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GEO for hospitality: Why Bing now matters
Posted by on March 13, 2026 at 5:26 pmI work in hotel ecommerce and have been digging into why some hotels appear in ChatGPT/Perplexity recommendations and others don't. Sharing what I've found as a lot of this applies beyond hospitality.
For context, only about 1 in 6 hotels currently show up when you ask an AI tool for a recommendation in their destination. That's a massive visibility gap and most hotel teams have no idea it exists.
Here's what seems to actually matter:
Bing indexation is critical. This is the big one nobody in hospitality is thinking about. Bing has been irrelevant for organic hotel traffic for years, so most teams ignore it. But ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from Bing's index alongside Google and their own crawlers. Copilot runs entirely on Bing. I've seen properties that rank well on Google but aren't properly indexed on Bing, and they're invisible in AI recommendations. 15 minutes in Bing Webmaster Tools submitting a sitemap could be the highest impact task going.
robots.txt blocking AI crawlers. A surprising number of hotel sites are blocking OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot, sometimes intentionally (CMS defaults, overzealous agency settings), sometimes without realising. Worth noting: OpenAI now has three separate bots, GPTBot (training), OAI-SearchBot (search results), and ChatGPT-User (real-time fetching for user queries). As of late 2025, ChatGPT-User no longer respects robots.txt, but blocking OAI-SearchBot still reduces your visibility in proactive recommendations.
JavaScript rendering. Hotels tend to have JS-heavy sites (booking engines, dynamic pricing, package builders). If structured data, room types, amenities, or offers are rendered client-side, some AI crawlers won't pick them up. Putting critical content and schema in raw HTML has made a noticeable difference in the sites I've looked at.
Citation surface / entity signals. The properties that consistently appear in AI recommendations tend to have strong third-party signals, Google Business Profile, review volume across platforms, press mentions, directory listings. AI seems to use these to triangulate whether an entity is real and notable. This probably maps to what the SEO world would call entity authority.
It compounds. Properties that show up in AI recommendations get more traffic, more bookings, more reviews, more citations, which reinforces their AI visibility. Classic flywheel, early movers have a real advantage.
Curious whether others are seeing similar patterns in other verticals. Also interested if anyone has done more rigorous testing on the Bing indexation x AI visibility correlation.
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1 Reply
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thanks captain obvious!
kidding but not really
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submitting the sitemap to bing is a good one I do myself, takes 0 effort and has compounding rewards as they recrawl. You can do it once and never open the thing again.
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