The AI Isn’t Making Things Up. It’s Reading Your OTA Description
This week: where that answer actually comes from.
When I review independent properties, the source is almost always the same. Your OTA listing. The description you wrote when you first got listed. The “about” section that still mentions a restaurant you closed during COVID.
AI treats all of it as current fact.
This week, do this: Pull up your Booking.com or Expedia description. Read it like a guest who has never heard of you. Count the lines that are wrong, outdated, or so generic they could describe any property in your area. That number is the reputation AI is repeating about you.
Before you check bookings this week, read your listing first.
Where the wrong answer starts
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about your property, those tools don’t call you. They don’t check your website. They pull from whatever text is most available, most structured, and most repeated across the web.
It’s the OTA page. One description. One amenity list. One set of policies. Repeated across platforms, cached by search engines, scraped by AI.
That’s the source file.
Why this hits harder in spring
Spring is when you’re competing for guests who’ve never heard of you. They have no reviews from friends, no past stays to reference. The listing is the first impression. And sometimes the only one.
When someone asks “Is [your property] good for families?” or “Does it have a pool?” or “What’s the parking situation?” the AI answers from whatever it can find.
It’s that same listing. Not your website. Not your Instagram. The listing you set and forgot.
The guest who gets a wrong answer doesn’t complain to you. They book somewhere else. The guest who doesn’t book never tells you why.
The part that costs you
Here’s the part most operators don’t want to admit. You probably didn’t write that OTA description with much care. Most operators didn’t. You were filling in fields to get listed, not writing the script AI would repeat for years.
No one told you it would matter this much. Now it does.
And here’s the cost you’re already paying: every outdated line, every vague amenity tag, every “charming property in a great location” sentence is being served up as a confident answer to a guest with a real question. You never see the conversation. You never correct it. The booking disappears.
That’s not a visibility problem. That’s an accuracy problem. And it sits inside a listing you control.
What to do about it
Fast (10 minutes):
Log into your top OTA platform. Read your description as a stranger. Mark anything wrong, missing, or generic enough to describe half the properties around you. Fix the three worst lines today. Start with anything that’s no longer true. Wrong beats vague.
You probably have this same stale listing on three or four platforms, not one. And most OTAs take days to reflect changes. The real time cost is closer to 45 minutes across all of them. Plus the wait. Start with the platform that sends you the most bookings. Get that one right first.
Deeper (30 minutes):
Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask: “Tell me about [your property name + location].” Compare what comes back to what’s actually true right now. Note every gap. Those gaps trace back to what your OTA listing is feeding the AI. Or failing to feed it. This isn’t a content exercise. It’s how you see the version of your property already being sold without you.
Copy-paste prompt to run on your own listing:
You are a first-time guest who found this property through search. Based only on this description, rewrite the three weakest lines so each one could only describe this property and no other. Then list what you’d confidently tell a friend about the property, and what questions the description leaves unanswered. Flag anything generic enough to describe most properties in the area.
Paste your current OTA description above that prompt. You’ll get draft replacement lines you can copy straight back into your listing.
When you log into your OTA dashboard this week, don’t just check bookings. Read your listing as a stranger and fix the three lines that are no longer true.
You can’t edit the AI. You can edit what it reads. Start with the listing.