Google Business Profile isn't your website
A hotel's Google Business Profile (the listing that shows up in Google Maps and next to Google Search results) is a separate, Google-owned record of a business: name, category, address, phone, hours, attributes, photos, and reviews, maintained through Google's own dashboard, not through the hotel's website or CMS. It can be accurate even when the website is thin, or thin even when the website is excellent, the two aren't linked.
That separation matters because two of the five major AI engines, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, are built and operated by Google itself, and both lean on this same Google-owned data for real-world, location-based questions. A hotel's own site is one input among several; the Business Profile is a direct one.
Why this matters more for Gemini and AI Overviews specifically
ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity don't have privileged access to Google's Business Profile data the way Google's own products do. Gemini and AI Overviews do, which is a big part of why a hotel can be accurately described on one and missing or wrong on the other: the gap often isn't the hotel's website, it's what Google's own listing says (or doesn't say) about the property.
Field by field: what's actually in a Business Profile
Categories: a primary category (usually "Hotel") plus additional categories Google lets a business claim, restaurant, spa, event venue, wedding venue, and so on, if those apply. Each additional accurate category is another way the listing can surface for a relevant question.
Attributes and amenities: a checklist of specific, factual claims, free Wi-Fi, pool, pet-friendly, wheelchair accessible, and dozens more. These are binary and checkable, either the box is ticked accurately or it isn't, unlike prose on a website that an AI has to interpret.
Photos: real, recent photos of rooms, common areas, and amenities, both owner-uploaded and guest-uploaded. A listing with few or outdated photos gives Google (and by extension Gemini) less to work with visually and, in some cases, less confidence in the listing overall.
Q&A: a public question-and-answer section anyone can post to, including the business itself. Unanswered or wrong answers sitting here are a real, visible signal, and one most hotels never check after setting up the profile.
Reviews and rating: not a Business Profile field exactly, but tightly attached to it, review count, average rating, and rating distribution are all part of what a Business Profile shows Google, and by extension what Gemini can draw on.
Hotel-specific fields sit in a separate layer
Room types, check-in and check-out times, and per-room pricing live in Google's hotel-specific data (the panel that appears when someone searches for hotels directly, often sourced through a hotel's booking-engine or OTA integrations, not the standard Business Profile edit screen). This guide focuses on the Business Profile fields every hotel can edit directly, since that's the more universally fixable layer, but it's worth knowing the two aren't the same system.
A real snapshot: what Golden Well Hotel's Google listing actually shows
Rather than a generic example, here's a real Google Business Profile snapshot pulled for Golden Well Hotel, one of the properties in this site's published case studies: a primary category of "Hotel" plus two additional categories, restaurant and wedding venue, a 4.8 rating from 220 reviews (195 of them 5-star), and 703 photos attached to the listing.
It also shows a real, concrete example of exactly the kind of gap this guide is about: the business name on the Google listing itself is "U Zlaté studně" (the property's original Czech name), not "Golden Well Hotel," the name used on its own website and everywhere else it's referenced. That's not a website problem, structured data, robots.txt, and on-page content can all be perfect, and this specific inconsistency would still sit entirely inside Google's own listing, invisible from the website side.
Where hotels usually leave real value on the table
The attributes checklist is the single most commonly under-filled field. Google offers dozens of specific, checkable attributes, and most business owners fill in a handful at setup and never return. A hotel that genuinely has a pool, a fitness center, airport shuttle, and pet-friendly rooms but only has "free Wi-Fi" checked is giving Gemini far less to work with than a competitor who filled the list out completely, even if the two properties are otherwise comparable.
Additional categories are the second most commonly missed. Most hotels claim only "Hotel" and stop, even when a restaurant, spa, or event space genuinely operates on-site and could be claimed as its own accurate category, each one a separate way to surface for a relevant search or answer.
The Q&A section is the one nobody checks after initial setup. It's open to the public, which means outdated or simply wrong answers can sit there indefinitely (a check-in time that changed two years ago, an amenity that no longer exists) unless someone from the hotel actively monitors and corrects it.
How to actually check and fix this
Search your hotel's name in Google Maps, or search "[hotel name] Google Business Profile" to find the management dashboard if you're the verified owner. Check the business name field first, exactly like the Golden Well example above, since a name mismatch is invisible unless someone specifically looks. Then work through categories (is every accurate one claimed), attributes (is the checklist actually filled in, not left at defaults), photos (recent, real, and enough of them), and the Q&A section (anything wrong or unanswered sitting there).
None of this requires a developer or a CMS change, it's editable directly inside Google's own dashboard, which makes it one of the faster fixes on the list compared to structured data or crawler access. A reasonable order to work through it: business name and categories first (they're foundational and quick to check), then attributes, then photos and Q&A, since those three take longer but compound over time as more real reviews and questions accumulate.