Picture a guest asking ChatGPT for a wellness hotel in the Alps, sauna and pool included, budget capped at 300 euros a night, family-friendly. The AI answers — with three or four names. Not ten blue links to scroll through, compare, and weigh up on your own. A finished shortlist, presented like a personal recommendation.
Is your hotel on it? Statistically, no. And with fairly high probability: no, in not a single topic.
This isn't a guess — it's the result of a recent study by maxonline, which systematically measured the AI visibility of over 500 four- and five-star hotels across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The result is uncomfortably clear — and that's exactly why it's worth sitting with.
Independently run hotels average just 11.2 out of 100 points. The median sits at 11.6 — this isn't an outlier effect, it's the normal state of the entire industry.
93% of all hotels studied stay under 20 points — the range where a hotel is effectively invisible to AI.
39% are even below 10 points, making them practically without effect.
28 hotels, including several five-star properties in internationally known destinations, scored exactly zero. Zero recommendations, across every single topic measured.
Of 472 independent hotels studied, only six reach 30 points at all. A single property in the entire study breaks 40.
For comparison: chain and multi-property domains average 36.2 points — more than three times as high. More on that shortly.
Here's the trap most hoteliers fall into. Ask the AI directly, "What is Hotel X?", and you'll almost always get a good, informed answer. That feels reassuring. It's also worthless.
Anyone who already knows a hotel's name is either already a guest, has already booked, or is searching for that specific property anyway. In that case the AI doesn't need to convince anyone — it just confirms something the asker already knows.
What matters is the other question: the anonymous one, without a brand name in it. "Best wellness hotel in the Zillertal." "Hotel with spa and childcare in South Tyrol." "Quiet boutique hotel in the Wachau." That's exactly the moment a new guest is won — or isn't. And it's exactly where nearly every hotel in the study fails. The authors therefore stripped all brand queries out of the measurement entirely. What was measured, exclusively, was how often a hotel shows up in purchase-intent recommendations with no name attached.
The gap between chains and independents is the single strongest finding in the study. Chain and multi-property domains average 36.2 points, independents 11.2. The reason isn't AI favoritism — it's a structural pattern that shows up directly in the data: a chain domain appears in an average of 72.8 topics, an independent hotel in only 26.6.
The mechanism behind it is simple. A chain domain bundles hundreds of properties across many regions. Every mention, every review, every link, every citation in a travel portal pays into the same domain. To an AI system, that reads as an enormous signal of topical breadth and authority. A single-property hotel with its own small website simply doesn't accumulate those signals at the same speed. It starts at a structural disadvantage — not because it's worse, but because it stands alone.
The good news: this disadvantage is structural, but not set in stone. It comes from a lack of topical breadth and external signals — both of which can be deliberately built.
Anyone assuming a five-star hotel is automatically in the clear is wrong. Five-star hotels average 12.9 points, four-star hotels 10.7. The gap is measurable but practically meaningless — both groups remain deep in the "cited occasionally, rarely prominently" range.
Some of the study's harshest individual findings:
Several five-star properties in internationally known winter sports destinations score zero.
A five-star property that regularly serves as a government guest house scores just 7.8 points.
The top-ranked wellness hotel in the entire study is a four-star property — outperforming every luxury brand in its region.
The explanation is straightforward: star ratings describe amenities and service. They say nothing about whether a property offers something findable on a specific topic. The AI recommends along topics, not along categories.
Particularly surprising: a destination's prestige and price level have no discernible effect on the AI visibility of the properties there. Lech am Arlberg — one of the most expensive and best-known addresses in the Alps — sits at 8.5 points, deep in the bottom range. Entire regions like Carinthia average just 4.4 points.
The explanation: where many properties offer the same thing and none stakes out a clear topical profile, the AI has no reason to name a specific one. It falls back on booking portals and chains instead — which have long since built their topical breadth.
In the country comparison, Switzerland leads with 14.3 points, followed by Germany at 11.2 and Austria at 9.6. Switzerland's lead, however, comes almost entirely from a handful of historic world-famous brands — exclude those, and all three countries sit at the same level. This isn't a national problem, but a structural one across the entire DACH hospitality industry.
The study's most striking finding isn't the low average — it's what's missing: a leader. Not a single independent hotel dominates the AI recommendation space. The highest score in the entire study was 44.8 out of 100 — achieved by a historic luxury property with a century of media presence.
For the rest of the industry, that means there's essentially no established competition. The field isn't hard-fought — it's simply unoccupied. Whoever claims it now is competing with almost no one. Whoever waits leaves it permanently to chains and booking portals.
Five levers that, according to the study, actually move the needle — and are reachable even for independents without chain-level resources:
Measure your visibility instead of guessing. The first step is a baseline assessment: which topics does your property already appear in for AI answers — and which not? Without a starting point, there's no way to track progress.
Own one clear topic instead of trying to be everything at once. Family stays, spa, cuisine, mountain sports, accessibility — a hotel that clearly owns its topic has a real shot at being mentioned there. A hotel that wants to be everything at once doesn't.
Make your website answer-ready. AI systems cite content that gives clear, formulated answers to concrete questions. Marketing copy doesn't get cited. Precise, verifiable facts do.
Build external signals deliberately. The chains' advantage isn't built on their own website, but outside it: mentions, links, citations in trade media, travel portals, and directories. That's exactly where AI systems derive authority from. For independents, that means your own website is necessary, but not sufficient.
Re-measure regularly. AI answers keep changing. Visibility isn't a fixed state — it's an ongoing process, comparable to classic SEO, just on a younger, more wide-open field.
At Matika, we build AI-driven systems for independent hotels and hospitality businesses across the DACH region — from operational automation to visibility strategies that address exactly this gap. This study confirms what we see in client work again and again: hotels rarely have an ideas problem. They have a visibility and execution problem.
Most properties know intuitively what they stand for. What's missing is the systematic translation of that profile into content, structure, and external signals that an AI can actually pick up and cite. That's exactly the difference between a hotel still winning new guests through AI search in five years — and one that's fully dependent on booking portals and chains by then.
If you want to know where your hotel actually stands in AI search today — and what can realistically change in the coming months — let's talk.
Book a no-obligation call →
How visible are hotels currently in ChatGPT and other AI search systems? Independently run four- and five-star hotels in the DACH region average an AI visibility score of 11.2 out of 100. 93% of all hotels studied fall under 20 points and are therefore practically absent from AI recommendations.
Why does AI recommend hotel chains more often than independent hotels? Because a chain domain bundles hundreds of properties. Every mention, link, and review pays into the same domain. As a result, a chain domain appears in an average of 72.8 topics, an independent hotel in just 26.6. The upshot: chains get recommended roughly three times as often.
Do five stars protect against invisibility in AI search? No. Five-star hotels average 12.9 points, four-star hotels 10.7 — both well below the threshold at which AI systems recommend reliably. Several five-star properties in well-known destinations score exactly zero.
What can hotels concretely do to become visible in AI search? Five steps make the biggest difference: measure your own visibility instead of guessing, own one clear topic instead of offering everything, make your website answer-ready, build external signals in trade media and portals, and re-measure regularly.
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