What can you actually buy?

You can buy two things, and both sit beside the answer rather than inside it.

On Google, ads around AI Overviews and inside AI Mode. Google’s own documentation says text and Shopping ads from existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible to show above, below or within an AI Overview, in English, in a listed set of countries that includes the United States, Canada, Australia and India but not yet most of Europe. In AI Mode, Google is testing ads that appear below a response, and when the response is a list of recommendations, a relevant ad can appear on that list as a highlighted answer. Every one of these carries an ad label. None of them changes which hotels the overview itself names: the organic part of the answer is built from Google’s knowledge of your property, and the ad is a separate slot bought through a campaign.

On ChatGPT, an ad under the answer. OpenAI is testing ads for logged-in adult users on the free and Go tiers. Its help centre is unusually direct about the boundary: the ad appears below the end of a response, it is labelled as sponsored and visually separated, it runs on a separate system from the chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank or alter what ChatGPT says. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users see no ads at all. So a traveller on a paid plan who asks for a boutique hotel in Lisbon sees only the answer, and the answer was never for sale.

At the time of writing we found no advertiser documentation for sponsored recommendations inside Gemini, Claude or Perplexity answers. We will update this page when any of the five engines documents something new.

What the money cannot buy

The thing every hotel actually wants, the sentence that says “stay at this one”, is not on the price list of any engine. That is not a temporary gap. Both vendors have built their ad products on the promise that the answer stays independent of the ad, because an answer people suspected was bought would stop being trusted, and the answer is the product.

This is also why “guaranteed placement in AI answers” is a claim you can test rather than weigh. Ask the seller which of the two documented ad surfaces the placement is, and whether the placement carries an ad label. If it is neither, what they are selling is formatting: FAQ blocks, question headings, “citation-ready” paragraphs. Those tidy a page. In our study of five hotels’ own Google data, the page that ranks first is not the page the AI names, none of that formatting changed which pages Google’s AI surfaced. The pages that got named were the ones tied to what each hotel was already known for.

Where the named hotel comes from instead

An engine names a hotel when three things are true, and none of them is a line item.

  • It recognises you as an entity. One name, one address, one set of facts that match across your site, Google Business Profile, Booking.com and the review platforms. A property whose facts disagree reads as two hotels, or none. The audit walks through the five checks.
  • It associates you with the question. A ski hotel gets named for “first week on snow with kids” because the wider web already says that about it, in its own pages and in what others write. That association is earned across everything the web says about you, and no page trick manufactures it.
  • It can act on you. Since OpenAI’s Agents API went into public beta in September 2026, an agent can search, compare and book without a person reading the list. The agent will not ask for the best hotel sets out what that changes: the property that wins is the one an agent can verify, match to a person, and book.

What paid media can do is feed the first of those. A campaign that puts your name in front of the right traveller produces searches for your hotel by name, and those searches, along with the reviews and the direct bookings that follow, are the kind of signal the engines read. Buy the ad for the guest it brings, and treat the AI answer as something the same guest helps you earn.

What to do with the budget

If you were about to spend on “AI optimisation” that promises placement, spend it on the three things above in that order: match your facts everywhere, make the pages that describe what you are known for the best pages on your site, and make your availability and rates readable by a machine. If you run Google Ads already, nothing changes: your existing campaigns are the ones eligible around AI Overviews, and there is no separate product to buy. If you run no ads, the AI answer is not a reason to start.

See also: The page that ranks first is not the page the AI names | The agent will not ask for the best hotel | Does Google Preferred Sources affect AI Overviews | Get found: the technical playbook