Traffic to hotel websites from AI assistants rose almost 200 percent between March and August 2026, Net Affinity and Smarthotel reported on 18 September 2026. Overall website traffic across the same sites grew 32 percent over the same months. The figures come from the vendors' own panel of client hotel websites.
Smarthotel supplies booking technology and digital marketing to hotels across the UK, Ireland and Europe. Net Affinity supplies booking, marketing and payment systems to independent hotels. Both companies own the data. No independent auditor reviewed it.
August added 53 percent
AI assistant sessions increased 53 percent from July to August. Revenue attributed to AI referrals rose 97 percent over the same month. ChatGPT carried 98 percent of AI assistant traffic and 95 percent of revenue attributed to AI referrals. Revenue from ChatGPT alone rose 141 percent since March.
Three published figures for the same months
The companies' 31 August 2026 announcement put ChatGPT at 97 percent of AI-referred traffic, with Gemini at 2 percent and Microsoft Copilot at 1 percent. It put ChatGPT at 98 percent of AI-referred revenue for July, up from 80 percent in March, with Gemini falling from 11 percent to 2 percent. The 18 September article puts ChatGPT at 98 percent of traffic and 95 percent of revenue. The AI Traffic Index the companies maintain states 94 percent of AI revenue for August, with Gemini at 4.5 percent. No methodology note explains the movement.
The index attributes part of the movement to volume. It states that AI traffic and revenue volumes are small, so a few bookings move the percentages.
AI still holds 0.4 percent of sessions
AI assistants accounted for 0.4 percent of hotel website sessions, 0.4 percent of transactions and 0.5 percent of revenue. The index records 0.5 percent of revenue for August 2026. It separately records 1.5 percent of revenue from US-based guests arriving through ChatGPT and other assistants.
UK and Ireland carry the growth
AI assistant traffic rose 287 percent in the UK and 230 percent in Ireland since March. US growth over the same months reached 10 percent. US-origin traffic was 58 percent of the panel's AI assistant traffic in March and 31 percent by the later reading. The US holds 7 percent of overall traffic across the panel.
Mobile takes the transaction
Between March and July, mobile moved from 78 to 80 percent of hotel website traffic. Mobile transactions moved from 62 to 66 percent. Mobile revenue moved from 54 to 59 percent, and desktop revenue moved from 44 to 39 percent.
Lauri Koop, managing director of Net Affinity, said the top of the booking journey is moving. In his account a guest can ask where to stay, compare hotels, check facilities and narrow the options inside one conversation, and then reach a hotel website with stronger booking intent.
What the mix means for hourly inventory
A day-use sale carries a short lead time and a same-day decision. The panel's figures put the growth in a research step that ends on a phone. An operator selling 6 a.m. to noon, noon to 6 p.m. or evening slots reads the trend as a channel question. The guest reaches the booking page later and more decided, and the slot list is what closes the sale.
The panel measures overnight booking sites. It publishes no day-use split. The 0.4 percent session share is the vendors' own caution against reading the growth curve as a shift in the booking base.
What the panel measures
The AI Traffic Index tracks referral data across hundreds of independent hotel websites. It counts referrals from major language models, and it excludes Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Every figure in the index and in both releases belongs to the two companies.