The new shelf: which hotels exist to AI and which ones don’t
The Stiplo Barcelona Study measured 659 registered properties across 27,360 AI travel answers to see which hotels AI recommends, which hotels it overlooks, who gets the link and why.
The story: AI travel answers are already reshaping hotel discovery, and the advantage is not evenly distributed.
Full PDF, methodology, source tables and republishable charts.
SCAN COMPLETE · 516 SURFACED
ONE DOT = ONE REGISTERED PROPERTY · N = 659
A fifth of Barcelona's register is invisible to AI
143 of 659 Barcelona properties never appeared in any answer, in any engine, in any language.
Independents are 8 times more likely to be invisible than chain hotels
The gap is discovery, not sentiment. Once surfaced, independents are recommended just as warmly.
Being named is not the same as winning the booking
Even when the hotel is mentioned, its own domain gets the link only 7.3% of the time.
registered hotels, hostals and guesthouses across Barcelona
AI answers across real user travel prompts with 20x repetitions to control variability
real consumer AI assistants tested
languages: English, Spanish, Catalan
The visual story
Who gets the click, who never gets named, and how specialists win anyway. Three charts from the study, republish-able with attribution.
AIs link to OTAs more than hotel sites
Being mentioned doesn't guarantee the hotel's website is linked in the AI answer: OTAs get the chance to capture the booking.
% of answers linking to at least one
AI invisibility is concentrated
Most properties surface at least once, but the invisible tail is large and concentrated in independent, lower-category accommodation.
% never surfaced, by segment
Hotels can still win their niche
Breaking into the top 10% of hotels is hard, for most hotels the realistic way to win in AI visibility is owning their specific niche
Visibility boost for specific queries vs generalist
Distinct properties surfaced, by prompt type
What really drives AI visibility isn’t your fashionable GEO checklist
Search visibility still matters, but the study points to reputation mass, authority and answerable content as clearer commercial levers.
MEASURED RELATIONSHIP WITH AI VISIBILITY. ASSOCIATION, NOT CAUSATION.
What hotels can do to boost their AI visibility
Ask for Google reviews, not just OTA reviews. Google review volume was five times more important for AI visibility than OTA reviews volume.
Make sure practical pages exist before making them pretty. Hotels with pages answering real guest questions were visible 87% of the time vs 72% without. Polish added almost nothing.
Deprioritise the fashionable AI checklist. llms.txt, FAQ schema, AI-crawler settings and content freshness showed no meaningful signal.
The full report ranks all 8 actions that enhance AI visibility, and shows you the ones that don't
Leave your email and we’ll send the detailed PDF with the complete hotel AI strategy.
Different desks can use different cuts.
The same data can serve hospitality trade, AI search, travel commerce and Barcelona-local coverage.
Independent hotels risk disappearing from AI travel answers
Chains are 37.6% of the register but receive 62.2% of surfacings. Independents are most of the market, but only 37.8% of surfacings.
AI has new gatekeepers, and nobody audits them
77% of cited sources are editorial guides and listicles, official tourism sites just 1.5%; Booking.com is the single most-linked destination (14.3% of answers)
AI names hotels, then often hands the click to someone else
The commercial question is not only whether AI recommends a hotel. It is whether the booking path reaches the hotel or an intermediary.
How Stiplo measured the AI shelf
Enough detail for a journalist to assess credibility quickly, with full methodology and source tables available under embargo.
Visibility
means named in a recommendation or list context. It is not the same as endorsement or booking.
Matcher accuracy
is validated in the low-to-mid 90s for precision and recall across held-out checks.
Adjusted figures
strip out major prominence proxies such as star category, chain membership and domain authority.
One city, one vertical,
free consumer AI surfaces. Other markets and paid research modes may behave differently.
“Hotels are used to checking where they rank in Google. The AI layer is a new shelf: it names some properties, forgets others, and often sends the click to someone else.”Carlo Del Mistro, Founder, Stiplo. Former Chief Digital Officer at Ennismore.
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Media contact
For methodology questions, property-level cuts or interviews.