The way buyers discover hospitality technology has changed. A growing number of hotel operators and property managers are turning to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLM-powered tools to ask questions that used to live in Google search bars.
They’re asking things like “What’s the best PMS for a boutique hotel group expanding across Europe?” or “How do I reduce guest complaints during check-in at a 200-room property?” The answers they get are shaping which brands make it into the consideration set long before a buyer ever visits a vendor’s website.
For hospitality tech companies trying to figure out where their marketing dollars should go, this creates a real tension. Do you double down on SEO? Go all-in on PR? Pour everything into owned content and hope the algorithms reward you?
In a recent industry report, Gartner predicted that by 2027, widespread adoption of LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will double the investment companies put into PR and earned media.
Nobody has a proven budget formula yet. But there is a logic to how these channels work together in 2026, and understanding that logic will help you make smarter decisions than chasing a magic percentage split.
Below, we’ve laid out a practical framework for thinking about that investment, based on what we’re seeing as a specialist public relations partner for hospitality tech businesses at Abode, combined with broader trends reshaping how buyers discover and evaluate vendors.
Need help navigating AI-driven discovery? Abode specializes in hospitality tech — we craft public relations strategies that make sure the right people and the right algorithms find, trust, and pick you. Talk to us today.
Forget channel silos: think reinforcement loops
For years, marketing and PR teams have organized their efforts around the PESO model: Paid, Earned, Social, and Owned media. Each channel had its own strategy, its own KPIs, and often its own team. Each was working toward the same overall goal, but often in different ways, with SEO chasing keywords, PR shaping narratives, paid driving conversion, and social following engagement.
That model still works, but in the age of LLMs, consistent messaging across those channels is essential. It’s what determines how your brand is understood.
Rather than just indexing your website, LLMs assemble a picture of your brand from every signal they can find: your own content, media coverage, social mentions, industry commentary, and structured data. Each signal either reinforces or contradicts the others. When those signals align, the LLM develops confidence that you are who you say you are, and when they conflict, you either get described inaccurately or you don’t appear at all.
What we’re seeing across our client base is a move toward a model where GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) sits alongside the traditional PESO channels. This doesn’t mean throwing out what was working before. But it does mean recognizing that every channel now feeds into a shared signal that
LLMs are reading, and your investment strategy needs to account for how those channels talk to each other.
Stop evaluating PR, SEO, content, and paid media as separate line items with separate ROI calculations, and start asking how each one strengthens the overall signal you’re sending.
Start with your foundation: owned content and category clarity
Get your messaging razor-sharp
Before you spend money amplifying your message, make sure the message is right. This sounds obvious, but we see it overlooked constantly, even among well-funded, mature hospitality tech companies.
LLMs reward language that is stripped back, clear, and unambiguous. If your homepage describes you as “an innovative end-to-end hospitality operating system powered by next-generation technology,” an LLM will struggle to categorize you. A buyer asking a specific question will never be matched to that kind of vague positioning.
We use a framework with our clients at Abode that gets to the core of it. Answer three questions, each in a single sentence:
- What do we do?
- Who is our software for?
- What category do we belong to?
Those three answers become your messaging foundation. They should be reflected on your homepage, your product pages, your PR boilerplate, your CEO’s LinkedIn posts, and anywhere else your brand speaks. Consistency across all of those touchpoints is what builds the reinforcement loop that LLMs respond to.
Define your category before someone else does
We saw this firsthand when we started working with a client at Abode. Before they came to us, one journalist had described them as “property management software,” another called them “an operations platform,” and a third went with “a hospitality tech system.” Three different articles, three different categories.
When journalists can’t consistently describe what you are, LLMs inherit that confusion. They’ll either pick one description at random, blend them into something incoherent, or leave you out of category-specific responses entirely.
There’s a proactive fix. Audit how media and LLMs currently describe your company. Compare that to how you describe yourself. Close the gaps by defining your category clearly and then reinforcing that definition everywhere. Left unaddressed, journalists and LLMs will categorize you on their own terms, and the result is rarely what you’d pick for yourself.
For more, read our article on the importance of category clarity and how AI search shapes market understanding in 2026.
Optimize your site for how LLMs actually read it
Something caught our attention at a recent industry conference, NoVacancy London. In a talk about AI visibility for hotels, the speaker mentioned that every major page on your website should have at least five FAQs on it. Almost nobody is doing this yet.
The reason is that LLMs are looking for structured, question-and-answer content because that mirrors how users prompt them. A well-written FAQ section on your pricing page, your product pages, and your solutions pages gives LLMs exactly the kind of content they prefer to cite.
Beyond FAQs, the technical layer matters too. Schema markup helps LLMs understand how your content is organized. Properly optimized entity data helps them connect your brand name to the right category and attributes. And when it comes to format, comparison pages and data-driven content tend to get cited more frequently than generic blog posts, because they map more directly to the specific questions buyers are asking.
If you’re investing in content, make sure the format is working as hard as the substance. A 2,000-word thought leadership article might resonate with human readers, but an LLM could easily overlook it if the content isn’t structured in a way that’s easy to parse and cite.
Build trust signals: why PR and earned media matter more than ever
LLMs check who agrees with you
This is one of the most important things we tell our clients at Abode, and it’s worth sitting with for a moment.
You can say anything you want about yourself on your website, and LLMs will read it. But they also know it’s self-reported, so they look outward for validation by scanning media coverage, industry publications, third-party reviews, and expert commentary to see whether other sources confirm what you’re claiming.
If your website says you’re the leading PMS for boutique hotels, and three trade publications have described you the same way, the LLM gains confidence in that claim and is more likely to surface you in relevant responses. But if nobody else is saying it, your claim sits there unverified and carries less weight.
This is where PR fits in. Every piece of earned media that describes your company consistently with your own messaging adds another trust signal that strengthens your visibility in LLM outputs. Without that coverage, there’s a gap that owned content alone can’t fill.
Training the LLMs through consistent reinforcement
We find it helpful to reframe the whole question: stop thinking about whether you’ll appear in LLM results, and start thinking about how to train LLMs to associate your brand with the right language, category, and context.
One of our clients at Abode is a good example. They’re a well-known brand in the short-term rental space with an excellent reputation, strong existing coverage, and plenty of inbound leads. But they recently launched a product for the hotel industry, where nobody knew them at all.
Beyond visibility, the strategy was a controlled repetition of the same narrative across the right sources. Over eight weeks, we deliberately inserted the brand into the hotel media news cycle, announcing the move, sharing product updates, and supporting it with an official launch. Alongside that, we positioned the new CEO for public commentary and placed three thought leadership articles in hotel-focused publications.
Each piece was designed to reinforce the same association: this is a hotel technology company, not just an STR player.
Piece by piece, those signals compound. Industry contacts begin to shift their perception first. LLMs follow later. We’re clear about that. Eight weeks isn’t enough to reshape model outputs. But the direction of travel is already visible.
LLM visibility is cumulative. Every press mention, every byline article, every consistent description of your brand adds to a body of evidence that LLMs draw from. There are no shortcuts, and there’s no single piece of coverage that will flip a switch. Think of it as an ongoing training process rather than a campaign with a launch date and an end date.
Don’t overlook paid amplification
Paid media, like advertising and sponsored content, can play an important role in accelerating the reinforcement loop.
Its role isn’t to amplify every individual placement, but to extend the reach of the narrative behind them. If you’ve secured coverage in a key trade publication or placed a strong thought leadership piece, paid activity can reinforce the same positioning through your owned channels.
That might mean promoting a complementary blog post, campaign page, or founder perspective that reflects the same message, or running targeted campaigns that consistently describe your brand in the same way across platforms.
Used well, this creates repetition across both editorial and controlled environments, increasing the likelihood that the same associations are picked up, referenced, and reinforced elsewhere.
Paid media alone won’t build LLM trust signals. But used strategically alongside earned and owned efforts, it can compress the timeline, especially for companies entering a new category or trying to shift perception quickly.
Map your investment to the buyer’s journey
Where LLMs fit in the funnel
We’re starting to see a clear pattern in how hospitality tech buyers use LLMs versus traditional search. At the awareness and education stage, buyers are increasingly starting with LLMs. They’re asking broad, exploratory questions: “How do I improve my hotel’s direct booking rate?” or “What technology do I need to manage a portfolio of boutique properties?” These are moments where your visibility in LLM responses can shape a buyer’s consideration set before they’ve even started comparing vendors.
As buyers move closer to a decision, they tend to shift back toward Google. They want to compare pricing pages, read case studies, look at review sites, and do the kind of side-by-side evaluation that traditional search still handles well.
Understanding where LLMs sit in your buyer’s journey has direct implications for investment. If your goal is brand awareness and early-stage consideration, LLM visibility through strong owned content and PR signals matters enormously. But if you’re focused on converting buyers who already know your name, your investment might lean more toward conversion-focused content, case studies, and paid search.
Stop tracking vanity prompts
Something we see frequently with our clients: many hospitality tech companies are monitoring prompts like “best property management software 2026” as their GEO benchmark. But almost nobody types that into ChatGPT.
When a buyer is using an LLM, they usually ask specific, situational questions: “What’s the best PMS for a 50-room boutique hotel in Barcelona that needs strong channel management?” or “How should I evaluate guest experience platforms if I’m running both hotels and short-term rentals?”
Your GEO strategy should reflect the way people actually prompt LLMs, not the way they used to search Google. That means building content and PR coverage around specific use cases, buyer personas, and industry challenges rather than broad category keywords.
Community and dark social: the invisible influence
There’s a layer of influence that doesn’t show up in any GEO audit but shapes LLM outputs indirectly. Industry Slack groups, private WhatsApp chats, hotel owner forums, and peer-to-peer conversations at trade shows all generate opinions and recommendations that can eventually surface in public content.
When a hotel operator recommends your product in a private community, that recommendation often influences what they later write publicly: a LinkedIn post, a blog comment, a review on a comparison site. Those public artifacts become part of the corpus that LLMs draw from.
You can’t directly optimize for dark social. But you can invest in customer advocacy, community engagement, and the kind of relationships where customers genuinely want to recommend you. Over time, those conversations compound into organic mentions that carry real credibility with both humans and LLMs.
How to get started: audits, benchmarks, and sequencing
Run a GEO audit, but know its limits
If you haven’t done a GEO audit yet, it’s a reasonable place to start. The basic process involves testing how LLMs respond to prompts relevant to your brand, your category, and your target buyers, then noting where you appear, where competitors show up, and what sources get cited.
The caveat: GEO audits are snapshots, not strategies. The prompts people use are evolving, LLM algorithms are changing constantly, and the sources they prioritize shift over time. An audit gives you a baseline, but it shouldn’t be treated as a definitive map of where you stand. Run them regularly, and treat the results as directional rather than absolute.
Use prompt testing for competitive intelligence
Beyond auditing your own visibility, prompt testing is a useful way to understand how the competitive landscape looks through the lens of an LLM. Try testing how ChatGPT or Perplexity describe your top three competitors, paying attention to the language they use, the sources they cite, and the conversations where you’re absent but should be present.
This kind of analysis can reveal gaps that traditional competitive research misses. If an LLM consistently cites a competitor’s CEO as a thought leader in your category but never mentions anyone from your team, that tells you something about where to invest your PR effort.
Be honest about measurement: attribution is still immature
One of the hardest truths about GEO in 2026 is that measurement is still catching up. Unlike paid search or even traditional SEO, there’s no clean attribution path from “a buyer saw us in a ChatGPT response” to “they became a customer.”
Some tools are emerging that track brand mentions in LLM outputs and monitor visibility across different prompts, like Promptwatch. These are worth exploring, but set expectations accordingly. The metrics are directional, not precise, so focus on trends over time rather than obsessing over individual prompt rankings. Leading indicators like increased branded search volume, more inbound PR inquiries, and growing share of voice in industry publications can tell you whether your efforts are gaining traction even when direct attribution remains elusive.
The companies that build measurement habits now, even imperfect ones, will be far better positioned as the tools mature.
There’s no magic budget split, but sequencing matters
A common question is how to balance owned, earned, and paid channels in this new landscape. The reality is that there is no fixed formula. The landscape is still evolving, the data is too nascent, and every company’s starting point is different. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from working with hospitality tech brands through this transition, it’s that sequencing matters more than percentages.
Get your owned content and messaging right first. Nail those three foundational questions, make sure your site speaks in clear, LLM-friendly language, and audit how you’re currently described in both media and LLM outputs. From there, layer in PR and earned media to build trust signals, and use paid amplification where it makes sense to speed things up. Throughout, keep the buyer’s journey in mind and measure what you can, even when the tools are imperfect.
The companies that treat this as a long-term signal-building exercise are the ones that will show up when it matters most. In a landscape where LLMs are assembling your brand’s reputation from every signal they can find, staying quiet is an expensive option.
Need help navigating AI-driven discovery? Abode specializes in hospitality tech — we craft public relations strategies that make sure the right people and the right algorithms find, trust, and pick you. Talk to us today.
