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 80% of budget gyms answers, typically in position 1.6. PureGym follows at 48%, Better at 33%.
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 | 80% | 1.6 | 31% | 22% |
| 2 | PureGym | 48% | 1.4 | 31% | 21% |
| 3 | Better | 33% | 3.1 | 12% | 38% |
| 4 | JD Gyms | 20% | 3.3 | 7% | 38% |
| 5 | Anytime Fitness | 10% | 3.2 | 0% | — |
| 6 | David Lloyd Clubs | 10% | 4.2 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Nuffield Health | 10% | 4.7 | 5% | 0% |
| 8 | Virgin Active | 7% | 5.5 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Third Space | 5% | 5.7 | 0% | — |
| 10 | DW Fitness First | 3% | 3.0 | 5% | 100% |
| 11 | Equinox | 3% | 5.5 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Everlast Gyms | 2% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Everyone Active | 2% | 4.0 | 2% | — |
| 14 | Gymbox | 2% | 4.0 | 2% | 100% |
| 15 | Energie Fitness | 2% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
The Gym Group is named most. That is not the same as being wanted.
Being named is visibility. Underneath it, asked to rate each brand directly, the AI assistants judge it three ways — how much it stands out, how much it belongs, and how much it is returned to. They put 50% of the 28 brands rated above indifference. Third Space leads the brands the answers name, at 77% of maximum Desire. On attachment, the most divided driver, Third Space indexes 122 against Xercise4Less at 66, on a category average of 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared (84 / 92 / 100 / 108 / 116). Above indifference means Desire above two-thirds of its maximum. See the full budget gyms desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for The Gym Group.
An assistant does not answer from memory alone. It runs its own web searches first, and whoever it searches for is the shortlist it then chooses from. Across 57 searches in budget gyms, The Gym Group is named in 43% of the ones that name a brand at all. ChatGPT Web, Copilot do not report their searches, so these shares are measured against the ones that do.
These are the assistants' own searches, read from their answers — not what anyone typed into a search engine.
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.
Better converts reads into citations. PureGym doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Better converts 38% of reads; PureGym just 21%. 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 | 80% | 1.6 | 31% | 22% |
| 2 | PureGym | 48% | 1.4 | 31% | 21% |
| 3 | Better | 33% | 3.1 | 12% | 38% |
| 4 | JD Gyms | 20% | 3.3 | 7% | 38% |
| 5 | Anytime Fitness | 10% | 3.2 | 0% | — |
| 6 | David Lloyd Clubs | 10% | 4.2 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Nuffield Health | 10% | 4.7 | 5% | 0% |
| 8 | Virgin Active | 7% | 5.5 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Third Space | 5% | 5.7 | 0% | — |
| 10 | DW Fitness First | 3% | 3.0 | 5% | 100% |
| 11 | Equinox | 3% | 5.5 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Everlast Gyms | 2% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Everyone Active | 2% | 4.0 | 2% | — |
| 14 | Gymbox | 2% | 4.0 | 2% | 100% |
| 15 | Energie Fitness | 2% | 5.0 | 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 | 35% | 90% | 20% | 70pp |
| The Gym Group | 55% | 100% | 85% | 45pp |
| Better | 20% | 45% | 35% | 25pp |
| David Lloyd Clubs | 0% | 25% | 5% | 25pp |
| Nuffield Health | 0% | 25% | 5% | 25pp |
| Anytime Fitness | 10% | 20% | 0% | 20pp |
| JD Gyms | 15% | 30% | 15% | 15pp |
| DW Fitness First | 10% | 0% | 0% | 10pp |
| Equinox | 0% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
| Third Space | 0% | 10% | 5% | 10pp |
Editorial carry budget gyms.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; Comparisons convert best — 79% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial | 37 | 19 | 66% |
| How-to guides | 33 | 12 | 73% |
| Community threads | 14 | 22 | 39% |
| Comparisons | 11 | 3 | 79% |
| pricing | 10 | 9 | 53% |
| Listicles | 9 | 3 | 75% |
| Other | 8 | 10 | 44% |
| Product pages | 7 | 3 | 70% |
Structured data is what separates cited from ignored.
Of the budget gyms pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Structured data is worth 23 percentage points; comparison table pages fare 5pp worse. Measured within the read population, so selection can't flatter it.
The data behind this chart
| Feature | Pages with | Cited % | Pages without | Cited % | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structured data | 176 | 63% | 84 | 39% | +23pp |
| Named author | 111 | 64% | 149 | 48% | +16pp |
| Hard statistics | 71 | 54% | 189 | 56% | -2pp |
| Updated this year | 80 | 53% | 180 | 56% | -4pp |
| Answer up front | 108 | 53% | 152 | 57% | -4pp |
| Comparison table | 45 | 51% | 215 | 56% | -5pp |
JD Gyms builds pages AI can quote.
Readiness scores each brand's own pages on the structure models reward — a direct answer up front, tables, hard numbers, named authors, structured data, recency, specifications. JD Gyms is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| JD Gyms | 43 | 2% | 105 |
| The Gym Group | 41 | 4% | 136 |
| Everyone Active | 27 | 0% | 6 |
| Anytime Fitness | 25 | 5% | 59 |
| PureGym | 25 | 5% | 115 |
| Energie Fitness | 25 | 33% | 3 |
| Village Gym | 23 | 10% | 10 |
| Snap Fitness | 22 | 25% | 4 |
| Fitness4Less | 21 | 0% | 3 |
| David Lloyd Clubs | 20 | 0% | 31 |
Readiness is the share of eight measurable structural signals present on a brand's profiled pages. It is a build-quality measure, not a ranking of the brand.
The questions budget gyms pages have to settle.
Read straight off the pages AI cited: the consumer questions cited content answers most often. Content that fails to settle these is content models have no reason to quote.
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 Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:13:33 GMT.