AI Travel Index · October 2026
Who AI recommends to travellers
We asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews the questions travellers ask about hotels, food, tours, airport transfers, eSIMs, insurance and airlines, in 20 cities. Then we recorded every business they named.
Download the full report (PDF, 25 pages) Short version (4 pages)
Ask a different assistant and you will usually get a different list. For a business, being named by one assistant says little about the others.
Cities
Every topic, what each assistant said, and the websites they relied on.
Named most often across cities
In brackets: in how many of the 20 cities it was among the top three named.
The websites AI relies on
Most cited sources across all answers. A business missing from these is harder for an assistant to find.
google.com · tripadvisor.com · viator.com · facebook.com · getyourguide.com · youtube.com · reddit.com · squaremouth.com · expedia.com · traveltomtom.net
How we ran it
On 10 October 2026 we asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews the same 320 travel questions: two for each of 8 topics in each of 20 cities, worded the way travellers ask.
Each question was asked from the city’s own country, through the assistant itself where possible (Perplexity through its API with web search). Google does not show an AI Overview for every search, so a few questions have three answers instead of four.
We recorded every answer in full and listed the businesses each one named. Landmarks, neighbourhoods and public places are not counted. Different spellings of the same business are merged.
This shows what the assistants said that day, not our own ranking. Answers change, so we ask the same questions again every month and keep every answer.
Is your business in the answer?
The free AI check shows whether ChatGPT names your business when customers ask, who it names instead, and three things to fix first. No card needed.