Industry work has documented the shift to generative discovery; what was missing for the German-speaking market until July 2026 was any published measurement at all. A visibility audit across 49 competitor domains in the German and English GEO market for hospitality found exactly one domain publishing original research. Verbatim from the report: "Nobody publishes measurement in German."
That is the reason for this work. I measure, publish the method, and release the raw data. Anyone who wants to recheck a figure should be able to, without access to my tools.
The papers
-
26 Aug 2026 · First-party survey · five measurements
The Disappearing Hotel
Generative discovery, AI visibility and the case for generative engine optimization in hospitality. Draws on industry and peer-reviewed work from 2023 to 2026, plus five first-party measurements collected 28 July 2026. With methodology, raw data and a dedicated chapter on the limits of the survey.
A German edition, "Das verschwindende Hotel", runs in parallel and is not a translation: it carries its own first-party German-market data surveyed 28 July 2026. Two further German-language papers are published under the German research index. Both editions are archived on ResearchGate.
How to check these figures
Four kinds of sources carry this work: dated industry surveys, the only peer-reviewed controlled study on generative search optimization to date, documentation published by the providers themselves, and my own measurements with a stated survey date. Where a figure is modeled, it says so. Where a value is directional rather than an exact measurement, it says that too.
AI models do not answer deterministically: the same question can be answered differently an hour later. I therefore ask every question repeatedly, record the model identifier for each run, and report the variance. For AI answers inside Google Search there is no official interface; I survey them through a conventional SEO tool and say so in the text.