Travel: how AI-ready are the leaders?
Booking, flights and experiences — a category where AI trip planning is growing fast. We ran the LLMready crawler against each homepage and scored it the same way as a free audit.
58/100
Median (all industries: 77)
33%
Publish an llms.txt
67%
Allow all 4 core AI crawlers
83%
Use Schema.org JSON-LD
Key findings
- Hostelworld leads with 85/100 (B); Booking.com trails at 39.
- The travel median is 19 points below the median of all 102 sites we measured.
- 1 of 6 block at least one core AI crawler (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended) in robots.txt.
- 33% publish an llms.txt and 0% an llms-full.txt. 33% rely on JavaScript to render their main text.
- Weakest category on average: citation readiness at 50/100.
Bot access
70
Content extractability
60
Semantic metadata
73
Citation readiness
50
Scores
Leaderboard
| # | Site | Score | Bot access | Extractability | Metadata | Citation | Core bots | llms.txt | Biggest gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 85 Hostelworldhostelworld.com | 85 B | 90 | 87 | 95 | 70 | Authorship and freshness | ||
| 2 | 82 KAYAKkayak.com | 82 B- | 90 | 71 | 93 | 76 | Authorship and freshness | ||
| 3 | 60 trivagotrivago.com | 60 D | 46 | 70 | 81 | 51 | llms.txt is present and valid | ||
| 4 | 56 Airbnbairbnb.com | 56 F | 43 | 62 | 87 | 41 | 2 | llms.txt is present and valid | |
| 5 | 55 Skyscannerskyscanner.net | 55 F | 76 | 37 | 75 | 31 | Content is in the initial HTML | ||
| 6 | 39 Booking.combooking.com | 39 F | 76 | 30 | 6 | 31 | Content is in the initial HTML |
Not scored because they turned away our crawler: Expedia (rate-limited automated requests (HTTP 429)), Tripadvisor (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), GetYourGuide (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), Vrbo (rate-limited automated requests (HTTP 429)), KLM (didn't respond in time), Hotels.com (didn't respond in time).
Most common gaps
Where travel sites lose points
Answer-ready formats
100%6 of 6 sites · Citation readiness
Add an FAQ section (with FAQPage schema) and question-style headings that mirror real queries.
Authorship and freshness
100%6 of 6 sites · Citation readiness
Show an author and published/updated dates (in markup and JSON-LD).
Content density
100%6 of 6 sites · Content extractability
Trim inline scripts, styles and markup bloat so text makes up a larger share of the page.
llms-full.txt is available
100%6 of 6 sites · Bot access
Publish the generated llms-full.txt alongside llms.txt.
llms.txt is present and valid
100%6 of 6 sites · Bot access
Fix the validation issues below or regenerate the file with LLMready.
Clear entity identity
83%5 of 6 sites · Citation readiness
Add Organization JSON-LD with name, logo and sameAs links to your official profiles.
Where would your site rank?
Run the same audit on your site and compare it to the travel median of 58.
A high score means AI engines can reach, read and understand a site. It doesn't guarantee citations — those also depend on authority, relevance and the question being asked.