How New York Marriott Marquis scores now
Thirteen signals across the three pillars, this month. Each bar shows how the brand compares with the category leader, which sits at 100. The dark bar marks a signal where this brand leads the set.
At a glance
The strategic read on the signals above - where New York Marriott Marquis sits, what is holding it back, and where the openings are. Who else is moving in the set is broken out under the trajectory chart on the next tab.
Found is strongest (84): 54% AI share of voice and first in Google's hotels pack on the Times Square searches. Understood is the ceiling (77), a whisker under Chosen (78). Share of voice runs from 72% on Copilot to 37% on Gemini - the models agree on where the Marquis is more than on why to choose it.
No category pages ranking. Its own pages reach the organic top 10 on none of 15 local hotel searches; top-10 footprint fell 1,058 to 494.
Own-name clicks leaking. Visits from 'new york marriott marquis' fell 2,048 to 109 a month; the AI Overview's lead citation is the microsite marriottmarquistimessquare.com.
Thin press. 20 press-set links against Hard Rock's 47, and few best-hotel lists.
Split trust. 4.4 on Google, but #285 of 530 on TripAdvisor.
Reasons beyond location. New Year's Eve (already #1 for NYE packages), the largest hotel and M Club, The View - seeded into the best-hotel lists and creators the models read.
Broadway and landmark pages. 'Hotels near Broadway theaters' is in this audience's prompt set and the Marquis is absent; Hard Rock ranks with dedicated pages.
Bring the satellites home. The View (#1 for 'revolving restaurant nyc') and the microsite carry authority the hotel path does not get.
Organic Discovery Score over time
Overall score by month across the set. Where is the field tightening or splitting apart?
Who is moving, and why
The hotels behind the trajectory chart above: what changed, by how much, and the specific page, ranking or link event behind it.
Long-tail rankings fell away (9,458 to 376 ranking keywords on the path) and visits from its own name collapsed (2,048 to 109 for 'new york marriott marquis') as an AI Overview took the top of the results. AI share of voice and the hotels pack hold it at #1.
The only hotel that held its rankings, on the back of dedicated 'hotels near' pages for Rockefeller Center, Radio City, MoMA and Javits. Press keeps landing too: Condé Nast Traveler's 'Long Live the Hard Rock' (2026) and Secret NYC's Messi suite coverage.
Still owns 'midtown manhattan hotels' (#5 organic, #1 in the hotels pack) and the Macy's parade press, but the long tail behind it is gone. Highest brand demand in the set (21.9k a month) and the lowest guest scores (4.0 Google, 3.8 TripAdvisor).
Its AI presence is almost all Bar 54, 'Times Square's highest rooftop bar' - one owned superlative every model repeats. For its own name, the German-language hyatt.com page outranks the English one.
A 'polished, 5-star' list-filler for Gemini and 30% share of voice on ChatGPT, with no signature hook and almost no press. In the hotels pack on 3 of 15 local searches.
A negative-SEO link wave: 73% of its top anchors are link-seller text naming lookalike domains. The jump is not earned authority. It has no non-brand term in the top 20 and 2.7% AI share of voice.
Signal by signal, against the leader
Thirteen signals side by side. Now is where we sit against the top rival this month. 13m indexed move is how our position against the set has shifted over the year - positive when we gain relative ground, even if raw values slide.
Why raw and indexed can disagree. Every signal is indexed to the leader each month (leader = 100). If rivals decline harder than we do, our indexed position rises even when the raw number falls. The pillar scores are indexed; the raw column shows the absolute change over the same window.
Non-brand keyword coverage
Ranking positions across a curated non-brand keyword set, grouped by buyer intent. Which brand owns which corner of the category.
Signals moving the wrong way
The tracked signals whose raw values have slid over the thirteen months. Even where the indexed position holds against the field, a falling raw number still needs fixing.
Category context
SERP pattern · AIOs · review floor · non-scored competitors
The structural shape of Times Square and Midtown hotels - who owns the SERP, where AI Overviews show up, which brand names inflate raw AI SoV, and the aggregators that sit outside the scored set but capture most of the demand.
How AI sees us
How AI sees New York Marriott Marquis
Two different questions the models answer: how often a brand is named, and how clearly and warmly it is described. The first is visibility, the second is interpretation. Both are measured across five AI models on NYC-worded prompts that name no hotel or chain.
AI Share of Voice, by model
How the models actually answer
Four real local prompts, with their estimated monthly volume. Two where the Marquis is named, two where a rival wins. Rival names in charcoal, the Marquis highlighted.
Say/Do signals gap
New York Marriott Marquis's positioning from its own site, side by side with how AI, Reddit and guest reviews describe it. The diff below shows which claims land on both sides, which are only in the brand's voice, and which external framings the brand isn't addressing.
Where AI's picture comes from
The sources the models cite when they discuss each brand. This is where earned, community and creator presence shows up - and where leaning on your own site becomes a fragility, because the models have less independent material to trust.
Three things carry AI's picture of these hotels: the chains' own hotel pages, Google Business Profile review panels, and a handful of best-hotel lists (Time Out, blacklane, overherenewyork, the Independent). Reddit is cited mainly through r/Broadway where-to-stay threads, and only by Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Mix from ChatGPT, Copilot and AI Mode citations; Hard Rock rests on 11 cited responses, so read its bar as indicative.
Who the press recommends
Links from 18 mainstream and travel-specialist titles that shape where people stay in New York, weighted by each title's authority and counted at each hotel's own path. When the best-hotel lists and the travel press keep naming a hotel, guests and models are being pointed towards it.
Press endorsement
Where the audience actually is
Cited Reddit threads · YouTube creators · prompt themes
The Reddit threads, YouTube channels and prompt themes AI cites when it discusses Times Square hotel.
Cited Reddit posts & threads
YouTube creators in the AI layer
Prompt themes & what they ask
Where New York Marriott Marquis is losing ground
The specific constraints behind the score, zoomed in - a gap to a named rival, or a signal moving the wrong way. This is the shortlist a Discovery Roadmap turns into work.
The gap
What to fix
The weakest signals, turned into things to work on - the starting point for a roadmap.
How the score is built
How the score is put together - the thirteen signals, the weights, the local adaptations, the adjustments and floors, and what is tracked month to month.
The thirteen signals
Data route: Ahrefs API (Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Brand Radar), US, pulled 21 October 2026, plus DataForSEO live SERPs searched from New York, Google Business Profiles, TripAdvisor and SparkToro. Each signal is indexed against the leader in the set each month, then rolled into its pillar. "Tracked" signals have monthly history (Sep 2025 to Sep 2026, October held out as partial); "point-in-time" ones are held at their latest reading.
| Pillar | Signal | What it reads | Basis |
|---|
Scoring hotels, not chains
Path-level targets
Five of the six hotels live on a chain domain, so every search and link signal is read at the hotel's own URL path: marriott.com/en-us/hotels/nycmq-new-york-marriott-marquis/, ihg.com/intercontinental/hotels/us/en/new-york/nychc/ (interconny.com is only a redirect to it), hilton.com/en/hotels/nycnhhh-new-york-hilton-midtown/, hyatt.com/hyatt-centric/en-US/nycts-hyatt-centric-times-square (the older /en-US/hotel/new-york/... URL carries no traffic), marriott.com/en-us/hotels/nycsw-the-westin-new-york-at-times-square/ and hotel.hardrock.com/new-york/. Brand Radar entities use the same paths.
Local adaptations
- Link authority combines referring domains to the path with the URL Rating of the hotel's main page, because every chain domain sits at DR 90+ and Domain Rating cannot tell the hotels apart.
- Hotels-pack presence is a new Found signal: the share of 15 local hotel searches (DataForSEO, searched from New York, desktop) where Google's hotels pack lists the hotel. Sponsored hotel ads are not counted.
- Guest reviews replace Trustpilot: the average of the Google Business Profile rating and the TripAdvisor rating.
Owned assets outside the scored path
The Marquis also runs marriottmarquistimessquare.com (the AI Overview's lead citation for the hotel's name), theviewnewyorkcity.com (#1 for 'revolving restaurant nyc') and outlet sites. Hyatt runs bar54nyc.com. These are not in the scores, for like-for-like comparison, and are named as levers instead.
Reading it: level, direction, consistency
Three properties, not one
Level is how good it is - read against 100, not only against rivals. Direction is which way it is heading - treat the score as the lagging indicator and the trend as the leading one. Consistency is how steadily it holds - variation around the hotel's own 13-month average.
Relative, and it moves under you
Each signal scores value ÷ set-best × 100 each month. If rivals improve and a hotel stands still, its score falls even though nothing about it changed. Every hotel in this set lost organic traffic after a July 2026 peak, so read each hotel's fall against the field's.
Weighting, the AI layer and the caveats
Weights
Understood-led: Found 30 · Understood 45 · Chosen 25. Within Found: AI share of voice 30%, non-brand traffic 25%, hotels-pack presence 25%, link authority 20%. Within Understood: AI clarity 25%, anchor relevance 24%, topic footprint 20%, category capture 19%, AI sentiment 12%. Within Chosen: brand demand 30%, top-3 rankings 25%, press endorsement 23%, guest reviews 22%. Switch to "Even" in the control bar to test the pillar weighting.
The AI layer
Ahrefs Brand Radar, Ahrefs prompt set, US. Scored scope: questions containing times square, midtown, manhattan, new york, nyc or broadway, excluding every question that names marriott, marquis, intercontinental, hilton, hyatt, ihg, westin or hard rock. No category filter, so the score reads total local AI presence, not just "where to stay" answers. Scored mentions: Marquis 231, Hilton 53, Hyatt 46, Westin 33, Hard Rock 22, InterContinental 21. Share of voice is the average of five models - ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Mode. Google AI Overviews were dropped from the score: they returned 9 scored mentions in total (7 of them the Marquis at 97% share of voice), too thin to index. Grok returned no mentions for any hotel, and Claude is not covered by the Ahrefs prompt set. Sentiment is an analyst read of 176 sampled Marquis answers and up to 25 per rival on their strongest models. The citation mix uses the top 50 cited domains per hotel on ChatGPT, Copilot and AI Mode combined; the "Other" slice is the long tail and is estimated.
Held at their latest reading
- The AI signals, anchor relevance (top 50 anchors by referring domains), hotels-pack presence, press and guest reviews are point-in-time, so they set the level but do not drive month-to-month movement.
- Topic footprint tracks the stable top-10 count, not total ranking keywords, which collapsed on every path (Marquis 9,458 to 376).
- URL Rating fell 35-55% for every hotel between September and October 2025, an Ahrefs-wide recalculation; read UR across hotels, not over time.
- Brand share comes from the top 50 branded keywords per hotel at two dates (Sep 2025, Sep 2026), interpolated between them.
Adjustments, floors and name collisions
Name-collision check
Every AI pull was run twice: the scored local scope, and a raw scope with no NYC wording required. Where raw mentions run well above scored mentions, the name is catching other hotels. The scored figure is used throughout. Raw vs scored mentions:
| Hotel | Raw mentions | Scored (local) | Ratio | Reason |
|---|
Review floor
A review rating is only scored when a hotel carries at least 500 lifetime reviews on each source. All six clear it on Google and TripAdvisor.
Link spam
Negative-SEO link waves hit InterContinental (referring domains 690 to 1,598 in September 2026), Hard Rock (1,025 to 1,867) and Hilton (1,017 to 1,446), with link-seller anchors naming lookalike domains (interconny.com, newyorkhiltonmidtown.com, hrhnewyork.com). The Marquis's count also doubled from May, with about 7% spam anchors. Referring-domain counts are shown as measured but read against the set median, and the spam shows up in anchor relevance.
Press counting
Press links are counted on the root domain of each title, live and lost, de-duplicated by linking URL. "First seen" is when Ahrefs found a link, not when the article ran, so recency is approximate. Many national titles route hotel links through booking partners, which keeps live counts low for every hotel.