The End of Rented Discovery: How AI Search Redistributes Power Between Hotels and Intermediaries
When a traveler asks an AI search engine to recommend a hotel, which sources get cited -- and does query framing matter? We audit 1,357 grounding citations from Google Gemini across 156 hotel queries in Tokyo and document a systematic pattern we call the Intent-Source Divide. Experiential queries draw 55.9% of their citations from non-OTA sources, compared to 30.8% for transactional queries -- a 25.1 percentage-point gap ($p < 5 \times 10^{-20}$). The effect is amplified in Japanese, where experiential queries draw 62.1% non-OTA citations compared to 50.0% in English -- consistent with a more diverse Japanese non-OTA content ecosystem. For an industry in which hotels have long paid OTAs f...
| Authors | Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 20 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 March 2026 |
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