With rural revitalization as China’s national policy priority, rural tourism has been promoted as a pathway to stimulate local economies and advance revitalization objectives. National and local governments have introduced policy measures to support rural tourism development. However, the spatial correspondence between documented policy attention and tourism popularity remains uneven and insufficiently understood. To address this gap, this study develops an integrated evaluation framework combining a text-based measure of documented policy attention, denoted PII, and a Tourism Popularity Index (TPI) using multi-source data from 920 peri-urban villages in Shanghai with rural tourism destination POIs. Spatial analysis reveals disparities between tourism popularity and documented policy attention, and further examines the contextual characteristics associated with this misalignment. The findings indicate that: (1) documented policy attention and rural tourism popularity exhibit pronounced spatial disparities, with high-popularity clusters emerging where favorable resource conditions, accessibility, and higher levels of policy attention coexist; (2) widespread policy–popularity mismatches indicate limited correspondence between the two measures; (3) the selected cases illustrate differences in spatial planning, operational capacity, and market-oriented strategies, cautioning against uniform policy expansion. The study offers a spatially explicit framework for assessing policy–popularity alignment and informing context-sensitive rural tourism governance in highly urbanized regions.