Guide
How to get your holiday rental mentioned by ChatGPT and other AI assistants.
AI assistants describe and recommend places they can read and understand on the open web. A home that only exists inside a booking platform is hard for them to see. A page of your own with plain facts, a short summary, structured data and text about the area gives an assistant what it needs to describe your home correctly and mention it.
In short
- AI assistants answer from pages they can read, often found through search engines.
- Give them plain facts: type of home, place, guests, rooms, amenities, distances.
- Add a short factual summary and a file for AI (llms.txt).
- Allow AI crawlers in your robots.txt.
- Nobody can guarantee a mention, but you can make it far more likely.
How guests use AI to find a place to stay
Instead of typing three keywords, guests now ask full questions: “Do you know a quiet villa with its own pool for four people, near the sea in Portugal?” The assistant searches the web, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer, often with links to its sources. If your home is one of those sources, it can be in the answer.
How AI assistants find pages
Most assistants that search the web, such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews, lean on search indexes and their own crawlers. In practice that means two things: your page must be findable by normal search engines (including Bing, not only Google), and the assistants’ own crawlers must be allowed to read it.
Step 1: be readable on the open web
A listing behind a platform is one of millions of near-identical pages. A page of your own, on your own domain, with your home’s name, is a clear source an assistant can quote and link to.
Step 2: give plain facts
Assistants are good at matching questions to facts. Write them out in full sentences and in a short list:
- type of home and where it is (village, region, country);
- number of guests, bedrooms, beds and bathrooms;
- amenities that people ask for: pool, sauna, sea view, garden, parking, pets allowed, EV charging;
- distances and travel times to the beach, village, station and airport;
- who it is ideal for: couples, families, walkers, remote workers.
Step 3: a short summary for AI
Put one paragraph near the top that describes the home factually, as you would to a friend: “Casa Oliva is a stone villa on the Mediterranean for four guests, with a private pool and a terrace under the olive trees. The coastal path is a five-minute walk away.” Many sites now also publish an llms.txt file: a plain-text summary of the site for language models. It costs nothing and makes your facts easy to pick up.
Step 4: structured data
Structured data (schema.org, for example the type VacationRental) tells machines in a fixed format what your home is, where it is and what it offers. It helps search engines first, and through them the assistants that rely on them.
Step 5: let AI crawlers in
Some websites block AI crawlers by default. Check your robots.txt: crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Bingbot should be allowed if you want to be mentioned.
Step 6: write about the area
Questions to assistants are often about a place, not a house: “where to stay near …”. A guide with your favourite spots and travel times connects your home to those questions.
Step 7: be mentioned elsewhere
Assistants trust what several sources agree on. Mentions on a local tourism site, a regional blog, partner businesses and your own social media all help an assistant connect your name to your place.
What you can’t control
Which homes an assistant mentions is up to the assistant, and answers change from day to day. Anyone who promises you a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT is overselling. What you can do is make sure that when an assistant looks, it finds a clear, correct and complete page about your home.
Questions
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT?
Not in the regular answers. What you can do is make your home easy to find and understand on the open web, so an assistant can mention it when it fits the question.
What is llms.txt?
A plain-text file at the root of a website that summarises the site for language models: what it is, the key facts and the most important pages. It is a proposed convention; it is cheap to add and easy for assistants to read.
Does it matter which search engine I am in?
Yes. Different assistants rely on different indexes, so make sure your page is in Google and in Bing. Submitting your sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is a good start.
Is a Hostproud page set up for AI assistants?
Yes. Every page gets a factual summary for AI, an “At a glance” block, structured data, text about the area and a robots.txt that welcomes AI crawlers. Whether an assistant mentions your home is up to that assistant.
Curious how your home looks on a page of its own?
Send the link to your Airbnb listing. Within 3 working days you’ll receive a free preview of your own page. No obligation.