· AEO · 1 min read
Why answer engines skip most hotel websites.
Beautiful galleries, no machine-readable facts. Here’s what a model needs to cite you.
Ask an answer engine where to stay in a city and watch what it cites. Almost never the hotel. Usually an OTA, a listicle, a review aggregator. The hotel has the best photography on the internet and the worst chance of being quoted.
Models quote facts, not moods
A generative engine builds its answer from passages it can attribute. It needs a sentence that says “Rooms from 42 m², check-in from 15:00, pets allowed on the ground floor” and a structured-data entity that says the same thing. Most hotel sites say neither.
The three things a model needs
- An entity. One Hotel with a stable name, address, geo and a link to every room as its own HotelRoom.
- A quotable page per question. Rooms, rates, policies, getting there, what is nearby. One page, one question, answered in the first paragraph.
- Consistency across the web. The same facts on Google Business Profile, the booking engine and the OTAs.
What we change in the first two weeks
We rewrite room and rate content as facts, ship the schema layer, and set a monthly re-test against four answer engines. The photography stays. The structure underneath it becomes the product.