Budget Hotels,
according to AI
Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about budget hotels — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Premier Inn owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
Premier Inn is the default answer.
Named in 38% of budget hotels answers, typically in position 1.5. Travelodge follows at 35%, ibis at 30%.
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 | Premier Inn | 38% | 1.5 | 61% | 14% |
| 2 | Travelodge | 35% | 2.0 | 33% | 9% |
| 3 | ibis | 30% | 3.5 | 6% | — |
| 4 | Holiday Inn | 12% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 5 | Holiday Inn Express | 12% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 6 | easyHotel | 7% | 4.3 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Point A Hotels | 5% | 4.3 | 0% | — |
| 8 | Premier Lodge | 2% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Bloc Hotels | 2% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
| 10 | Z Hotels | 2% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Hampton by Hilton | 2% | 7.0 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Mercure | 0% | — | 0% | — |
| 13 | Novotel | 0% | — | 0% | — |
Budget Hotels is decided on affinity.
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 hotels, Premier Inn leads affinity at 104 against Point A Hotels at 75, indexed on the category at 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full budget hotels desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for Premier Inn.
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 42 searches in budget hotels, Premier Inn is named in 50% of the ones that name a brand at all. ChatGPT Web does not report its 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 hotels.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering budget hotels questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
Premier Inn converts reads into citations. Travelodge doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Premier Inn converts 14% of reads; Travelodge just 9%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Premier Inn | 38% | 1.5 | 61% | 14% |
| 2 | Travelodge | 35% | 2.0 | 33% | 9% |
| 3 | ibis | 30% | 3.5 | 6% | — |
| 4 | Holiday Inn | 12% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 5 | Holiday Inn Express | 12% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 6 | easyHotel | 7% | 4.3 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Point A Hotels | 5% | 4.3 | 0% | — |
| 8 | Premier Lodge | 2% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Bloc Hotels | 2% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
| 10 | Z Hotels | 2% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Hampton by Hilton | 2% | 7.0 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Mercure | 0% | — | 0% | — |
| 13 | Novotel | 0% | — | 0% | — |
The models do not agree on who leads.
Ask about budget hotels and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → Premier Inn, Gemini → Premier Inn, ChatGPT → ibis. Their top-five lists share just 67% of names.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premier Inn | 40% | 60% | 15% | 45pp |
| Travelodge | 35% | 55% | 15% | 40pp |
| ibis | 25% | 50% | 15% | 35pp |
| Holiday Inn Express | 5% | 20% | 10% | 15pp |
| Holiday Inn | 5% | 20% | 10% | 15pp |
| easyHotel | 0% | 10% | 10% | 10pp |
| Premier Lodge | 5% | 0% | 0% | 5pp |
| Hampton by Hilton | 5% | 0% | 0% | 5pp |
| Z Hotels | 0% | 5% | 0% | 5pp |
| Bloc Hotels | 0% | 5% | 0% | 5pp |
How-to guides carry budget hotels.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. How-to guides supply the most citations; faq convert best — 89% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| How-to guides | 68 | 25 | 73% |
| Editorial | 59 | 27 | 69% |
| Community threads | 25 | 35 | 42% |
| Product pages | 21 | 6 | 78% |
| faq | 17 | 2 | 89% |
| Listicles | 16 | 17 | 48% |
| category-page | 12 | 7 | 63% |
| Comparisons | 11 | 3 | 79% |
Structured data is what separates cited from ignored.
Of the budget hotels pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Structured data is worth 17 percentage points; hard statistics pages fare 15pp 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 | 172 | 69% | 269 | 52% | +17pp |
| Answer up front | 212 | 63% | 229 | 54% | +9pp |
| Updated this year | 99 | 64% | 342 | 57% | +7pp |
| Named author | 162 | 59% | 279 | 58% | +1pp |
| Comparison table | 65 | 58% | 376 | 58% | +0pp |
| Hard statistics | 97 | 46% | 344 | 62% | -15pp |
easyHotel 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. easyHotel is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| easyHotel | 33 | 0% | 5 |
| Travelodge | 21 | 7% | 173 |
| ibis | 21 | 2% | 133 |
| Premier Inn | 17 | 14% | 156 |
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 hotels 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, 12 Sep 2026 06:38:42 GMT.