Ask ChatGPT what a room at your hotel costs and the answer will almost never come from you. New tracking data shows the chatbot sources hotel pricing overwhelmingly from Booking.com, Expedia and other online travel agencies — and Google is moving to a system where a hotel that fails to send its own rate feed by September 30 loses the ability to advertise entirely, while competitors' prices continue to appear beside its listing.

Nicolas Sitter, head of AI research at hotel data firm Lighthouse and co-founder of a company selling AI visibility tracking, captured 240 hotel pricing queries on June 25 and logged every page ChatGPT fetched to answer them. The model searched the web in 98.8% of cases. OTAs accounted for 46% of the pages it read — more than every other category of source combined.

The citation pattern is more lopsided still. Only 11% of the OTA pages ChatGPT fetched appeared as links in its answers. The model takes its prices from the OTAs and credits forums like Reddit, according to Sitter's study. The caveats are real: one researcher, one day of data, from a vendor that sells the fix. But the structural finding matches what operators see when they test their own properties.

The OTAs are inside the chatbot itself

The OTA presence is not limited to search results. Booking.com and Expedia run their own apps inside ChatGPT, built on OpenAI's tools, that display hotels, prices and booking links within the conversation. Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel described the strategy to the Wall Street Journal bluntly: when a traveler in ChatGPT wants to book, "we're right there."

The companies also buy the inventory around the answer. ChatGPT has sold ads in the US since February and in Europe since August. When SE Ranking, a search visibility vendor, ran 50,006 US queries through the model in July, every ad it found was a single sponsored offer. In travel, Booking.com held that one ad position 62.57% of the time. Again: one vendor, one day, one market — but a single ad slot by design concentrates that position heavily.

Google's feed mandate

Google operates the same way, with a rate feed in place of a crawl. Booking.com, Expedia and other resellers send Google their prices for a given hotel daily. A hotel's own rate appears beside theirs only if the property sends its own feed through Google Hotel Center or its booking engine.

Until now, Google filled that gap for hotels that advertised without a feed by finding the rate itself. According to Google's Hotel Center help page, that arrangement ends September 30. After that date, no feed means no hotel ads — and the property's listing on Google continues to display other companies' prices next to its name. Hotels running on Payments by Booking.com may even see the price Booking.com unilaterally chose to sell at.

Sending the feed does not guarantee parity of placement. Google decides how many prices appear and which one ranks first, and feeds that fail its accuracy checks get dropped.

The EU wrinkle

In the European Union, Google has gone further. Since September 8, to comply with the Digital Markets Act, its main search page displays OTA prices in one block and hotels in another — without live prices attached to the hotel block. A regulation written to protect hotels has left only the resellers' prices carrying live numbers on the page.

Booking moves into Google's AI answer

In the US, booking has migrated into Google's AI Mode. Since late August, travelers can plan a trip, pick a hotel and pay with Google Pay without leaving the answer. Google named ten partners: Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline, Trip.com, Choice, Hilton, IHG, Marriott and Wyndham. Five of the ten seats belong to chains with their own rate feeds, apps and loyalty programs — and Choice, Hilton and Wyndham can display a points price in the answer, letting a member with an existing balance weigh a hotel's cash rate against a night that costs nothing out of pocket.

No independent appears on the partner list. An independent enters the AI answer only through a booking site, at the booking site's price.

The operator's lever

For an independent hotel, one practical action remains: send Google the rate feed, keep it accurate, and ensure the brand website displays the same number. That places the hotel's own price on Google beside the OTAs'. Google still determines whether it ranks first or fourth, and Booking.com's price will sit next to it regardless.

The machine-sourced price environment is tightening: Google's September 30 feed cutoff is fixed, ChatGPT's ad inventory is expanding, and AI Mode booking is live with a partner list that excludes independents. Operators that delay feed setup face the fall pricing season with their rates defined by resellers.