Your hotel has an AI rank. Do you know what it is?

The question probably wasn't on your radar a year ago. It might barely be on your radar now. But somewhere between the last time a traveler opened Google to find a hotel and the next time they ask ChatGPT instead, your property earned a rank. AI systems are already recommending hotels to travelers every single day, surfacing some, skipping others, describing properties in their own words to users who rarely look past the first answer they receive. Most hoteliers have no idea where they stand.

That was the starting point for our most recent webinar, and it turned out to be a more urgent conversation than most attendees expected. Our Head of Brand and Content, Adam Swart, sat down with Carrie Ell (VP Business Development) and Sonia Merena (Director, Northern Europe) to unpack what AI ranking actually means for hotels, what Lighthouse is doing about it and what hoteliers can do right now to take control.

The front door is moving

For the past two decades, the path from travel inspiration to hotel booking ran through a search bar. Travelers typed, scrolled, clicked and compared. The search engine was the gatekeeper, and hotels that understood how to be visible there, through search engine optimization (SEO), online travel agency (OTA) listings and metasearch, built a real advantage.

Now, we’re seeing a shift. Travelers aren’t searching less, they’re searching differently. Instead of opening Google, a growing number are opening ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity and asking a question. And instead of receiving a page of links to filter through, they receive an answer: a single, personalized recommendation shaped by everything the AI knows about their preferences, their destination and their intent.

"AI isn't replacing search," Adam put it plainly. "It's replacing the search engine itself."

That is a distinction worth sitting with. When a traveler gets a list of links, they do the work of deciding, but when a traveler gets an AI recommendation, the AI has already decided. There is no page two or comparison shopping across tabs, there’s just a response that reads like advice from a well-traveled friend. The hotels that surface in that response win the booking. The ones that don't may never know what they missed.

The numbers that demand attention

ChatGPT now has over 900 million users every week. According to recent research, 42% of travelers used AI tools to plan trips last year, a figure that surprised almost no one on the call, given how naturally these tools have become part of everyday life. Among millennials and Gen Z, the number climbs to 60%.

That last figure carries particular weight because they aren’t just occasional experimenters, they are travelers who are learning an entirely new behavior from the start: not searching, but asking for recommendations. As Carrie noted, that has real implications for lifetime value. Hotels that establish a presence in AI now are not just capturing a booking. They are becoming part of how a generation learns to find places to stay.

OTAs didn't wait, and neither should you

When ChatGPT launched its in-platform apps in October 2023, the comparison point was striking. Apple had six million users when it launched the App Store in 2008. ChatGPT had 900 million. The two companies that recognized the significance of that moment fastest in the hotel space were Booking.com and Expedia. Both were day-one launch partners.

That sounds like good news at first. If your hotel is listed on those platforms, you are technically discoverable through their ChatGPT presence. But technically discoverable and directly bookable are very different things. Being in ChatGPT through an OTA is the digital equivalent of not having your own website that ranks on Google. Your hotel is there, but someone else is describing it, someone else is controlling the conversation and someone else is collecting the commission.

The window to establish a direct presence alongside OTAs is open, but it won’t stay open indefinitely.

Connect AI 2.0: what's new

Lighthouse built Connect AI to give hotels their own seat at the table inside ChatGPT, not through an OTA, not at a commission, but through a direct booking app that surfaces your property with your content, your rates and a path that leads straight to your booking engine.

The app was submitted to ChatGPT when the platform first opened to external developers, and launched in March. The day before this webinar, an enhanced version went live.

The headline addition in version 2.0 is what the team is calling the immersive hotel card: an expanded property page that opens when a traveler taps on your hotel inside ChatGPT. It brings together photos, reviews, unique selling points (USPs), amenities and maps, everything a traveler wants when they are close to a decision, in a single rich experience that does not require them to leave the platform. When they are ready to book, every "Book Now" button routes them directly to the hotel's own booking engine. 

The other significant addition is personalization. If ChatGPT understands that a traveler is searching for a family stay or a couples' retreat, the property page adapts its content accordingly. As Carrie noted, Lighthouse and The Hotels Network have spent a decade learning that personalization is one of the most reliable conversion levers available. Bringing that into the AI environment is a natural extension of work that is already proven.

One more important distinction: this is not a commission app. There are other apps appearing in the ChatGPT marketplace that claim to support direct bookings but still charge a commission. Connect AI does not. A low flat monthly fee with no transaction costs and no percentage of the booking going anywhere other than the hotel.

Introducing AI Visibility Insights: your hotel's AI rank, made visible

Travelers are already using ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to plan trips, and those tools are recommending hotels before a guest ever reaches your website. Most hotels have no idea whether they are showing up in those conversations, how they are being described or who is ranking above them. It is the fastest-growing search channel in travel, and until now, it has been effectively invisible to hoteliers.

AI Visibility Insights changes that. It is Lighthouse’s upcoming Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) monitoring solution built specifically for hospitality, included at no additional cost for all Connect AI clients. Sonia walked attendees through the dashboard in detail, and it is worth covering each layer, because together they answer questions hotels have never been able to ask before.

Mention rate and average positioning

The first thing the dashboard shows is how frequently your hotel appears when AI is asked for recommendations in your destination, giving you a clear picture of your share of voice inside AI discovery. Alongside that is your average positioning across those recommendations. As Sonia explained, position matters more in AI search than it does in traditional search. Travelers who ask an AI for a hotel recommendation typically act on the first answer they receive. Moving from position three to position one is not a marginal improvement. It is the difference between being part of the journey and being absent from it entirely.

Visibility by USP

The dashboard also breaks down which of your property's attributes AI actually associates with you: location, pool, restaurant, spa, business facilities, and how prominently each one features across different AI platforms. This is where the data becomes genuinely actionable. Sonia used a clear example: a hotel with a spa that barely registers as a recommended attribute anywhere. The dashboard makes that gap visible and points toward what to do about it: strengthening the spa's presence on the hotel website, building out content across other sources, generating user content that routes back to the direct site. The fix is not mysterious once you can see the problem.

AI-native competitive positioning

The competitive view is one of the more striking parts of the dashboard, because the compset it surfaces may look nothing like the one you are used to. Your traditional competitive set is defined by geography and star rating. Your AI competitive set is defined by which hotels AI decides to recommend alongside yours, and those may be entirely different properties. The dashboard lets you choose which competitors to benchmark against and tracks your positioning relative to them across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity separately, so you can see where you are strong and where you have the most room to close ground quickly.

Sources, citations and the direct booking connection

This is where the dashboard connects AI visibility to direct channel performance. It shows where AI is drawing its information from when it recommends your property: your own website, OTAs, user-generated content, travel media and destination platforms. But it goes further than just identifying sources. It tracks the balance of direct hotel links versus OTA links appearing in AI responses about your property, and benchmarks that split against your competitors.

That distinction matters. A hotel with 67% of its AI citations coming from its own direct website is in a strong position: the AI already recognizes it as the authoritative source and is more likely to route travelers toward it. A hotel whose AI presence is built primarily on OTA citations is, in effect, training AI to send its guests somewhere else. The sources view surfaces exactly those content gaps, so hotels can make targeted improvements to their owned content and shift AI recommendations back in their favor over time.

Answering the questions everyone is asking

"Is this only for large branded hotels?"

Not at all. Connect AI and the AI Visibility dashboard are available for any hotel: independent, branded, chain or management company. Independent hotels in particular stand to gain the most. A direct presence in ChatGPT puts them alongside OTAs and major brands without the commission costs that would otherwise come with that visibility.

"How does the setup work?"

When a hotel joins Connect AI, Lighthouse pulls a full analysis of the property, everything publicly known about it, and sends it back for review. The hotel checks the information, adds anything specific to their property that might not appear on the website and approves it. That becomes the data anchor, fed through Lighthouse's Model Context Protocol (MCP) technology into both the ChatGPT app and the various AI agents. Carrie also flagged that the AI-ready content Lighthouse prepares can be applied directly to a hotel's own website schema, effectively Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for organic discoverability across all AI platforms, not just ChatGPT.

"What does it cost?"

Connect AI runs on a low flat monthly fee, with no transaction costs and no commission on bookings. AI Visibility Insights is included for all Connect AI clients at no additional cost. That pricing reflects how early this channel still is, and it is unlikely to stay at its current level for long.

The window is open, but not forever

Adam closed the session the same way he opened it, by asking whether hoteliers know their AI rank. The honest answer, for most of the industry, is still no. And as he pointed out, that is not a failure. These platforms are still being trained. What gets cited, what gets recommended and what gets booked are all still being shaped, which is exactly what makes this moment valuable.

The hoteliers who adopted Google early did not just get traffic. They established authority that compounded over time, setting a standard that later entrants had to work much harder to match. The same dynamic is playing out now in AI, and the window to be among the first movers is still open.

Watch the full webinar.