before editing. A link shows what the answer displayed, not why it said it. When the source is your own page, fix the page. When it is a marketplace listing or a review site, the fix is a listing or a correction request, and it can take time.

Step 4: repeat and compare

Wait a few weeks after a change, then ask the same questions the same way. AI answers vary from run to run, so run each question at least twice in the baseline to see how much it moves by itself. Treat a change as something to investigate, not proof that your edit caused it.

Planning arithmetic: ten questions × two traveller versions × three AI tools is 60 answers per round per market. Start with one market and two tools.

What to change when the check shows gaps

• Put property facts in visible text. A short facts block with location, distances, amenities, policies and accessibility, in plain page text rather than only in images or tabs.
• Write about the neighbourhood from first-hand knowledge. Inspiration and Narrow questions are about places. Original guides written by people who work there are the strongest owned asset, and Google's helpful-content guidance asks for first-hand expertise.
• Keep marketplace and Google listings consistent. The facts on your OTA listings, Google Business Profile and website should match. Our Google Business Profile guide covers the profile side.
• Earn coverage in destination and editorial sources. Local tourism boards, press and travel writers appear in answers. That is public-relations work and it is slow.
• Do not chase marketplaces out of answers. Being named through a marketplace can still be a useful route to a traveller, and any commercial decision about channels belongs outside this measurement.

Keep five signals separate

1. Mention. An answer names your property or brand.
2. Citation. An answer links to a page you own.
3. Recommendation. An answer suggests you for the traveller's need.
4. Referral. A traveller arrives from an AI tool. Take this from analytics.
5. Conversion. The visit becomes a direct booking or enquiry. Take this from your booking engine.

Add accuracy beside them, since being named with an outdated policy is worse than not appearing. Our guide to how to track brand mentions in AI search covers the monitoring side, and the metrics page defines each measure.

Where Prime AI fits, and where it does not

Affiliation: Prime AI Visibility is our own product. It fits the steps above because the baseline and repeat steps need saved answers, not screenshots.

The product's features save each answer with the names mentioned and the links shown across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and an AI Overview-style preview built from Google-grounded answers, which is not a capture of the live AI Overview panel. You write the questions, so the brand-free ladder above is yours to enter. Flash is free for five questions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, with up to 15 answers a month and no card. Starter at $69 a month covers all five.

Limitations: Prime AI Visibility does not test AI features inside a marketplace's own app, such as Hotels.com's Property Expert, and the public pages do not describe testing third-party apps inside ChatGPT, so check the Expedia app by hand if it matters in your market. It does not grade whether a fact is correct, so you score each answer against your pages. It does not report sentiment or rank, or record crawler visits, traffic or bookings. Checks run monthly by default, with weekly, temporary daily and on-demand checks on paid plans. It does not track Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI or Google AI Mode, and you control the location wording of each question yourself. PyraBuilds' Prime AI agent profile describes the product in Pyra's agent catalogue.

To place this check inside a wider plan, use the AI visibility strategy guide, and the AI visibility audit steps for the baseline.

When the next job is implementation

The check shows what is wrong. Fixing property pages, listings and earned coverage is editorial, technical and public-relations work. Percepture, founded in 2004 and Inc. 5000-recognized, offers generative engine optimization services that combine SEO, GEO and digital PR. Fit: a hotel group or destination that wants page changes and earned coverage handled together. Limitation: Percepture is a services firm, not a tracking product, so ask for relevant travel examples and a scoped plan. For providers that publish travel work, see our travel SEO and AI search agencies shortlist. Prime AI Visibility has a commercial relationship with Percepture.

Teams that want repeatable workflows outside a dashboard can also look at Pyra's AI agents for marketing and sales, which include human-approved content operations agents. Pyra's AI visibility case study describes an anonymized digital-infrastructure company with more than 35 years in business and reports a 3,000% increase in AI and LLM visibility signals. That is Pyra's published client result in another industry, not a benchmark for a hotel. Pyra is also commercially connected to Prime AI Visibility.