Budget Gyms,
according to AI
Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about budget gyms — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, The Gym Group owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
The Gym Group is the default answer.
Named in 85% of budget gyms answers, typically in position 1.6. PureGym follows at 52%, Better at 35%.
Every brand AI names, ranked.
Visibility is the share of answers naming the brand; citation share is its slice of all brand-owned pages cited; read→cited is how often its pages convert a read into a citation.
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Gym Group | 85% | 1.6 | 19% | 17% |
| 2 | PureGym | 52% | 1.4 | 38% | 58% |
| 3 | Better | 35% | 3.1 | 10% | 20% |
| 4 | JD Gyms | 18% | 2.8 | 5% | 100% |
| 5 | Anytime Fitness | 13% | 4.0 | 7% | — |
| 6 | David Lloyd Clubs | 13% | 4.1 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Nuffield Health | 12% | 4.6 | 7% | 100% |
| 8 | DW Fitness First | 7% | 3.3 | 5% | 100% |
| 9 | Third Space | 5% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
| 10 | Energie Fitness | 3% | 4.5 | 2% | — |
| 11 | Snap Fitness | 3% | 5.0 | 2% | — |
| 12 | Fitness4Less | 3% | 5.5 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Virgin Active | 3% | 6.0 | 0% | — |
| 14 | Gymbox | 2% | 2.0 | 2% | 100% |
| 15 | 1Rebel | 2% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
The Gym Group is named most. That is not the same as being wanted.
Being named is visibility. Underneath it, every answer describes a brand in three ways — how much it stands out, how much it belongs, and how much it is returned to. In budget gyms, Third Space leads attraction at 117 against DW Fitness First at 85, indexed on the category at 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full budget gyms desire edition →
The referees of budget gyms.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering budget gyms questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
PureGym converts reads into citations. The Gym Group doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? PureGym converts 58% of reads; The Gym Group just 17%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Gym Group | 85% | 1.6 | 19% | 17% |
| 2 | PureGym | 52% | 1.4 | 38% | 58% |
| 3 | Better | 35% | 3.1 | 10% | 20% |
| 4 | JD Gyms | 18% | 2.8 | 5% | 100% |
| 5 | Anytime Fitness | 13% | 4.0 | 7% | — |
| 6 | David Lloyd Clubs | 13% | 4.1 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Nuffield Health | 12% | 4.6 | 7% | 100% |
| 8 | DW Fitness First | 7% | 3.3 | 5% | 100% |
| 9 | Third Space | 5% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
| 10 | Energie Fitness | 3% | 4.5 | 2% | — |
| 11 | Snap Fitness | 3% | 5.0 | 2% | — |
| 12 | Fitness4Less | 3% | 5.5 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Virgin Active | 3% | 6.0 | 0% | — |
| 14 | Gymbox | 2% | 2.0 | 2% | 100% |
| 15 | 1Rebel | 2% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
All three models agree: The Gym Group.
A rare consensus — every model puts The Gym Group first, and their top-five lists overlap 57%. Winning here means winning everywhere at once.
Brands whose visibility swings most between models — the bar per model, widest gap on the right.
The data behind this chart
| Brand | Claude | Gemini | ChatGPT | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PureGym | 40% | 85% | 30% | 55pp |
| The Gym Group | 65% | 100% | 90% | 35pp |
| David Lloyd Clubs | 0% | 35% | 5% | 35pp |
| Anytime Fitness | 20% | 20% | 0% | 20pp |
| JD Gyms | 15% | 30% | 10% | 20pp |
| Better | 25% | 40% | 40% | 15pp |
| Nuffield Health | 5% | 20% | 10% | 15pp |
| Third Space | 0% | 15% | 0% | 15pp |
| Virgin Active | 0% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
| Snap Fitness | 0% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
Nineteen more categories.
Method: 20 unbranded consumer prompts per category, spread across the buying journey, run weekly against ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Read→cited uses Claude and ChatGPT only (Gemini does not separate the two). Correlational observations of model behaviour at the time of the run. Data from the run completed Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:51:11 GMT.