For about a year now, “just get on Reddit” has been the hospitality marketing world’s favorite cheat code for AI visibility. Post in r/travel, seed a “best boutique hotels in [city]” thread, get your property mentioned, and — the theory goes — ChatGPT will start recommending you.
It’s a tidy story. It’s also, according to the data, mostly backwards.
The great Dan Petrovic (DEJAN) — who has forgotten more about how search engines actually work than most of us will ever learn — recently published citation-mining numbers that quietly detonate the whole premise. And when we ran our own DataForSEO pull specifically on hotel queries, the hotel version of the story turned out to be even cleaner.
The numbers nobody wanted
Here’s what Dan’s cross-engine study found, and what our 60-query hotel pull found on top of it:
The Reddit “AI shortcut” is really just a Google ranking.
Reddit’s AI presence tracks its Google ranking — nothing more. “Post on Reddit for AI” was always “rank on Google, which feeds Google’s AI.”
Hotel data: DataForSEO, 60 hotel travel-advice queries · cross-engine citation study: Dan Petrovic (DEJAN)
Let that sink in. Across the board:
- OpenAI (ChatGPT) pulled Reddit in as a candidate 491,024 times and cited it 3,012 times — a 99.4% rejection rate, the highest of any domain in Dan’s dataset. It looks at Reddit constantly and then decides not to use it.
- Anthropic’s Claude cites Reddit zero times. It doesn’t even bring Reddit in as a candidate. Reddit is simply not in the room.
- Google cites Reddit heavily — second only to YouTube.
So one engine leans on Reddit and two mostly walk past it. If your entire AI-visibility plan for your hotel is “be talked about on Reddit,” you’ve built it for the one engine that already gives you the traffic, and ignored the two that don’t.
The hotel angle makes it even starker
We wanted to know how this plays out specifically in travel, so we pulled Google results for 60 hotel travel-advice queries — the “best hotels in Charleston,” “where to stay in Nashville,” “best area to stay in New Orleans,” “is Santa Fe worth visiting” kind of queries where Reddit threads famously dominate.
The result: Reddit ranked on page one for 93% of them, at an average position of #3. And of the queries that triggered a Google AI Overview, 79% cited Reddit.
That is a massive Reddit footprint. But look at why it’s there. Reddit isn’t in those AI Overviews because Google’s AI has some special love for Reddit — it’s there because Reddit ranks in ordinary Google search, and Google’s AI surfaces are built directly on top of those rankings. Reddit’s AI presence is a shadow cast by its organic performance.
What this actually changes for your hotel
The move depends entirely on which AI you’re optimizing for — and most hotels have been optimizing for the wrong one.
If you want ChatGPT to recommend your hotel: Reddit is close to a dead end. ChatGPT retrieves Reddit and throws 99.4% of it away. Seeding threads is not the lever. The lever is making your own site the quotable source — the entity, schema, and answer-shaped content an LLM will actually lift. (That’s the AEO/GEO work, and it’s a different muscle entirely.)
If you want Claude to recommend your hotel: Reddit isn’t even a factor — it’s not in Claude’s candidate set at all. Same answer: your citation-worthiness has to live on sources Claude trusts, not on Reddit.
If you want to show up in Google’s AI Overviews: Reddit still earns its place the way it always has — by ranking. And here’s the uncomfortable part for hotels: you don’t own those Reddit threads. You can’t schema them, you can’t update them, and you can’t stop a two-year-old “avoid this place” comment from getting surfaced. Your leverage there is your own pages out-ranking the thread, plus genuine review and reputation work — not astroturfing r/travel.
The honest takeaway
“Post on Reddit to get cited by AI” was always just “rank in Google, which happens to feed Google’s AI.” For hotels, that means the quarter you were about to spend seeding Reddit threads to impress ChatGPT is a quarter aimed at the wrong target.
The engines that don’t already send you traffic — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude — are won on your own turf: clean entities, structured data, quotable content, consistent facts, real answers to real guest questions. That’s unglamorous, it compounds, and it’s the opposite of a shortcut. Which is probably why the shortcut got so popular.
Worth checking against your own citation data before you pour another quarter into Reddit threads. (And genuinely — go read Dan’s work. The man is a national treasure.)
Want to see where your hotel is actually getting cited — and where it’s invisible — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude? That’s exactly the AI-visibility audit we run.