AI RESEARCH
The End of Rented Discovery: How AI Search Redistributes Power Between Hotels and Intermediaries
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2603.20062v1 Announce Type: cross When a traveler asks an AI search engine to recommend a hotel, which sources get cited -- and does query framing matter? We audit 1,357 grounding citations from Google Gemini across 156 hotel queries in Tokyo and document a systematic pattern we call the Intent-Source Divide. Experiential queries draw 55.9\% of their citations from non-OTA sources, compared to 30.8\% for transactional queries -- a 25.1%age-point gap ($p < 5 \times 10^{-20