Luxury travel has always been a game of who tells the best story and who tells it first.
In recent years, it’s also been about whose story is showing up first on Google. But in 2025, the audience isn’t just travelers scrolling Instagram or advisors skimming newsletters; it’s the algorithms themselves. Per a sweeping new study from Spotlight Communications, most luxury hotels are whispering into the void.
In the age of AI search, your website might be gorgeous, your spend might be sky-high, and your rooms might be $4,000 a night.
But if the bots can’t read you, dear, they can’t recommend you.
The Big Picture
Spotlight released what’s likely to become required reading among luxury-brand CMOs: “Invisible or Influential? Luxury Travel in the Era of AI Search,” a white paper dissecting why even major five-star names are now at risk of disappearing from AI-generated recommendations.
The headline finding: Visibility in AI search relies on what the study calls “machine-readable credibility” instead of traditional SEO.
“AI-driven search no longer just directs travelers, it decides who deserves to be found,” Spotlight CEO Lucy Clifton said in a statement. “Visibility now depends on the quality of storytelling, the authority of coverage and the independent voices PR establishes. PR is no longer just what happens when the story is told—it is how AI learns to tell it.”
The firms behind the study, Spotlight and AI-forward marketing agency Make Lemonade Fizz, analyzed 15 high-end hotels and travel brands using questionnaires, interviews, SEMrush audits, Google PageSpeed Insights and visibility tests in ChatGPT, Google AI Overview and Perplexity.
The consistent theme: AI thinks more like a journalist than a keyword scraper. It wants authority, repetition, reputation and structure rather than metadata acrobatics.
“AI search rewards what it understands, what it’s fed, and what it sees repeated,” Maria Sze, founder of Make Lemonade Fizz, said in a statement. “AI-driven summaries now shape what we see online—every article, quote and story feeds the algorithm deciding who gets seen.”
By the Numbers
AI visibility scores ranged from 0 to 70, depending on market. Most luxury properties sat between 14–38, appearing in fewer than 40 percent of relevant searches.
Some hotels with excellent site speed had low AI visibility—and vice versa—proving technical performance doesn’t translate to discoverability.
Properties with 1,000+ citations per month dramatically outperformed those with fewer than 100, underscoring the power of editorial validation.
Key Findings
- Discoverability Is the New Luxury Currency: Machine-readable credibility—voices of trust, consistency and authority—is becoming the defining factor in whether a brand even appears in AI results.
- Even “Famous” Brands Can Be Invisible: AI visibility varied wildly by region. Even well-known players often failed to rank across markets.
- Performance Doesn’t Equal Presence: Technical speed and site health didn’t predict visibility. Domain authority and media coverage did.
- Hotels Are Beautiful, But Their Data Is a Mess: Most lacked structured data identifying basics like property type, amenities, awards and sustainability credentials.
- SEO is So Last Season: Trusted third-party coverage carried more weight for AI recommendations than keyword tactics or paid search.
- Trust Shapes the Shortlist: Algorithms reward brands that appear well-referenced, well-reviewed and consistently cited.
- AI Readiness Is the New Operational Gap: Many luxury brands lacked the foundational content structure required for machines to interpret their identity.
- Reputation Is Performance Marketing: Press coverage, expert endorsements and backlinks influenced visibility more than advertising.
Now What?
AI is increasingly the unseen hand behind trip inspiration, even for UHNW travelers who still book through advisors.
If a property doesn’t surface in those early algorithmic recommendations, it risks being left off the initial consideration set altogether. That affects everything: advisor mindshare, rate strategy, brand equity and long-term competitiveness.
Luxury travel has always thrived on exclusivity, but disappearing from AI search isn’t the kind of exclusivity anyone wants.
The brands that win in this new landscape won’t necessarily be the ones with the flashiest video campaigns or the biggest marketing budgets; they’ll be the ones machines trust as much as humans do.
Related Articles
Travel Advisors Are Living in a Time of “More”
How AI is Redefining the Luxury Hotel Experience
Hex Aims to End Data Disconnect Between Hotels & Advisors
Ensemble Summit Inspires Attendees to “Reimagine the Future”
