This insight summarises There Is No Single AI Ranking for Your Hotel by Lynn Patchett, Founder & Head of Marketing at Kollective, published on Hospitality Net.
The finding: Kollective ran 13,500 AI searches across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The result is a direct challenge to how the industry currently thinks about "AI SEO."
Rankings are unstable at the query level.
- ChatGPT's top hotel recommendation changes 45% of the time when the same question is asked twice.
- Only 60% of hotels reappear on repeated queries.
- Gemini is the most consistent — same top pick 59% of the time.
- Google AI Overviews is the least — 41%, and it declines to produce an overview at all on 25% of boutique queries.
Platforms don't agree with each other.
- Different AI platforms return the same single top hotel recommendation only 4% of the time.
- 70% of hotel names appear on only one platform — meaning cross-platform overlap is the exception, not the rule.
Descriptor choice reshapes your competitive set. "Boutique," "luxury," and "romantic" pull entirely different property mixes:
- "Boutique" conversations are only 3% chains — independents dominate.
- "Luxury" conversations run ~25% chains — the competitive set flips.
Descriptor language is competitive strategy.
What this means for how you measure and act:
- Stop chasing a single AI ranking. It doesn't exist and it won't stabilize.
- Measure consistency of presence per platform over time — not position on a single query.
- Track by descriptor — "boutique in Lisbon" and "luxury in Lisbon" are different battlegrounds with different competitors.
- Optimize each platform independently. Cross-platform overlap is 4% — a strategy tuned to one won't carry to the others.
- Treat volatility as the baseline. Ranking movement 45% of the time is not a signal to react to individual queries — it's a signal to build durable presence signals (structured data, third-party citations, review volume).
Bottom line: in AI discovery, showing up reliably — across queries, across descriptors, across platforms — matters more than owning any one ranking. Build for presence, not position.