Can AI Assistants Read Europe's Holiday Rental Websites?

Published October 22, 2026 · Threshold · Revised October 22, 2026 to add 13 countries

We checked 1,248 independent holiday rental managers' websites in 38 European countries in October 2026. Only 1 in 14 (7.0%) tells an AI assistant, in the format it looks for, that it offers places to stay. That is less than half the rate we found in the United States the same month (15.0%).

Key findings

Of the 1,178 sites that answered, 82 (7.0%) are labelled as a place to stay. Nearly nine in ten can be read but carry no such label, so an assistant has to guess what they offer and where; the rest show it nothing useful at all.

A further 70 sites (5.6% of all 1,248) didn't answer at all, were down for maintenance, or weren't finished.

• Europe labels less than half as often as the US. 7.0% of European sites carry the label against 15.0% in our US study, and no region of Europe comes close: the best, Southern Europe at 9%, would rank second-lowest among the six US regions.
• In the UK, security services turn assistants away. 18 of the 169 UK sites that answered (11%) turned the check away at Cloudflare, whose bot settings can shut out AI assistants even when a site's own robots.txt welcomes them. In the US the same happened to fewer than 1 site in 100.
• Blocking on purpose is rare. Only 16 sites tell AI assistants to stay away in their robots.txt file: 15 block ChatGPT's crawlers, 15 Claude's, 14 Google Gemini's and 6 Perplexity's.
• Most pages have words to read; few say what they are. The typical readable home page offers about 8,000 characters of text, and only 44 offer fewer than 2,000. The gap is the label, not the content.

By country

The Netherlands and Poland lead, with nearly one site in three and one in five labelled. France, the second-largest group in our sample, labels 4 of 113, and none of the sites we checked in Belgium, Hungary or the Czech Republic carries the label.

By region

Southern Europe does best. South-East Europe trails, with a single labelled site among 80, and the Nordic and Baltic countries have two among 96.

Independent managers with their own websites are also harder to find in some countries than others. In the Nordic countries, Austria and Switzerland, most holiday homes are let through national agencies, resort schemes or booking portals, so the independent managers we could find there were few. In the Balkan countries, too, our searches turned up mostly owners letting their own flats through booking sites, and few managers with websites of their own: we found one in North Macedonia and four in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Why it matters

More travelers now ask an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to find and compare places to stay, and the assistant can only recommend what it can read and understand.

When an assistant answers “find me a villa for six near Lagos, Portugal,” it reads web pages for the answer. A page labelled with structured data says, in a form software reads without guessing, that this is a holiday rental, where it is and what it offers. An unlabelled page leaves the assistant to infer all of that from the wording, in whatever language the site is written in.

So a manager whose site an assistant can't read clearly is easier for it to pass over, in favour of sources it can read, often a listing on a booking site with that site's fees.

What managers can do

Most of these fixes are an afternoon's work for a web developer, and the first three cost nothing.

1. Check what an assistant sees. A free check such as threshold.rentals/check reads a site the way an AI crawler does and reports which of the problems above it has.
2. Check your security service. If you use Cloudflare, look at its bot settings (Security, then Bots or AI Crawl Control): “Block AI bots” and Bot Fight Mode can turn assistants away even when robots.txt allows them.
3. Unblock the assistants, if you want them. Remove the lines in robots.txt that name GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended or PerplexityBot.
4. Label your pages. Add structured data: VacationRental on each rental's page and LodgingBusiness for the company. Google reads the same labels.
5. Put the words in the page. If your rental platform builds pages in the browser, ask for server-side rendering, so the text and rentals are in the page itself.
6. Say it in plain text. A few sentences on what you offer, where, and for how many guests give an assistant something to quote, in your own language and, if your guests come from abroad, in English too.

How we checked

We found independent holiday rental managers in 38 countries, then read each one's home page the way an AI crawler does, from October 20 to 22, 2026.

• The sample. 1,248 local and regional managers with their own websites in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Andorra, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We found them through web searches in each country's languages, tourist office and regional accommodation lists, and local directories. National brands and their franchises, booking sites and portals, hotels and single-owner listings were left out. A later review of each site took out a further 63 that turned out not to be independent holiday rental managers, such as cleaning firms, estate agents with no holiday letting, chains, resorts and directories, and second websites of businesses already counted.
• The test. The same one as our US study: for each home page we checked whether the site's robots.txt turns away the main AI assistants' crawlers, whether the page has at least 600 characters of readable text without running scripts, and whether it carries structured data labelling it as lodging (schema.org LodgingBusiness, VacationRental, Accommodation or a related type).
• The limits. The sample isn't a census: it leans toward managers that are easy to find online, and the number of sites varies widely by country, so country figures are shown only where 20 or more sites answered. We checked home pages only; a site may label its individual rental pages even when its home page carries no label.

Revision. First published on October 22, 2026 with 1,092 sites in 25 countries (7.6% labelled). Revised the same day to add 156 sites in 13 more countries: Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Andorra, Finland and Iceland. The figures for the first 25 countries didn't change.

You're welcome to quote these figures with credit to Threshold and a link to this page. Journalists can ask for the figures by country at hello@threshold.rentals. Our US study uses the same method.