Remember when searching a hotel by name gave you its website, a map and a few review sites? AI Overviews have moved into the neighborhood. Two new studies, from SE Ranking and Semrush, show how far they have come.
Your name isn’t safe ground anymore
The first study ran 1,000 US brand searches and found an AI Overview on 82.5% of them. The second tracked 400 commercial searches for a year and watched AI Overview coverage nearly double, from 45.75% to 88%. The biggest jump? Searches with “reviews” in them, up from 30.14% to about 90%.
Now picture a guest typing your hotel’s name, or “[hotel] reviews”. They get an AI answer before they get your website.
Here’s the good news
Those AI answers don’t stop at your homepage. They cite more of a brand’s own pages than the top 10 does (2.57 per answer versus 1.72), and they dig deeper. Product, service and category pages made up 22.9% of brand-site citations, against 6.1% in the top 10. And 62.2% of the brand pages cited weren’t in the top 10 for that search at all.
For hotels, our take is that room, spa, dining, meetings and location pages could all get a seat in the answer, even when they don’t rank for it. Pages that never got much love in a blue-links world might be doing the talking now.
Your site isn’t the only source, either. About 40% of citations came from places a brand manages: the website (33.8%), app store listings and Google Business Profile (2.7%). Another 20.8% came from social, video and review sites, mostly YouTube. The remaining 39% came from places a brand doesn’t control. So your profiles and reviews are part of the conversation too.
The honest bit
Neither study looked at hotels. The closest category, travel and transport, showed an AI Overview on 68.1% of brand searches in all three test runs. Both studies are US desktop only, both come from companies that sell tracking tools, and neither measured traffic or bookings. So take the direction seriously and the exact numbers lightly.
The direction is hard to miss, though. Google’s AI answers are moving onto the searches that lead to bookings, and the second study expects the remaining gaps to keep closing.
What to do now
- Google your own hotel. Try your name, “[hotel] reviews” and “best hotels in [your city]”. See if an AI Overview shows up, what it says and which pages it cites.
- Fix what’s wrong at the source. If the answer is out of date, the page it came from probably is too. Start with rooms, rates, amenities and policies.
- Give your deeper pages a job. Make sure rooms, spa, dining, meetings and location pages are clear, current and consistent with your name, address and details everywhere else.
- Tidy your profiles. Google Business Profile, YouTube and review sites all feed these answers. Keep them accurate and reply to reviews.
Helpful reading
- AI Overviews appear on 82.5% of US brand searches, SE Ranking, 22 October 2026
- AI Overviews have nearly doubled across five commercial search modifiers, Semrush, 21 October 2026
- AI features and your website, Google Search Central
Guests are meeting AI answers before they meet your website, even when they type your name. Let’s make sure the answer is a good one.
How is your hotel surfacing in AI? Need help finding out? Get in touch with three&six