Everybody in independent hotel marketing has spent the last two years obsessing over ChatGPT. Fair enough, it is the loud one. But there is a quieter engine recommending hotels to a massive built-in audience, and almost nobody at the property level is optimizing for it on purpose. That engine is Microsoft Copilot, and it does not think the way ChatGPT does.
Here is the thing I keep telling hoteliers who book an intro call with me: Copilot is sitting inside Windows, inside Edge, inside Microsoft 365, inside Bing. It has distribution that ChatGPT had to fight for. And when somebody types “best boutique hotel near the convention center for a work trip” into that Copilot box, the answer it gives is built on a different foundation than the one ChatGPT builds on. If you optimize for one and assume the other comes along for free, you are leaving a whole channel on the table.
So let me walk through exactly how Copilot decides which hotels to surface, and the concrete moves that actually feed it.
Why Copilot is not just ChatGPT in a blue coat
The shorthand a lot of people use is “Copilot is ChatGPT with a Microsoft logo.” That is wrong in the way that matters most for us.
Copilot rides the Bing index for live, grounded web results. When you ask it something that needs current information, it runs searches against Bing, pulls pages, and synthesizes an answer from what it retrieves. The base ChatGPT consumer experience grounds differently and historically leaned on its own browsing stack and Bing under the hood at times, but the practical result is that what Bing knows about your hotel directly shapes what Copilot says about your hotel. ChatGPT’s recommendations and Copilot’s recommendations diverge in the real world all the time, and that divergence is mostly a data-source story.
There is a second layer that is uniquely Copilot: enterprise and Microsoft 365 context. When somebody uses Copilot inside their work account, it can fold in their calendar, their email, their travel dates. A salesperson asking Copilot to “find a hotel for my Tuesday trip to Orlando” is getting a recommendation shaped by both the Bing web layer and their own work context. You cannot optimize the calendar half. But you can absolutely own the Bing web half, and that is where the work lives.
The mental model I use: ChatGPT is a librarian who memorized a lot and occasionally walks to the shelf. Copilot is a librarian standing at the Bing card catalog with your appointment book open. Different catalog, different answer.
The Bing foundation almost no hotelier has touched
Most independent hotels I audit have a polished Google Business Profile and a completely neglected Bing presence. That is a missed channel, plain and simple. Bing is not Google, but it is the pipe into Copilot, and the work to feed it is not hard. It is just unglamorous, which is why it gets skipped.
There are three Bing-side assets that feed Copilot, and you want all three working.
1. Bing Webmaster Tools — get crawled, get indexed, get clean
If Bing has not crawled your site cleanly, Copilot has nothing solid to retrieve. Step one is always Bing Webmaster Tools. Verify the property, submit your sitemap, and actually read what it tells you.
What I look for in there:
- Index coverage. Are your room pages, your direct-booking page, your local-area pages actually indexed in Bing, or only your homepage? Half-indexed sites get half-represented in Copilot.
- Crawl errors. Bing’s crawler trips on different things than Googlebot. I have seen sites perfectly indexed in Google with a pile of Bing crawl errors nobody ever looked at.
- The URL Inspection tool. Use it to confirm Bing sees the page the way you intend, with the title, description, and main content rendered.
You can also import your Google Search Console data straight into Bing Webmaster Tools to bootstrap your sitemaps and settings, which saves an afternoon. Do that, then keep treating Bing as its own thing.
2. Bing Places — the listing Copilot reads for local intent
Google Business Profile does not feed Bing. I will say that again because it trips people up: your immaculate GBP listing contributes nothing to Bing’s local layer. Bing has its own listing product, Bing Places, and Copilot reaches into it for “hotel near X” style questions.
If your Bing Places listing is unclaimed, auto-generated, or thin, you are handing the local AI answer to whoever did claim theirs. Claim it. Then fill it out with the same discipline you would put into GBP: correct name, address, phone that exactly matches your website, accurate category, real hours, real photos, the booking link pointed at your direct site and not an OTA.
If you have not done the Google side of this work yet either, my Google Business Profile playbook covers the fundamentals that carry over, and our local SEO and GBP service handles both engines together because there is no reason to do this twice in isolation.
3. Structured data — so the engine quotes you, not a guess
This is the part that ties Bing optimization to AI answers. When Copilot retrieves your page, structured data (schema markup) helps it extract your facts cleanly instead of guessing them out of your prose.
For a hotel, the schema that earns its keep:
- Hotel / LodgingBusiness schema with your name, address, geo coordinates, price range, star rating, amenities, and check-in / check-out times.
- FAQPage schema on pages that answer real guest questions, because that is exactly the question-and-answer shape these engines love to lift.
- Review / AggregateRating schema where you legitimately have it, so your reputation travels with the listing.
- BreadcrumbStructured navigation so the engine understands where a page sits.
The reason this matters more for AI search than for blue-link search: a traditional result just needs to rank. An AI answer needs to state a fact about you out loud with confidence. Clean schema is the difference between Copilot saying “the Such-and-Such Inn offers free parking and is a ten-minute walk from the arena” and Copilot skipping you because it could not confidently pin down a single detail. I dig deeper into how AI engines read a hotel in is your hotel invisible to ChatGPT, and the same extraction logic applies to Copilot with the Bing twist.
How a Copilot recommendation actually gets built
Let me sketch the path from a guest’s question to your name appearing, because once you see the pipeline you know exactly where to push.
A traveler types something into Copilot. Copilot interprets the intent, runs one or more Bing searches, retrieves a handful of pages and listings, cross-checks them, and writes a synthesized answer that often cites or links sources. Your job is to be retrievable, extractable, and corroborated at every step.
Here is how I map the Bing-and-Copilot assets to what they actually do:
| Asset | What it feeds | Why it matters for Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Crawl and index health | If Bing cannot index you cleanly, Copilot has nothing to retrieve |
| Bing Places listing | Local and map intent | Powers “hotel near X” answers; GBP does not feed this |
| Hotel / LodgingBusiness schema | Fact extraction | Lets Copilot state your details accurately instead of guessing |
| FAQ content and schema | Question-shaped answers | Matches the Q-and-A format these engines lift verbatim |
| Third-party mentions and reviews | Corroboration | Copilot trusts facts that appear in more than one place |
That last row is the one people underrate. These engines do not just read your site. They look for corroboration across the open web. If your website says you are pet-friendly with a rooftop bar, but no review site, local guide, or directory confirms it, the engine treats that claim as softer than one echoed in three places. This is why off-site reputation and mentions are not a separate vanity project. They are part of how you get recommended. We treat that as one workstream in content and reputation and in our brand mentions for LLMs work.
Copilot versus ChatGPT — practical differences for hoteliers
Because these two engines ground differently, the same hotel can show up beautifully in one and be missing from the other. Here is where I focus the split:
- For Copilot, win Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools health, a claimed and rich Bing Places listing, and Bing-crawlable structured data are your levers. This is the half most independents have completely ignored, which means it is also the half with the least competition.
- For ChatGPT, win broad web authority and mentions. Get talked about across the places its training and browsing surface, keep your facts consistent everywhere, and earn citations.
- For both, be consistent. Name, address, phone, amenities, and policies must match across your site, your listings, and third-party sources. Inconsistency is what makes an AI engine hedge or drop you. A phone number that differs by one digit between your site and a directory is the kind of thing that quietly costs you the recommendation.
The hoteliers who win the AI-search channel are not the ones chasing one shiny chatbot. They are the ones who make their facts boringly consistent and verifiable everywhere a machine might look, then make sure Bing specifically has a clean copy.
I want to be straight about expectations, because this is where a lot of agencies oversell. There is no guaranteed placement and no guaranteed timeline with any AI engine. What you can do is maximize the odds: be indexable, be extractable, be corroborated, and be consistent. When those four are true, you are in the candidate pool every time a relevant question gets asked. When they are not, you are not even eligible. Realistically, once Bing has recrawled clean pages and your Bing Places listing is verified, I tend to see movement over weeks to a couple of months, tracking Bing’s crawl and index cycles, not overnight.
Why this ladders back to direct bookings and margin
Here is the part that makes the unglamorous Bing work worth your Tuesday afternoon. Every time Copilot recommends your hotel and links to your own site instead of an OTA, that is a potential booking where you keep the margin instead of handing roughly 15 to 25 percent to an online travel agency. AI assistants are becoming a real research-and-decision surface, and the properties that show up there with a direct link get a shot at the booking before the OTA funnel ever opens.
I am not going to tell you this lets you escape the OTAs. It does not, and anyone promising that is selling you something. The OTAs are a permanent part of the mix and they bring you guests you would not otherwise reach. The realistic goal is a healthier OTA mix: you claw back the bookings from people who were going to choose you anyway, the ones who asked an assistant, got pointed at you, and would happily book direct if the path were clean. That is margin you are currently leaking. The math on exactly what that commission costs you is laid out in the book-direct math, and the mechanics of why OTAs intercept your own-name searches are in how OTAs steal search.
So the Bing-and-Copilot checklist, in order:
- Verify your property in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, fix crawl and index errors.
- Claim and fully build out your Bing Places listing, with the booking link pointed at your direct site.
- Add and validate Hotel, FAQ, and Review schema on the pages that matter.
- Make your name, address, phone, amenities, and policies identical everywhere a machine could read them.
- Earn third-party mentions and reviews so your facts are corroborated, not just self-asserted.
None of these are exotic. They are just the work, and the AI-search payoff makes them newly worth doing. If you want the bigger frame on all of this, the hotel SEO 2026 starter guide sets the foundation that this Copilot work sits on top of.
Want me to look at your Bing footprint?
If you have never logged into Bing Webmaster Tools and have no idea whether your Bing Places listing is even claimed, that is genuinely the most common starting point I see, and it is fixable. On a free intro call I will pull up your property, check what Bing and Copilot currently know about you, and tell you the two or three highest-leverage gaps. No pitch theater, just a clear read. Grab a time here, or look at exactly how we run AI visibility on our AEO and GEO service page.