Marketing and pricing professionals chase powerful datasets, and search volume for rentals in a given location looks like a strong demand signal. But whether high search should raise rates is more nuanced than it seems.
A valid search is hard to define
A reliable search metric should mean “Listing X was displayed to a human being for a specific travel date Y.” In practice, data rarely meets that standard — and where the search happens makes it worse.
Where search happens
- Google — Trends shows seasonal peaks for terms like “Airbnb,” but it’s noisy at the city level, and it reflects when the search happened, not the travel dates searched for.
- The OTAs — Airbnb and Vrbo hold rich search data (impressions, placement, click-through) but don’t share it with managers.
- The bots problem — even if they shared it, roughly 47.5% of all 2022 web traffic was bots, so half the “search” could be automated scraping.
- Direct — your own booking site is the highest-quality search data, but it’s technically hard to collect and covers only part of total activity.
- Intent — “look-to-book” ratios once signaled early purchasing intent, but data quality and fragmented channels undermined them.
Bookable Search™
Quibble built Bookable Search™ to fix this by redefining a meaningful search. It filters out bots and non-serious shoppers and focuses only on searches where the shopper did purchase — instances where your property appeared in a search and the shopper booked something very similar. That eliminates the noise and captures genuine demand from conversion-ready consumers, feeding Quibble’s choice model to predict how often a listing shows up in buyer-ready searches.
Predicted bookings from Bookable Search™ do a second job: across the comp set, they set seasonality. Seasons are not hand-picked by revenue managers; when predicted bookings across your comp set rise, the season rises with them. See Forecasting demand before it happens for how that feeds the forecast, and Reading the comp set for how the set itself is chosen.