Where ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek Find Hotels
We asked ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek 576 hotel questions across 8 cities. Here is what each one reads, and where each one sends the guest to book a room.
Where do ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek find hotels?
When a guest asks an AI assistant for a hotel, what it has read shapes the shortlist, and the link it displays determines where the guest goes next. We wanted to measure both, so on 21 October 2026 we asked ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek the same 64 hotel questions three times each. That gave us 576 answers across eight cities: Jakarta, Bali, Paris, London, Tokyo, New York, Bangkok and Singapore.
The three assistants acted very differently, so checking just one gives a hotel only a partial view.
What we asked
Each city got eight questions of the kind a guest might type: the best hotels in the city, the best boutique hotel, the best luxury hotel, the best budget hotel under a set price, a family friendly hotel, where to stay for a business trip, a romantic hotel for couples, and one question in the local language (or, for English-speaking cities, a hotel near a landmark).
ChatGPT and Gemini answers came from their consumer apps, collected from the United States. DeepSeek answers came from its API with web search turned on. For each answer we logged the hotels named, the sources returned and the links shown to the guest.
Each assistant leans on different sources
| Assistant | Sources behind the answers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek | Travel guides and magazines (Michelin Guide, Time Out, Oyster, Travel + Leisure) | about 43% |
| Booking sites (Trip.com, Booking.com, Agoda and others) | about 41% | |
| Hotel and hotel group websites | about 7% | |
| ChatGPT | Travel guides and magazines | about 60% |
| Booking sites | about 16% | |
| Review sites, mainly Tripadvisor | about 11% | |
| Hotel websites | about 6% | |
| Gemini | Mostly Google's own hotel data; it showed an outside source in only 30 of 192 answers | not shown |
DeepSeek's search returned about eight distinct websites for each answer. ChatGPT showed citations in fewer than half of its answers (88 of 192), and when it did, they were mostly editorial lists and Tripadvisor. Gemini almost never showed a source outside Google.
For a hotel, most pages informing an answer therefore belong to others: guides reviewing you, "best hotels in" articles mentioning you, and your booking-site listings.
Each assistant sends the guest somewhere different
ChatGPT links to hotel websites. Of the links shown inside its answers, 85% went to a hotel or hotel group's own site, such as fourseasons.com, hyatt.com or a single property's domain, and about two in three ChatGPT answers (124 of 192) linked to at least one hotel's own site.
Gemini keeps guests on Google. Its hotel cards linked to Google Travel in 157 of 192 answers (82%), and almost all of its other links were Google search pages.
DeepSeek names hotels without giving the guest a booking link.
The assistant a guest uses can therefore take the same question to your website, Google's hotel price comparison, or just your name.
The shortlists barely overlap
For the same question, the hotels named by ChatGPT and DeepSeek overlapped by about 21%. ChatGPT and Gemini overlapped by about 16%, and DeepSeek and Gemini by 13%. All three assistants named only about 7% of hotels for the same question.
A single assistant isn't stable either. Asked the same question again, it changed roughly 40% to 50% of the hotels on its list, which we look at in Ask AI twice, get different hotels.
What hotels can do with this
- Ensure the page ChatGPT reaches covers the basics. ChatGPT sends guests straight to hotel websites, so the page should say where you are, what rooms you have, roughly what they cost and who the hotel suits.
- Keep your Google hotel listing complete. Gemini directed guests to Google Travel in most answers, so guests first see your Google Business Profile, photos and rates.
- Work to get into the guides. Michelin Guide, Time Out, Oyster and Travel + Leisure were among the most common sources, and those lists feed both DeepSeek and ChatGPT.
- Write your booking-site listings around the questions guests ask. A listing that omits "family rooms" or "five minutes from the station" gives an assistant no reason to recommend you for either.
- Check all three assistants. ChatGPT can list a hotel that Gemini omits for the same question.
How SearchSeal helps
SearchSeal asks your guests' questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews every day, with Copilot, DeepSeek and others available as add-ons. It shows the hotels named instead of you and the sources returned with each answer, turning sources that omit you into a "get listed" task. See AI visibility for hotels.
Method and limits
- 64 questions, 3 runs each, on 3 assistants: 576 answers, all collected on 21 October 2026.
- ChatGPT and Gemini answers came from their apps through a data provider, located in the United States. Gemini reported a Flash-Lite model and ChatGPT did not report its model. DeepSeek answers came from its API with one web search per answer, not from the DeepSeek app.
- Source shares count websites, with country versions of the same site (such as Trip.com's) counted once. For ChatGPT they cover cited sources and search results returned with the answer.
- A language model extracted the hotels and brands from each answer and classified each website as a booking site, guide, review site or hotel site. A second review redid every calculation from the raw answers.
- This is one day of answers. AI answers often change, so take the numbers as a snapshot rather than a ranking.
- The full data is free to download and reuse: AI hotel answers dataset.
Frequently asked questions
Which sources do ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek use for hotel answers?
DeepSeek's search returned about eight distinct websites for each answer. ChatGPT showed citations in fewer than half of its answers (88 of 192), and when it did, they were mostly editorial lists and Tripadvisor. Gemini almost never showed a source outside Google.
Where does each assistant send the guest?
ChatGPT links to hotel websites. Gemini keeps guests on Google. DeepSeek names hotels without giving the guest a booking link.