Bing, Not Google, Is the Real Gatekeeper of ChatGPT Travel Recommendations

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT answers “What are the best hotels in New York City?” it does not scrape the live web. Instead, it leans on a pre-trained snapshot of the internet and, crucially, on the links that Bing’s search-index feed into that snapshot. A new case study that tracked 68 identical prompts proves that a hotel can own Google’s search-results page and still be virtually absent from ChatGPT’s shortlist—while a modest Bing article can catapult an under-the-radar property into the AI’s top answers.

Why We Put New York’s Luxury Hotels Under the Microscope

We needed a vertical that is both saturated and mature, one where brand equity, press coverage and review scores all collide. New York City luxury hotels fit the bill: household names like The Plaza compete with boutique newcomers such as The Fifth Avenue Hotel, and every property lives or dies on third-party endorsements. Crucially, none of the analysts on our team have clients in hospitality, so we could stay agnostic while we stress-tested how large-language-model (LLM) answers are really built.

Over two weeks we submitted the prompt “What are the best hotels in New York City?” 68 times, logging every mention, citation and fan-out (the extra questions ChatGPT asks itself behind the scenes). One name barely registered: Baccarat Hotel, a five-star property with 4.7-star TripAdvisor reviews and a Google Business Profile that routinely outranks competitors. Baccarat appeared only once—1.5 % of all answers—so we adopted it as our “invisible client” and went hunting for the blind spot.

Google Dominance Didn’t Move the Needle

First, we looked at conventional search. For the query “best hotels in NYC,” Baccarat’s own site ranks on the first page of Google, and its official pages appear in the map pack. Travel-section articles from Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure and TimeOut also list the property prominently. In other words, Google’s ecosystem treats Baccarat as a top-tier contender.

Yet when we examined the fan-out queries ChatGPT generated for itself—phrases such as “luxury hotels NYC 2023,” “top-rated NYC hotel for couples,” “five-star hotels Times Square”—Baccarat was cited in only three of the 201 Bing-powered sources that the model retrieved. By contrast, The Fifth Avenue Hotel, which sits lower in Google’s organic results, appeared in 27 of those Bing sources and consequently surfaced in 42 % of the final ChatGPT answers.

Bing Rankings Predict ChatGPT Mentions Almost Perfectly

We ran a Spearman rank-correlation test between Bing’s top-20 results for each fan-out query and the frequency with which a hotel was recommended. The correlation coefficient was 0.81—statistically significant and far stronger than the 0.47 correlation we found with Google’s rankings. In plain language: if a travel article about “best NYC hotels” ranks on the first page of Bing, ChatGPT is very likely to paraphrase or explicitly cite that article. Google visibility, while helpful for direct traffic, does not carry the same weight inside the LLM’s answer box.

What It Takes to Crack Bing’s Travel Index

Bing’s algorithm still relies heavily on traditional SEO signals—backlinks, page authority, schema markup—but it also weights social proof and third-party endorsements more heavily than Google does in this vertical. Articles that aggregate “expert picks” or “reader awards” consistently outrank individual hotel homepages. To appear in those articles, a property needs:

• Press coverage in outlets that Bing News indexes quickly (Forbes, Bloomberg, The Telegraph, National Geographic).
• Inclusion in “best-of” lists that use list-item schema and have a high citation flow from other travel sites.
• Freshness: Bing’s travel SERPs favor pieces updated within the last 90 days.
• Local hosting or CDN presence in Europe or the U.S. East Coast, because Bing’s crawler appears to time-out slower pages more aggressively than Googlebot.

None of those tactics require advertising spend; they do demand a deliberate digital-PR sprint and a willingness to pitch writers whose pieces are likely to be picked up by MSN and Apple News—two sources Bing scans within minutes of publication.

Action Plan for Any Brand That Wants Into ChatGPT Answers

Our experiment ended once we boosted Baccarat’s visibility by pitching a single “where to stay in NYC 2024” roundup to a major travel outlet known to rank well in Bing. Within 12 days the article hit page 1 for three fan-out queries; two weeks later Baccarat appeared in 28 % of our ChatGPT prompts, a 17-fold increase. The lesson applies far beyond hotels:

1. Map the fan-out queries your audience is likely to trigger (tools such as Bing Webmaster’s “related queries” or AlsoAsked.com help).
2. Identify which third-party articles already dominate those Bing results.
3. Offer writers refreshed data, exclusive images or expert quotes so they update their pieces—because Bing rewards recency.
4. Secure at