Which AI crawlers exist, and what they need
Each major AI assistant runs its own crawler: OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot, Google's Google-Extended, and Perplexity's PerplexityBot, among others. Each one respects standard robots.txt rules the same way traditional search crawlers do — meaning a misconfigured robots.txt can block an AI engine from reading your site just as easily as it can block Google.
A basic robots.txt checklist
Confirm your robots.txt doesn't block AI-bot user agents by name or by an overly broad wildcard rule. If you want AI engines to read and potentially cite your site, they need explicit or default allow rules covering your key pages — not just human traffic and Googlebot.
Schema.org Hotel and FAQPage markup, in plain terms
Structured data markup (schema.org's Hotel and FAQPage types) gives AI engines a machine-readable summary of your property — room count, amenities, address, star rating, common questions — instead of forcing them to infer it from prose. Hotels with this markup give AI assistants a clearer, more confident basis to cite specific facts correctly.
What llms.txt is, and whether it's proven yet
llms.txt is an emerging (not yet standardized) convention: a plain-text file summarizing a site for AI agents, similar in spirit to robots.txt. Publishing one is a low-effort, forward-looking step — but it's genuinely new, so its absence isn't a real problem today, just an opportunity to be ahead of the curve.
The semantic HTML and JavaScript-rendering problem
If your key content (room details, amenities, policies) only renders after JavaScript runs, some crawlers may see a mostly empty page. Semantic HTML — real headings, real text content in the initial HTML response — gives AI crawlers something to read even if they don't execute your site's JavaScript.
Sitemap hygiene
A sitemap.xml, referenced from robots.txt, helps any crawler — AI or traditional — discover every page on your site, including rooms, amenities, and policy pages that might otherwise be missed if they're not well-linked internally.
A free check vs. an ongoing one
A one-time technical audit tells you where you stand today. Because AI crawler behavior, your site, and your competitors' sites all keep changing, an ongoing audit — rerun on a schedule — is what confirms a fix actually took effect.