GEO. AEO. LLMO. It's Still Just SEO.
The hospitality industry has a remarkable talent for buying the same thing twice.
Twenty years ago, a generation of hotel marketing teams paid consultants to decode Google's algorithm. They were sold keyword strategies, backlink packages, metadata audits and content calendars — all promising first page rankings if you just trusted the process and signed the retainer.
Some of it worked. Most of it was foundational digital hygiene dressed up in proprietary language and invoiced at a premium.
Now meet the new acronyms. GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation. AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation. LLMO — Large Language Model Optimisation. Each one promising to unlock your hotel's visibility in the age of AI search. Each one sold by someone with a deck, a framework and a monthly fee.
Google just published an official guide on how to optimise for generative AI search. It is worth reading in full. The headline finding, buried inside careful language but impossible to miss if you're paying attention, is this: optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience — and thus still SEO.
Same index. Same ranking systems. Same quality signals that have always mattered.
The acronyms are new. The work isn't.
What Google actually said — and what it means for hotels.
Google's guide confirms that its AI features — AI Overviews, AI Mode — use a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In plain English: the AI pulls from Google's existing Search index, ranked by the same systems your team has been optimising against for years, and uses that content to generate responses.
There is no separate AI index to crack. There is no special markup to add. There is no secret GEO framework that bypasses the fundamentals.
Google also explicitly debunked several tactics currently being sold to hoteliers:
— You don't need to chunk your content into AI-friendly bite-sized blocks.
— You don't need to rewrite your copy in a special "AI voice."
— You don't need an llms.txt file or any other machine-readable AI file.
— You don't need to chase inauthentic mentions across the web.
— Structured data is useful for rich results in regular Search, but is not required for AI visibility and will not move the needle on ChatGPT or Perplexity on its own.
If a vendor has been pitching any of the above as the key to your hotel's AI visibility — save your budget.
What actually matters.
Google's guidance points to one overriding principle: create unique, non-commodity content that real people find genuinely useful. For hotels, that means content that no competitor can copy — because it comes from actual experience, actual knowledge, and an actual point of view.
A "Top 10 Things to Do in London" page assembled from common knowledge is commodity content. A concierge's genuine insider guide to the neighbourhood your hotel sits in — specific, opinionated, useful — is not. AI systems are designed to surface the latter and ignore the former.
Beyond content, the fundamentals are the same ones covered in detail in Your Next Guest Is Asking ChatGPT Where to Stay. Is Your Hotel in the Answer?:
Your information must be consistent everywhere. Hotel name, address, room count, amenities — identical across your website, Google Business Profile, Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor. AI cross-verifies. Contradictions destroy confidence.
Your descriptions must be written in human language. Not marketing copy. Not brochure language from 2015. The way a knowledgeable colleague would describe your hotel to someone who genuinely needed to know.
Your reviews must be actively managed. Volume, recency, rating consistency across platforms, and thoughtful responses to every piece of feedback — positive and negative. AI treats your review profile as a trust signal.
Your press releases, if you write them, must contain actual facts. As covered in Finally Someone Is Reading Your Press Releases. It's AI. — corroborated facts distributed across credible, publicly crawlable sources are exactly what AI uses to build confidence in a recommendation.
None of this is new. None of it requires a GEO consultant. All of it requires discipline, consistency and the willingness to do unglamorous work well.
The ONE thing that is genuinely new.
The stakes.
With Google Search, a weak digital presence meant a lower ranking. There was still a page two. There were still ads. There were still ways to reach guests even if your organic position was poor.
With AI search, there is one answer. Your hotel is either in it or it isn't. The cost of getting the fundamentals wrong has never been higher — which is exactly why the consultants selling new acronyms are having such a good year.
The hotels that will win AI search visibility are not the ones that buy the most sophisticated GEO package. They are the ones that built the strongest digital foundation — clean data, consistent information, genuine content, actively managed reputation — and kept building it before anyone told them to.
If that sounds familiar, it's because it is. You've heard this story before. The only thing that changes is the acronym on the invoice.
xoxo, Bored Hotelier 😉
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO for hotels? Less than the people selling GEO and AEO packages would like you to think. Google has officially confirmed that its generative AI features pull from the same Search index, ranked by the same quality systems, as regular Google Search. GEO and AEO are marketing terms for what is still fundamentally SEO — the same content quality, consistency and authority signals that have always mattered.
How do I optimise my hotel for AI search? Start with what Google confirmed actually works: consistent information across every platform your hotel appears on, unique content written for real people rather than algorithms, an actively managed review profile, and descriptions in plain language that match how travelers actually search. There is no shortcut specific to AI. The foundation is the foundation.
Do I need a special AI optimisation strategy for my hotel website? No. Google has explicitly debunked the idea that generative AI search requires separate tactics — no content chunking, no llms.txt files, no special markup, no AI-specific rewriting. If your hotel's digital presence is built on strong SEO fundamentals, you already have the foundation AI search needs. If it isn't, no AI-specific tactic will compensate for it.