SKIFT DATA + AI SUMMIT 2026
THE ARGUMENT
In AI search, a hotel either appears or it doesn’t. Slavin cited research showing only 6% of hotels surface in AI results, making visibility a commercial problem, not just a marketing one. He also said the AI-search consumer is not a monolith. Budget travelers price-compare, while luxury travelers are “purely experiential.” Aside from providing a multifaceted discovery experience, the biggest challenge in AI search is attribution. Traveler decisions begin to form weeks in advance, prior to active research, and then on the other end, the last click captures the credit. That gap is the problem Curacity exists to solve: Its core model uses deterministic matching to link upper-funnel content to a booking.
THE SO WHAT
As AI search cuts out the middleman, booking attribution is at even more of a premium. Last-click models hand the credit to OTAs, yet decisions form weeks upstream, where no one — not even the LLMs — can yet prove influence. Curacity is racing to close that gap by measuring the upper-funnel impact. The hotelier’s decision today should be how to fund AI visibility now and demand deterministic proof of conversion.