Does ChatGPT recommend your Phuket hotel? How to check in ten minutes
For owners and general managers of independent hotels, resorts and villas in Phuket: a test you can run yourself today, and a written record you can repeat every month.
Open a temporary chat in ChatGPT, ask where to stay in Kata for a week in February, and write down every property it names. Repeat the same question in Perplexity and in Google, in English, Russian and Chinese. Ten minutes later you know whether the AI answers your future guests read ever mention your hotel, and you have a written record you can run again next month.
What this test tells you, and what it does not
An AI answer about where to stay typically cites only one or two resorts, according to a presentation published by HSMAI Asia. That is the whole stake. Not a page of ten results: one or two names.
The competition for those two slots is large. Knight Frank counted about 47,000 tracked hotel rooms in Phuket in its Bangkok and Phuket hotel market H1 2026 report, over 100,000 including non-hotel accommodation, with 63% run by local or regional operators.
The audience is real too. ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly active users in October 2025, according to TechCrunch. Google said in its Q2 2026 earnings remarks that AI Mode passed one billion monthly active users by July 2026, and that AI Overviews and AI Mode are now one search experience.
How much your guests use it depends on where they come from. A US survey reported by ITIJ puts 55% of American travellers using AI to plan trips. A British survey by ABTA, reported by the Bangladesh Monitor, puts British travellers at 8%. So you test market by market, not once in English and done.
Two honest limits. The test will not tell you how many bookings an AI answer produced: there is no reliable attribution for that today. And being named will not replace your OTA volume. OTAs held about 83% of hotel bookings in Asia-Pacific against 11.2% direct in 2025, on D-EDGE data reported by Travelmole. Keep Agoda and Booking.com. This is about the layer that now sits in front of them.
Step 1: write the ten questions a guest would really type
Nobody asks an AI "best hotel Phuket". They describe a situation: an area, a season, a budget, who is travelling. Write ten questions in that shape, using your own area and your own guest profile. Keep them for every future test.
| Question to ask | What it tests | Languages to repeat it in |
|---|---|---|
| Where should I stay in Kata for a week in February with two children? | Area plus season plus party | English, Russian |
| Quiet hotel near Bang Tao beach with a pool, under 5,000 THB a night | Area plus budget | English, Chinese |
| Boutique hotels in Phuket Town for a couple, walking distance to restaurants | Area plus style | English, Thai |
| Which Phuket resorts have a kids club and a shuttle to the beach? | A facility you actually have | English, Russian |
| Best hotels in Rawai or Chalong for a long stay | Area plus length of stay | English, Russian |
| Hotels near [the landmark closest to you] | Proximity | English, Chinese |
| Is [your exact hotel name] a good place to stay? | Whether the AI knows you at all | All of them |
Nationalities decide the languages. Phuket received 8.1 million visitors from January to July 2026, about a quarter of them Thai, and Russia, China and India together are close to half of foreign visitors, with Russia first, according to The Thaiger. Test in English, Russian, Chinese and Thai. If you do not speak them, ask ChatGPT to translate each question first, then paste the translation into a fresh chat.
Step 2: run the questions cleanly
The point is to see what a stranger sees, not what your own history produces.
- ChatGPT: start a temporary chat, so your memory and past conversations do not bias the answer. Paste one question. Write down every property named, in order.
- Perplexity: open a private browser window and ask the same question. Perplexity lists its sources under the answer. Note which sites it used: Agoda, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, a travel blog, your own website.
- Google: private window, not signed in, type the question as a full sentence. Read the AI answer at the top and note the names and the links it cites.
- Do the same question in the second language. Answers in Russian and Chinese often name completely different hotels.
- Repeat the whole set a second time two days later. These answers are not stable, and one run proves nothing.
Ten minutes covers one language properly. Four languages is closer to an hour, spread over two mornings.
Step 3: record it in one sheet
One spreadsheet, one row per run. Nothing else.
| Date | Question | Language | Tool | Named? | Position | Sources cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Oct | Kata, February, two children | English | ChatGPT | No | - | - |
| 23 Oct | Kata, February, two children | Russian | ChatGPT | No | - | - |
| 23 Oct | Quiet hotel Bang Tao under 5,000 THB | English | Yes | 2nd of 3 | Agoda, own site |
Your score is a count: named in 3 of 10 questions in Russian, against 0 last month. That is the only progress measure available, and it is enough.
Then read the competitors who appear every single time. Open the page the AI cited and compare it with yours. In most cases their page answers the question in words (the beach, the walking distance, the kids club, the season) while yours shows photos and a booking button.
What usually explains being absent
An AI answer is built from what can be read about you and cross checked in several places. Five causes cover almost every case.
A website that never answers the question
If no page on your site contains the sentence "a five minute walk from Kata beach" or "family rooms with a connecting door", nothing can be quoted. Write one short page per recurring question, in plain sentences, with the area name, the distance in minutes, the facility and the season.
No structured data, or blocked crawlers
Ask whoever maintains your site for two things: Hotel structured data in JSON-LD (name, address, phone, price range, amenities) on the home page, and a check of your robots.txt file for rules blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. A blocked crawler is a silent cause: everything looks fine to you and nothing can read you.
A name and an address that do not match
Compare your exact name, street address and phone number across Google Maps, Agoda, Booking.com, TripAdvisor and your own site. "Baan X Resort and Spa" in one place and "Baan X Phuket" in another is enough to break the link between sources. Pick one exact string and change every listing to it. Our guide on how to rank on Google Maps in Phuket covers the profile side of this in detail.
Few reviews, and no replies
89% of consumers expect businesses to respond to reviews, per the BrightLocal Consumer Review Survey 2025 reported by Searchlab. Reply to all of them, in the language they were written in. Ask every departing guest for a review, with no condition and no gift: buying reviews, filtering for happy guests only, or offering anything in exchange all break Google's policies.
Nothing in the guest's language
A Russian question is answered from Russian language sources. Russian travellers also read Yandex Maps, where a Phuket restaurant such as Chekhoff has over 3,500 ratings. For Chinese guests, a Prince of Songkla University study found Xiaohongshu (RED) the most influential channel, scored 4.09 out of 5. A translated page on your own site is the starting point, not the whole job.
Do this one thing this week
Run the ten questions once in English and once in Russian, fill the sheet, and fix the single gap that appears most often: usually one page that answers one real question, in the words a guest uses. Then run the same ten questions again in thirty days. Notorioos offers a free Visibility Check that shows where the hotel appears on Google Maps and in AI answers in five languages, with the three fixes that matter most.
Questions
How often should I check whether ChatGPT recommends my hotel?
Once a month is enough, using the same questions in the same order so the results are comparable. Run each question twice, on two different days, because these answers change between runs. Keep everything in one spreadsheet so you can see a count go up or down.
Why does ChatGPT name a different hotel every time I ask?
These systems are not deterministic, and they also take into account your location, your chat history and the wording of the question. That is why you use a temporary chat or a private browser window, and why you repeat each question. One appearance is noise, five appearances out of ten runs is a signal.
Does being named in an AI answer bring direct bookings?
There is no reliable way to attribute a booking to an AI answer today, so treat the test as a visibility check rather than a revenue report. What you can measure is your own count of appearances over time, plus direct enquiries by phone, WhatsApp and your booking engine. Keep your OTA channels running while you work on this.
Should I test in Russian and Chinese if my website is only in English?
Yes, because the answer in each language is built mostly from sources in that language, and you need to know how large the gap is. Russia and China are among the biggest source markets for Phuket, so an absence there matters commercially. Start by testing, then decide which language is worth a translated page first.
Axel Joseph Auguste co-founded Notorioos. He builds the tools the agency uses to measure where a business appears on Google Maps and in AI answers such as ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, for real estate agencies, hotels, boat charters and restaurants in Phuket. Before Notorioos, he built Bilan de Compétences, a software platform for career assessment consultants in France.