Understanding Geographic Bias in Searches

[Sam7023]

I'm looking at buying a new house in St. Louis, and expecting to be out of town, with the house up on AirBnB, 4 months out of every year. Obviously, it's important to me to get it prominently listed, so that it can be paying for itself that third of the year.

I notice that when I search St. Louis for listings, only the middle and southern half of the city show up on the first 4 pages of search results. If you specifically zoom in on the north half of the city, you find listings, including some with some with many stays and excellent rankings. But nothing on the north side of the city shows up on the first MANY pages of search results. If you zoom in on the map to exclude the south side, there are properties all over the northside up on AirBnB. They're just not coming up on searches.

As I'm doing my house hunting, many of the properties I'm finding are on the north side. I'm concerned that if I buy one of these, it'll get buried in AirBnB searches.

Taking a step back, why does the AirBnB search favor certain regions of a city? If AirBnB loves the southside of a town, and I buy pass over a favorite property on the north side to get one that'll do well on AirBnB, am I risking that the search criteria will change next year and AirBnB will be giving all the frontpage listings to northside properties?

[Joan2709]

Hi @Sam7023 

Only Airbnb knows the answers to the "why" they choose to display a specific type of map in a geographic area. Many Hosts who were just outside a major city/town just disappeared from the search results map in 2022. This is also when we started seeing the listing "bubbles"; some are large and display a nightly price and others are small and don't display a price? 🤔. Guests can search by neighborhood, landmark, or specific address, but many don't know to do that. Many Hosts were force to list on other platforms as Airbnb's improved search features caused their listings to disappear entirely unless zooming in very close to their location on the map:

Search by Neighborhood, Landmark, or Address

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/421