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.