GEO · Hospitality sector SEO for hotels and restaurants: how Google and AI systems come to recommend you

How guests search today

The search rarely starts with the name of a place. People search by occasion: “dog-friendly hotel Lake Windermere”, “restaurant with terrace Shoreditch”, “vegetarian food Edinburgh old town”. In a chat this becomes a whole question: “Which hotel in the Lake District is quiet, has a spa and suits a long weekend for two?”.

AI systems answer with a few places and justify the choice, often with reviews and facilities. They draw on the Google Business Profile, booking and review portals, restaurant and hotel guides, tourist board websites, local media and travel blogs. Your own website is one source among many, but the only one you shape entirely yourself. For chains and places with guests from several countries, AI systems may also draw on different sources in each language.

The basics on your website

1. Describe occasions: wellness, families, dogs, meetings and seminars, weddings, business dinners. For each important occasion a section or a page of its own with concrete details.
2. Facilities as text: room sizes, accessibility, parking, charging points, terrace, space for groups, allergens and dietary options.
3. Menu and prices as HTML: an additional PDF is fine, but the main dishes and prices should be on the page as text.
4. Keep opening hours and seasons up to date: closing days, holidays, seasonal times and bank holidays the same and current everywhere.
5. Multilingual: guests from abroad ask in their own language. Translated pages with clean language links help Google and AI systems show the right version.
6. Add structured data: the Schema.org types Hotel and Restaurant describe address, opening hours, cuisine, reservations and menu in a machine-readable way.

Profile, portals and booking links

For hotels and restaurants, the Google Business Profile is the single most important source. Keep category, attributes such as terrace or dogs allowed, photos, menu, reservation link and questions and answers up to date. Hotels can use free booking links through Google Hotel Center or their Business Profile. According to Google, these links are ranked by usefulness to guests, and payments play no part in it.

Beyond that, the portals where your guests book and review count, as do restaurant and hotel guides and tourist board websites. Check name, address, facilities and photos there. Contradictions, such as an old closing day on a portal, otherwise end up directly in AI answers.

Reviews: what the law requires

In hospitality, reviews often decide the booking. Since the modernisation of EU consumer law, clear rules apply:

• Note on checks on your own website: if you show guest reviews, you must state whether and how you ensure they come from guests who actually stayed or ate with you.
• No fake or bought reviews: they are explicitly banned in the EU, and in the United Kingdom explicitly too since April 2025.
• Nothing in return: Google removes reviews for which discounts, drinks or other benefits were offered.
• Replies: reply briefly and personally to every review, stay factual with criticism and offer a solution.

Common mistakes

• Menu only as a photo: guests with allergies and AI systems cannot find the information.
• Booking only through an embedded third-party system: room types and prices then often appear nowhere on your website as text.
• Outdated season times: a closed place that counts as open in AI answers costs trust.
• Image galleries without text: beautiful photos without descriptions tell machines nothing about facilities and location.
• Only one language: guests from abroad ask AI systems in their own language. Without translated pages, the answers rely on portals rather than on your own details.

Where AI takes pressure off the business

More visibility brings more enquiries, often in several languages and outside office hours. AI can sort enquiries about availability, groups and events, draft replies in the guest’s language and prepare review responses that your team checks and approves. How this works is shown in our article on automating customer enquiries.