The AI Booking Channel publishes a machine-readable copy of your property data so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini can find your listings, describe them accurately, and send guests to book direct on your own site.
What it does #
Guests increasingly ask an AI assistant for travel recommendations instead of searching the web. An assistant can only recommend what it can read, and an ordinary property page is easy for it to misread: it may quote a stale price, miss your minimum-stay rule, or skip your site entirely and point the guest at a listing platform. That is a direct booking lost before the guest ever saw your website.
The AI Booking Channel gives assistants a clean, purpose-built version of your inventory to read instead. When you switch it on, your site starts publishing:
- A machine-readable page for every published property, carrying rates, availability, and minimum-stay rules for the window you choose. How precise the location is (street address, coordinates) is entirely your call.
- An AI sitemap that lists every one of those property pages so crawlers can find them all.
- A site catalog file that introduces your whole inventory, your business name, and a contact address in one place.
- Richer structured data on your regular property pages, adding details such as pet policy, brand, language, and a direct booking link.
- A welcome for AI crawlers in your site’s robots file. This is added only when your site is set to be visible to search engines.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A guest asks ChatGPT for a pet-friendly cabin near the lake for the first week of October. The assistant reads your property feed, sees the cabin is available that week, quotes the correct nightly rate and the three-night minimum, and links the guest straight to your booking page.
The channel is honest with assistants about what the data promises. Every feed states that availability is listing-level and indicative, and that nightly prices are pre-tax and pre-fee, with the final price always confirmed on the property page. That keeps AI descriptions accurate and protects your guests from quoted totals your checkout would contradict.
You also see what the channel is doing for you. The analytics card at the top of the settings reports “at least N reads” over your chosen window (7, 30, or 90 days), split by assistant. Only reads served directly by your site are counted, so cached reads do not appear; the real number can only be higher. Visits from people arriving out of an AI assistant are reported on their own line, separate from crawler reads. Bookings and revenue are counted only from confirmed reservations placed by guests who arrived through the channel’s tagged booking links or directly from an AI assistant, so the attribution is real rather than estimated.
The module ships off. Turning it on is a deliberate choice, because it publishes your property data where anyone, including competitors, can read it. The location-privacy settings exist so you decide exactly how much is shared.
How to turn it on #
1. Switch on the module #
In the HomeRunner Toolkit Hub, switch on AI Booking Channel. Feeds build automatically within a few minutes; the Published feeds card shows the count and the last-built time.
2. Choose what the feeds carry #
In the Content section, set the Availability horizon (how many days of pricing and availability each feed covers, 90 by default) and decide whether to include nightly pricing, unavailable dates, and minimum-stay rules. All three are on by default because they are what make an AI recommendation accurate.
3. Decide how precise location should be #
Both location settings are off by default, so feeds carry the public area (city and region) only. Turn on Expose exact street address or Expose precise coordinates only if that level of detail is acceptable for every listing in the feed.
4. Add your business identity #
Under Discoverability, enter your Business name and Business phone so assistants attribute listings to your brand, and a Contact email for crawler operators. Each falls back sensibly when left blank (site title, omitted, and site admin email respectively).
5. Save and confirm it is serving #
Click Save AI Booking Channel settings. The Output card should read Serving. To see how AI crawlers reach your site, click Run reachability test: it fetches your own home page and robots file as several AI crawlers and reports what your server returns. The test only reads status; it never changes your firewall or any bot rule.
Settings #
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Availability horizon (days) | How many days of pricing and availability each feed carries, from today. 7 to 730. Default: 90. |
| Include nightly pricing | Whether feeds carry the per-night rate list. Off leaves availability only. Default: on. |
| Include unavailable dates | Lists blocked nights explicitly as not available instead of omitting them. Default: on. |
| Include minimum-stay rules | Marks nights that carry a minimum-stay requirement. Default: on. |
| Respect per-property opt-out | Honors a per-property exclude flag, so listings marked as excluded stay out of the channel. Default: on. |
| Include drafts and private listings | Off by default, so only published listings are ever exposed to crawlers. |
| Expose exact street address | Publishes the full street address. When off, feeds carry city and region only. Consider guest and owner privacy before enabling. Default: off. |
| Expose precise coordinates | Publishes exact latitude and longitude. When off, coordinates are left out. Default: off. |
| llms.txt mode | Where the site catalog is served. Serve full (the default) publishes it at /llms-full.txt and never touches an existing /llms.txt. Generate serves /llms.txt when nothing else on the site does. Off disables the catalog. |
| Publish the AI sitemap | Serves /ai-sitemap.xml listing every per-property feed. Default: on. |
| Inject rel=alternate link | Adds a machine-readable pointer on each property page so crawlers find that property’s feed. Default: on. |
| JSON-LD enrichment | Adds extra fields (pets, brand, language, booking link) to the structured data on your property pages so AI and Google read richer detail. Default: on. |
| Business name | Used as the brand in structured data. Blank uses the site title. Default: blank. |
| Business phone | Added to structured data as your telephone number. Left out entirely when blank; never invented. Default: blank. |
| Contact email | Published in the site catalog so crawler operators can reach you. Blank uses the site admin email. Default: blank. |
| Rate-limit hint (req/sec) | A courtesy crawl-rate suggestion advertised in the site catalog. 0.1 to 100. Default: 1. |
| Add Allow directives to robots.txt | Adds explicit welcome rules for AI crawlers to your site’s robots file, plus a pointer to the AI sitemap. Applies only when the site is set to be visible to search engines; a physical robots file, or an SEO plugin that manages it, takes precedence. Default: on. |
| Regeneration trigger | When feeds rebuild: when your property data updates, on the scheduled safety-net rebuild, or both. Default: both (recommended). |
| Safety-net cron interval | How often the scheduled background rebuild runs as a fallback to update-driven refreshes: hourly, twice daily, or daily. Default: daily. |
| Cache TTL (minutes) | How long a served feed may be cached before it is considered stale. 5 to 10080. Default: 720 (twelve hours). |
| Staging guard | Auto (the default) blocks all feed output on any non-production host, so a staging copy of your site never gets crawled. Force on overrides that and requires a typed confirmation. |
| Kill switch | Emergency stop. Every feed address immediately stops serving, without disabling the module or losing your settings. Default: off. |
Tips #
- If crawlers do not seem to find your feeds, check that your site is set to be visible to search engines first. The robots-file welcome is only added on a search-visible site. Feeds themselves regenerate automatically after property or pricing changes, and Regenerate feeds now in the Freshness section rebuilds everything on demand.
- A booking is attributed when the confirmed reservation happens within 30 days of the guest’s first arrival through the channel. Revenue is shown per currency where the booking total is known; bookings without a known total still count toward the booking number.
- The “at least N reads” figure is deliberately conservative. Reads answered by a page cache in front of your site are not counted, so treat the number as a floor, never as the full picture.
- You can keep an individual listing out of the channel, for example a property an owner wants kept low-profile. There is no switch for this on the listing edit screen yet, so ask HomeRunner support to flag the property for you; the Respect per-property opt-out setting controls whether flagged listings are honored.
- The AI Booking Channel tells you where a booking came from; Toolkit: Conversion Tracking shows how guests move through your booking flow once they arrive. The two work well side by side.
- New to the Toolkit? Start with Toolkit: Overview for the full list of modules.