Do it twice. Once with Dubai in the sentence, once with Abu Dhabi. Keep the two source lists apart. A Dubai list says nothing about Abu Dhabi.
Ask the way a guest asks
Do not type your hotel's name. That only checks whether the model can find your brand. The guest who has never stayed with you will not ask it that way.
Put the city, or a neighbourhood, and the reason for the stay. Leave your name out.
These lines are wording to adapt, not results. Use the area you actually serve and the trip you actually sell.
Dubai: "Where should I stay near Dubai Marina for a three-night business trip?"
Abu Dhabi: "Where should I stay near the Corniche in Abu Dhabi for a long weekend with kids?"
Ask each one in its own chat. If you have a hotel in only one city, that city's answer is the one that matters. Still run the other city once, with an area you do not serve, so you can see that the source list is not yours.
Travellers on r/dubai already weigh area, metro access, and value when they compare hotels. Those threads are ordinary guest talk, not Perplexity answers. They only show the kind of question this check starts from.
Write down the cited pages, not a ranking
Perplexity's own help says every answer includes citations linking to the original sources. Some citations carry a Government, Academic, or Trusted label. Focus changes which kinds of sources an answer draws on. That is all this article needs from the product help. Do not treat a label as proof that a page is right about your hotel.
From each answer, keep:
The question, and the city in it.
Every cited page, in the order it appeared. Hotel site, booking page, review page, editorial page, or anything else. If your own site is there, mark it. If it is not, write "own site absent."
For each page, one short note: does it describe this property, a different one, or the city in general? If the page looks outdated for your hours, rooms, or whether you are open, write that down. If you cannot tell, write "unclear."
A blank note looks like this. Fill it from your own chat. Do not borrow a "best hotels" list from a magazine and treat it as Perplexity's sources.
City: Question: Cited pages, in order: Own site: present / absent Page notes: correct for this property / wrong property / outdated / unclear
That is the whole record. One try, one note. No score. This is not a check for whether you are named first, and it is not a plan to win more citations. The naming check is a different article: how to check if ChatGPT names your restaurant in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
Read the Dubai note and the Abu Dhabi note separately
"In Dubai" and "in Abu Dhabi" are different questions. A Marina answer is not a Corniche answer. The model is not holding a single UAE hotel list and swapping the city name.
So a note that cites your Dubai site for a Marina stay is about that question only. It does not say which pages would appear for a guest asking about Abu Dhabi. Leave the other city's sources on their own line.
What the source list can and cannot tell you
Open each cited page. Check three things. Is your hotel on it? Does it describe the property you run, or a different one? Are the rooms, the area, or the booking details still true?
Trade coverage gives one reason to expect review pages among the sources. PhocusWire reported that Perplexity launched hotel booking with Selfbook and Tripadvisor, and that after picking a mode, users get answers based on Selfbook data and Tripadvisor reviews. That is a reason review pages may show up. It is not a source list for any one hotel in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Skift's 27 March 2025 lede said users can book hotels inside Perplexity, and that the feature was glitchy at that early stage. Do not treat either story as what Perplexity cites for your property today.
People who use Perplexity already argue about how sources are chosen. In February 2025, a Redditor on r/perplexity_ai said they had to ask twice not to use sources they distrusted, and that those sources kept appearing. In June 2024, another user said they used Perplexity especially for its citations and asked how it picks them. Neither thread was about a hotel, and neither was about the UAE. They only show that the source list is the part owners should read carefully.
If a cited page is wrong about your hotel, that page is a concrete gap for this question. Correcting it is not a promise that the next answer will drop it, or that your own site will appear. If the answer cited pages and none of them is yours, you still have the list of pages a guest was shown for that wording. You cannot see a hidden score behind the list. Do not invent one.
If you ask the same question again later and the same pages come back, keep the second note next to the first. Still do not turn two tries into a percentage. This check does not say how often your site is cited, and it does not cover any assistant except Perplexity. Being cited is also not the same as being recommended. That distinction is in how to measure AI visibility for a local business.
Whereon keeps the cited pages for the city of the hotel, and whether the hotel's own site was among them. The first look is the two notes above.