Exclusive Feature: A hotel F&B manager in Dubrovnik told me recently that his property ranks on the first page of Google for 'seafood dinner with sea view' and he was right to be proud, but then I asked him to open ChatGPT and type the same phrase, his restaurant was not mentioned.

The AI named three competitors he had never considered rivals. He had spent three years building his Google presence and had not spent a single hour on what was replacing it.

That gap has a name now: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization. It is the discipline of structuring your content and online presence so that AI engines cite you when travelers ask questions. And in 2026, travelers are asking a lot of questions to AI.

The Numbers That Should Concern You

According to Similarweb’s 2026 Generative AI Brand Visibility Index, 35% of US consumers now use AI at the product discovery stage, compared to 13.6% who use traditional search. A Simon Kucher survey puts the share of travelers already using AI when planning a trip at 43%. Adobe Analytics found that AI-referred traffic to travel sites grew 3,500% year-on-year in July 2025.

The conversion numbers are sharper still. Peer-reviewed hospitality research on real portal data found that AI assistant traffic converted at 8.26%, compared to 3.88% for organic search. Visitors arriving from AI are not browsing. They arrive with intent already formed by a recommendation they trust.

For hotels specifically, the picture is stark. Only one-sixth of the world’s approximately 810,000 hotel properties are currently visible when travelers use AI tools to search for accommodation, according to HotelWorld AI’s 2025 index. The remaining five-sixths do not exist in this channel at all.

Your hotel is very likely in the five-sixths. Your F&B operation certainly is.

Why F&B Is the Blindspot Inside the Blindspot

Hotel marketing teams are slowly waking up to the visibility problem for room bookings. GEO for the rooms product is at least entering the conversation. But hotel F&B operates in a secondary layer that almost no one has addressed.

When a traveler asks ChatGPT “where should I have dinner in Split with a view of the old town,” the AI generates a shortlist. That shortlist is built from whatever structured, crawlable, third-party-confirmed content exists about dining options in that area. If your hotel restaurant has a great menu, a trained chef, and a terrace with an extraordinary view but none of that is written about outside your own website, the AI has nothing to pull from.

This is the core insight that Alberto Chierici, founder of AQURA, a GEO strategy firm, explained clearly: “AI models expand your query into 10 to 50 other extra queries, and they usually corroborate results between them. If there is no corroboration of sources, it’s difficult.”

In other words, the AI does not trust a single source. It looks for the same claim confirmed across multiple independent platforms. A hotel that has great content on its own website but nothing in industry magazines, local press, food blogs, or review aggregators will fail that corroboration test every time.

The Problem With Using AI to Fix an AI Problem

Here is the paradox that most hotel marketers will not want to hear: AI-generated content does not solve the GEO problem. It makes it worse.

Alberto Chierici is direct on this point: “The content must be really great, written by a human person, not by AI, because AI engines penalize AI-generated content. SEO as well penalizes AI-generated content, so you lose on both surfaces.”

The temptation is understandable. A hotel marketing manager with limited time and budget reaches for a chatbot, generates fifty pages of F&B content overnight, publishes it, and assumes the GEO problem is solved. It is not.

Research on AI systems in hospitality consistently shows that content loses persuasive power when users detect low authenticity or weak provenance signals. The properties that will win the AI discovery layer are the ones producing authoritative, experience-grounded, human-authored content, not the ones generating the most volume.

For hotel F&B specifically, that means content written by someone who actually knows what a food cost report looks like, what happens to kitchen margins in peak season, and what distinguishes a genuine local sourcing approach from a marketing claim. Expertise is not optional. It is the differentiator.

What the AI Actually Cites

Similarweb’s research on AI source behavior for travel queries identifies two dominant categories: News and Publishers as the primary source, and Reviews and UGC platforms such as TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, and Reddit in second place.

Peer-reviewed research adds an important nuance here. User-generated content is valuable in travel because travelers ask experiential questions that only firsthand knowledge can answer: Is this hotel actually quiet? Is the neighborhood safe to walk at night? Does the restaurant accommodate children? For those questions, UGC fills an information gap that no official source can. But UGC is best understood as an evidence layer, not automatically a preferred citation layer.

AI systems cross-reference UGC against more authoritative sources before incorporating it. Volume alone does not produce citation.

For hotel F&B, this means the citation chain runs through three distinct layers, and you need to be present in all three.
Industry magazine coverage and opinion pieces. A byline in a hospitality trade publication carries more citation weight than ten pages of self-authored content on your own domain. Third-party editorial mentions are corroborating signals the AI is designed to find.

Guest reviews with specific, extractable detail. Not just volume, but precision. A review that mentions your wood-fired octopus, your sommelier by name, and the Tuesday evening tasting menu gives the AI something it can extract, verify against other sources, and incorporate into an answer. “Great food” gives it nothing.

Emerging influencer content. Alberto Chierici’s recommendation: target influencers with audiences between 20,000 and 100,000 followers. These accounts produce authentic, detailed, discoverable UGC without the cost and dilution of larger partnerships.

What E-E-A-T Actually Means for Hotel F&B

E-E-A-T, Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust, is a content quality framework originally developed by Google. In industry GEO discussions, it is often cited as the standard AI engines now apply when deciding what to cite.

The academic picture is more precise. Peer-reviewed research from 2023 to 2026 does not establish that ChatGPT or Perplexity calculate E-E-A-T as a direct algorithmic ranking factor. What the research does establish is something equally useful: the four dimensions of E-E-A-T closely match the content signals that make AI engines more likely to retrieve, incorporate, and cite a source. Experience supplies firsthand detail unavailable elsewhere. Expertise improves factual quality. Authority provides recognizable credibility signals. Trust correlates with reliability and consistency across sources.

Alberto Chierici notes something telling about adoption: “It still surprises me how incredibly few people in the world follow that advice verbatim.” The framework is not new. The discipline to apply it rigorously is rare.

For hotel F&B content in practice: write from demonstrated operational experience, not marketing copy. Be technically specific about sourcing, preparation, and team credentials. Ensure your property is mentioned in third-party sources the AI treats as authoritative. Maintain absolute consistency across every platform where your F&B is described. The gap between the hotel that does this and the one that does not is not a technology gap. It is a content discipline gap.

One Concrete Step You Can Take This Week

Alberto Chierici, when asked for the single most impactful first step, points to competitive intelligence as the entry point: search for a comparable property in your market by name in ChatGPT or Claude, see how it is presented, identify which sources the AI cites, and ask whether your property is present on those same sources. Repeat this exercise over a week, because AI answers are statistical. The names that consistently appear in the top three are winning for a reason.

For hotel F&B specifically, add a second step: audit the specificity of your existing content. Open your restaurant page on your hotel website and ask whether any sentence on that page would be impossible to write about a different restaurant. Generic language, “fresh local ingredients,” “seasonal menu,” “casual dining atmosphere,” is invisible to AI engines. Specific language, “our pasta is made daily at 6 AM by our pastry team using semolina sourced from a mill in Puglia,” is the kind of content the AI can extract, corroborate, and cite.

Peer-reviewed research on generative engine optimization confirms this directly: pages with extractable, concrete information, numerical facts, comparisons, procedures, and clearly stated recommendations are measurably more likely to have their content incorporated into AI-generated answers than pages with vague promotional copy.

Specificity is what separates the one-sixth of hotels that exist in AI search from the five-sixths that do not.

References

• Similarweb, 2026 Generative AI Brand Visibility Index. similarweb.com/corp/reports/the-2026-generative-ai-brand-visibility-index/
• Similarweb, 2025 Generative AI Landscape: From Platforms to Pathways. similarweb.com/corp/2025-generative-ai-landscape
• HotelWorld AI, World’s Best at AI 2025 Index. hotelworldai.com
• Alberto Chierici, AQURA Studio. aqurastudio.com
• Noble Studios / Semrush: AI referral conversion rate data, 2025-2026.
• Simon Kucher & Partners: Traveler AI usage survey, 2025.
• ConvertMate, GEO Benchmark Study 2026. convertmate.io/research/geo-benchmark-2026

Leo Ljubicic is a master chef, master pastry chef, F&B Manager, and culinary instructor at RCK Dubrovnik (since 2013). He is a WorldSkills Croatia evaluator and founder of LPI LABS, an independent hospitality intelligence platform. He writes on F&B operations, AI in hospitality, and Adriatic market dynamics for HotelExecutive, FSR Magazine, Forbes Croatia, and 4Hoteliers.com. Contact: legal@lpilabs.io / linkedin.com/in/leo-ljubicic

This is strictly a 4Hoteliers.com exclusive feature. Reproduction in any shape or form without explicit permissions is prohibited.