An Australian hotel chain taking part in a local seo marketing trial has seen direct revenue increase significantly, with one hotel’s organic booking contributions increasing by 173%.
When travellers ask ChatGPT where to stay, the answers don’t come from search results, they come from belief. In those moments, if AI doesn’t recognise your brand, you don’t just lose visibility, you lose opportunity. That’s where Novotel Singapore on Stevens began, almost invisible. Ninety days later, it became one of Singapore’s most AI-cited hotels. The secret? Data that made AI trust them.
From “family hotels near Orchard Road” to “best wedding venues in Singapore,” AI models now reference the hotel naturally and accurately, not because of luck or ad spend, but because the data made them believe.
Powered by AI Source, Novotel’s digital ecosystem evolved from a static SEO structure into an AI-recognised authority in under 90 days.
When the AI Source program began, Novotel’s Share of Voice (SoV), the measure of how often a brand appears in AI-generated answers hovered between 0.2% and 2%. Practically invisible.
Within 90 days, that number skyrocketed to 28% in ChatGPT and 32% in Google AI Mode, a 16× increase from baseline. By October, the property wasn’t just catching up; it was leading. It had surpassed iconic competitors like Marina Bay Sands (10.6%), The Fullerton (25%) and Mandarin Oriental (14.5%), setting a new benchmark for Accor hotels in AI visibility.
Both ChatGPT and Google AI began associating Novotel with the right categories, family stays, weddings, and urban escapes. When an algorithm starts describing your brand the way your guests do, you’ve achieved something deeper than search rankings. You’ve achieved semantic alignment the moment AI truly understands your story.
Visibility without credibility is just noise. The turning point for Novotel came when its digital ecosystem began signalling trust.
During the 90-day pilot, the hotel maintained a consistently positive sentiment score of 70–75%, while its SEO technical score hit 98/100, and its authority score reached 69. Over 1,000 new backlinks strengthened the site’s digital reputation, giving AI systems the equivalent of glowing character references.
In traditional SEO, backlinks nudge rankings. In AI search, they anchor trust. They tell the algorithm, “This is a reliable, expert source worth citing.”
It’s no coincidence that once those signals matured, both ChatGPT and Google AI started mentioning Novotel confidently and repeatedly, not as a random result, but as a trusted answer.
One of the most striking outcomes came in September, when Novotel generated 4,500 non-brand organic sessions. These weren’t travellers searching for “Novotel.” They were people discovering the property through broader, high-intent searches like “family hotel Singapore” or “wedding venue near Orchard Road.”
That’s the difference between being found and being chosen.
This shift marked Novotel’s entry into the conversations shaping traveller intent, the spaces where decisions begin. Through AI Source, the property stopped relying solely on brand loyalty and started capturing new market share through discovery.
That’s what Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is built for: making brands visible in the evolving conversations that define visibility today, not just the search boxes of yesterday.
Many hotels celebrate when web sessions spike. But Novotel’s AI Source pilot revealed a deeper truth, not all traffic is created equal.
Over the 90-day period, overall site events decreased slightly (–5.8%), yet revenue actions increased by 1.5%. In other words, fewer people were browsing but more were booking.
That’s the quiet power of AI-optimised visibility. It doesn’t just attract visitors; it aligns discovery with intent. AI Source didn’t flood the site with noise. It filtered for relevance, bringing in travellers who were already close to a decision.
This is the kind of data that marketing teams dream of: fewer wanderers, more conversions, stronger intent.
