Lighthouse acquires Hotelrank.ai to boost hotels’ visibility on AI travel platforms

Acquisition adds AI visibility metrics to Connect AI

Lighthouse, which describes itself as an AI-driven commercial operating platform for travel and hospitality, has confirmed the acquisition of Hotelrank.ai. The deal is expected to enrich Connect AI, its offer designed to make properties discoverable, understandable and bookable by AI agents. With this additional capability, hoteliers can track how their properties appear on platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Anthropic’s tools. The announcement clearly places visibility in AI-generated answers as a new arena of commercial competition, on a par with search, pricing and the quality of content produced.

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To deliver on that promise, Hotelrank.ai runs structured queries across multiple models to measure a hotel’s presence, associated citations, position in responses, perception attributes surfaced by artificial intelligence, and the split between direct links and those from OTAs. Connected to Connect AI, this capability is meant to give commercial, marketing and revenue teams indicators specific to these new channels. The set‑up aims to track visibility over time, benchmark a property against competitors, identify the levers that favour direct booking, and check that the hotel remains accurately represented and directly bookable when a traveller consults a conversational assistant. “Connect AI gives hotels the ability to be discovered and booked through AI travel platforms. Hotelrank.ai completes the picture by showing them exactly how they're performing in this new channel,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, chief executive of Lighthouse.

Lighthouse says AI‑powered travel planning is growing faster than any other distribution channel in hospitality history. Yet most properties still have few tools to measure how these platforms perceive them, recommend them or link to a direct site rather than to an OTA. By adding a measurement layer to Connect AI, Lighthouse is seeking to turn an opaque space into a manageable channel, with metrics comparable to those already used for the web, distribution or commercial performance management. “Bringing together Connect AI and Hotelrank is also setting the ground for what comes next: a world where AI agents book hotels autonomously on behalf of travelers,” said Benjamin Pipat, co‑founder of Hotelrank.ai.

Founded in 2025, Hotelrank.ai supports hotels in more than 25 countries. Lighthouse, for its part, says it relies on a data network covering 80,000 hotels in 185 countries. The deal brings together a generalist commercial operating platform and a specialist in visibility measurement on large language models, with the ambition of giving chains, regional groups and independents a dashboard suited to hotel distribution in the age of AI agents.