Tracking My Own AI Visibility
I spend my time measuring how AI engines recommend hotels. This page turns the method on me: a frozen panel of 31 prompts about my own niche — AI search for hotels — runs against five engines every Tuesday, and every result lands here in public, including the zeros.
Citation rate per engine, week by week
Share of each engine's 43 weekly captures whose answer cites a nicolassitter.com URL. With one run in, these are dots — lines appear as weeks accumulate. Once the action log starts, vertical markers show what I shipped and when.
A mention is “Nicolas Sitter”, “Hotelrank” or “nicolassitter” appearing in the answer text without a link — detected by an NER pass over every answer, never solicited by the prompts.
| Date | Type | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-11 | dashboard_launch | Niche AI Visibility dashboard goes live (the measurement instrument itself) |
Cite rate by prompt tier × engine
The 31 prompts split into five intent tiers — each asks a different question about my visibility. Cells show the cite rate and the captures behind it; darker purple means more of that tier's answers linked me.
| Tier | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | Copilot | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Category Am I cited when people learn the topic? | 0.0% 0/10 | 0.0% 0/10 | 0.0% 0/10 | 50.0% 5/10 · 4m | 0.0% 0/10 · 1m |
Engine Am I cited when an AI explains how AIs work? | 11.1% 1/9 | 0.0% 0/9 | 0.0% 0/9 | 22.2% 2/9 · 4m | 0.0% 0/9 |
Resource Am I the canonical source for the data? | 33.3% 3/9 · 1m | 0.0% 0/9 | 11.1% 1/9 · 2m | 11.1% 1/9 · 4m | 0.0% 0/9 · 3m |
People Am I named as an expert? | 0.0% 0/7 · 1m | 0.0% 0/7 | 0.0% 0/7 · 1m | 0.0% 0/7 | 0.0% 0/7 |
Tool Do my free tools surface for task queries? | 0.0% 0/8 | 0.0% 0/8 | 0.0% 0/8 | 0.0% 0/8 | 0.0% 0/8 |
x/n = answers citing me / captures for that tier this week; m = unlinked mentions. The People tier is expected to stay at zero for a long while — being named as an expert is the slowest signal to move, and reporting that honestly is part of the experiment.
Which of my pages get cited
Every nicolassitter.com URL that appeared in an answer's citations this week. This list decides what I write next: the pages engines already trust are the ones worth deepening.
Engine self-awareness grid
Seven prompts each ask how one specific AI recommends hotels — including Claude and Mistral, which this panel doesn't capture as answerers. Rows are the engine being asked about; columns are the engine doing the answering. Does ChatGPT cite my anatomy-of-ChatGPT study when explaining itself?
| Asked about ↓ | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | Copilot | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ChatGPT “How does ChatGPT recommend hotels?” | — | — | — | mentioned | — |
Perplexity “How does Perplexity choose which hotels to suggest?” | — | — | — | — | — |
Gemini “How does Google Gemini handle hotel recommendations?” | — | — | — | — | — |
Copilot “How does Microsoft Copilot recommend hotels?” | — | — | — | — | — |
Google AI Mode “How does Google AI Mode handle hotel searches?” | — | — | — | cited 1/1 | — |
Claude “How does Claude search for hotels?” | cited 1/1 | — | — | cited 1/1 | — |
Mistral “How does Mistral's Le Chat find hotels?” | — | — | — | — | — |
I have dedicated research for ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Claude and Mistral, but no article yet on how Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot pick hotels. If those rows fill up with competitor citations, that's my editorial calendar talking.
Every prompt, every engine
The full panel, no aggregation: which of the 31 prompts produce a citation, which only a name-mention, and which draw a blank — per engine. This is the raw layer everything above is computed from.
| Prompt | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | Copilot | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| c1How do hotels show up in ChatGPT recommendations? | — | — | — | 3/3 | — |
| c2What is GEO for hotels? | — | — | — | — | — |
| c3Do AI search engines actually read hotel websites? | — | — | — | 1/1 | — |
| c4How can a hotel improve its visibility in AI search results? | — | — | — | — | — |
| c5Why does my hotel never appear in ChatGPT answers? | — | — | — | — | — |
| c6Does schema markup help hotels get recommended by AI? | — | — | — | 1/1 | m 1/1 |
| Prompt | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | Copilot | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| e1How does ChatGPT recommend hotels? | — | — | — | m 2/3 | — |
| e2How does Perplexity choose which hotels to suggest? | — | — | — | — | — |
| e3How does Google Gemini handle hotel recommendations? | — | — | — | — | — |
| e4How does Microsoft Copilot recommend hotels? | — | — | — | — | — |
| e5How does Google AI Mode handle hotel searches? | — | — | — | 1/1 | — |
| e6How does Claude search for hotels? | 1/1 | — | — | 1/1 | — |
| e7How does Mistral's Le Chat find hotels? | — | — | — | — | — |
| Prompt | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | Copilot | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| r1What's the best research on how AI recommends hotels? | — | — | — | — | — |
| r2Are there studies on how often ChatGPT links directly to hotel websites? | m 1/1 | — | — | m 1/1 | — |
| r3Which websites does ChatGPT cite most for hotel recommendations? | 1/1 | — | — | m 1/1 | — |
| r4How many hotels block AI crawlers in robots.txt? | 1/1 | — | — | m 1/1 | m 1/1 |
| r5What percentage of hotels use schema.org markup? | — | — | — | — | m 1/1 |
| r6How much traffic do hotels actually get from ChatGPT and Perplexity? | 1/1 | — | m 1/1 | 1/1 | — |
| r7hotel llms.txt adoption statistics | — | — | 1/1 | — | m 1/1 |
| Prompt | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | Copilot | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| p1Who are the leading experts on AI search for hotels? | — | — | — | — | — |
| p2Who should I follow to understand how ChatGPT recommends hotels? | — | — | — | — | — |
| p3hotel AI visibility consultant | m 1/1 | — | m 1/1 | — | — |
| p4Who does original research on generative engine optimization for travel? | — | — | — | — | — |
| p5Best newsletters or blogs about AI search in the hotel industry | — | — | — | — | — |
| Prompt | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | Copilot | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| t1Free tool to check a hotel's schema markup | — | — | — | — | — |
| t2How can I check if my hotel website is in Common Crawl? | — | — | — | — | — |
| t3How do I know if AI chatbots can crawl my hotel site? | — | — | — | — | — |
| t4Is there an llms.txt generator for hotels? | — | — | — | — | — |
| t5Free AI visibility audit for hotels | — | — | — | — | — |
| t6Tool to analyze hotel guest reviews with AI | — | — | — | — | — |
n/N= cited nicolassitter.com in n of N answers · m= name mentioned without a link · — = neither. Counts accumulate across all runs.
The frozen panel, the cadence, the caveats
Same standard as the research articles: the full prompt panel is published, the limitations are listed, and nothing about the measurement is hidden.
Panel. 31 prompts across five intent tiers, frozen on June 10, 2026. Prompts are never edited — additions only arrive as a versioned batch (panel v2) — so week-over-week movement stays comparable. No prompt contains my name or domain; name mentions are detected passively by an NER pass over every answer. Download the panel: prompts.csv.
Volatility control. Every prompt runs 3× per run, because single-shot AI answers flap — all rates are computed over the repeats. (Run 1, June 10, fired only six headline prompts in triplicate; full-panel triplicates start with run 2.)
Cadence and setup. Weekly, Tuesdays 03:00 UTC, via Bright Data. Logged-out sessions on a US proxy, English prompts only in v1 (French variants for 8 prompts are planned as v1.1). Real users with history and location will see different answers — the same caveat as every study on this site.
- n is small. Even at three shots per prompt, one week is a snapshot. Treat any individual week as noise; only the multi-week rates carry information.
- Citation positions aren't comparable across engines. Copilot and Google AI Mode expose citations as footnote pools rather than ranked lists, so this page never ranks by position.
- I'm measuring myself and optimizing for the metric. The mitigation is publishing everything: the panel, the action log, and the misses.
The full 31-prompt panel (v1, frozen 2026-06-10)
| c1 | How do hotels show up in ChatGPT recommendations? | headline |
| c2 | What is GEO for hotels? | headline |
| c3 | Do AI search engines actually read hotel websites? | |
| c4 | How can a hotel improve its visibility in AI search results? | |
| c5 | Why does my hotel never appear in ChatGPT answers? | |
| c6 | Does schema markup help hotels get recommended by AI? |
| e1 | How does ChatGPT recommend hotels? | headline |
| e2 | How does Perplexity choose which hotels to suggest? | |
| e3 | How does Google Gemini handle hotel recommendations? | |
| e4 | How does Microsoft Copilot recommend hotels? | |
| e5 | How does Google AI Mode handle hotel searches? | |
| e6 | How does Claude search for hotels? | |
| e7 | How does Mistral's Le Chat find hotels? |
| r1 | What's the best research on how AI recommends hotels? | headline |
| r2 | Are there studies on how often ChatGPT links directly to hotel websites? | |
| r3 | Which websites does ChatGPT cite most for hotel recommendations? | |
| r4 | How many hotels block AI crawlers in robots.txt? | |
| r5 | What percentage of hotels use schema.org markup? | |
| r6 | How much traffic do hotels actually get from ChatGPT and Perplexity? | |
| r7 | hotel llms.txt adoption statistics |
| p1 | Who are the leading experts on AI search for hotels? | headline |
| p2 | Who should I follow to understand how ChatGPT recommends hotels? | |
| p3 | hotel AI visibility consultant | |
| p4 | Who does original research on generative engine optimization for travel? | |
| p5 | Best newsletters or blogs about AI search in the hotel industry |
| t1 | Free tool to check a hotel's schema markup | headline |
| t2 | How can I check if my hotel website is in Common Crawl? | |
| t3 | How do I know if AI chatbots can crawl my hotel site? | |
| t4 | Is there an llms.txt generator for hotels? | |
| t5 | Free AI visibility audit for hotels | |
| t6 | Tool to analyze hotel guest reviews with AI |