In Brief: Stephanie Smith and Michael Curran examine whether hotel marketers are repeating past black hat SEO mistakes in their current use of geolocation-based digital marketing, raising concerns about compliance, guest trust, and long-term brand reputation.
Have we time-traveled back to 2010? (Yes, we are aging ourselves.)
As hotels race to improve their visibility in LLMs, a growing number of AI-first companies are recommending the same basic strategy: Create lots more content.
Answer every conceivable question. Publish endless FAQs. Generate hundreds, or thousands, of pages designed to make sure AI knows everything possible about your hotel.
Haven’t we done this before?
Fifteen to twenty years ago, companies were desperate to rank higher in Google. When marketers figured out signals that appeared to influence rankings, some started designing websites for the search engine instead of the human using it.
Remember all those black hat SEO tactics? Keyword stuffing. Doorway pages. Link schemes. One of my personal favorites: putting keywords on a website in the same color as the background so humans couldn’t see them, but search engines could.
And Google eventually figured it out.
Welcome to Black Hat GEO
There’s a new version of the old SEO game happening right now.
Instead of asking:
“How can we manipulate Google into ranking this page?”
We’re asking:
“How can we create enough content to train/influence/cheat an LLM to recommend our hotel?”
If you’re publishing a page because you believe a machine needs to read it, but you don’t believe an actual traveler would find it useful, why are you publishing it?
That’s where the AI-content race is going in the wrong direction.
If It’s Good for Humans, It Should Be Good for LLMs
The guiding principle for hotel content should be simple:
Content that is good for humans should, by definition, also be good for LLMs. AI tools break a question into many sub-questions by doing a query fan-out and then cites specific passages.
So, a hotel won’t win by creating more pages, but with pages that answer real traveler questions with specific, clearly stated facts.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t make hotel content easier for machines to understand. We should. Clear site architecture, structured data, accurate information, and consistency across digital channels all matter.
But none of those things require creating spammy content.
There’s a big difference between making useful content machine-readable and generating hundreds of generic pages because someone thinks more content equals more AI visibility. The content needs to help establish you or your business as an authority of something or, at the very least, as expanding as a topic authority that started somewhere else.
In other words, writing content about the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC over and over and over again isn’t going to help you. Just like a human would want, you need to give the AIs a reason that you are bringing something new to the discussion.
Your Hotel Cannot Be the Best Hotel for Everyone
Your hotel does not need to be recommended to every traveler for every LLM search.
- A 200-room airport hotel doesn’t need to convince an AI that it’s the perfect romantic getaway.
- A downtown lifestyle hotel doesn’t need to be the best choice for every family with three children.
- A resort shouldn’t try to rank for every possible reason someone might visit its destination.
Think of this just like picking keywords for historical SEO work.
If you were a property in The Loop in Chicago, would it be nice to rank for “Chicago Hotels”? Sure. Tens-of-thousands of searches a month. No brainer, right? Wrong.
Not only is competition for that term through the roof, the term doesn’t tell you anything about a person’s intent. They could be an econo-only person, or suite-only, or any of a thousand different things that don’t apply to you. AI is no different.
Nobody asks ChatGPT solely for “chicago hotels”. They use long prompts that reward hotels with clear positioning.
You don’t need visibility for the sake of visibility. Pick the customer segments you can actually win. Then create useful content for those travelers.
If it’s valuable to them, it’s also better information for an LLM trying to answer their questions.
Do We Really Think LLMs Won’t Figure Out AI Slop?
Do we really believe the world’s largest AI companies are going to spend billions building increasingly sophisticated models and those models will never get better at identifying low-value, mass-produced AI content?
There are already “algorithmic watermarks” being used partially for this purpose.
Today, Google’s guidance warns against using generative AI to produce large numbers of pages without adding value for users. It classifies generating pages primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than help users as scaled content abuse.
AI Isn’t the Problem. AI Slop Is.
This isn’t an argument against using AI to create content. Every hotel marketer uses AI daily.
AI can help research traveler questions, identify content gaps, organize information, analyze reviews, create outlines, and improve drafts.
Just like hiring an intern from the old days, use AI to help shorten the time needed to go live with new content or a new direction. But make sure what you are ultimately crafting is produced by a person who can help expand on a topic, not just dump more pages on the pile.
The problem isn’t using AI to create content.
The problem is creating content for AI instead of creating content for customers.
That’s how we ended up with websites stuffed with keywords 15 years ago.
Stop Trying to Cheat the LLM
Hotels absolutely need an AI visibility strategy.
You need to know whether LLMs understand your hotel’s amenities, location, experiences, and differentiators and whether they recommend you to the travelers you’re actually trying to attract.
Understand the questions those target travelers ask. Answer them better than your competitors with specifics. Then measure whether your hotel is showing up in the conversations that matter.
Because if your content exists only for an LLM and provides no value to the human ultimately booking the room, maybe it shouldn’t exist at all.
We learned that lesson once with Google SEO. Let’s not spend the next five years learning it again with AI.
Stephanie Smith, CEO and Digital Matriarch, Cogwheel Marketing & Analytics, HSMAI Marketing Advisory Board Member. Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn.
Michael Curran,VP Marketing Operations at Cogwheel Marketing. Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn.
Source: View the original article at Cogwheel Marketing.