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 40% of budget hotels answers, typically in position 1.6. Travelodge follows at 37%, ibis at 25%.
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 | 40% | 1.6 | 48% | 67% |
| 2 | Travelodge | 37% | 1.8 | 43% | 0% |
| 3 | ibis | 25% | 3.9 | 9% | — |
| 4 | Holiday Inn | 12% | 3.3 | 0% | — |
| 5 | Holiday Inn Express | 12% | 4.3 | 0% | — |
| 6 | easyHotel | 10% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Point A Hotels | 3% | 6.5 | 0% | — |
| 8 | Alhambra Hotel | 2% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Crowne Plaza | 2% | 2.0 | 0% | — |
| 10 | The Pilgrm | 2% | 2.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Z Hotels | 2% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Bloc Hotels | 2% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Mercure | 0% | — | 0% | — |
| 14 | Novotel | 0% | — | 0% | — |
Budget Hotels is decided on attraction.
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, citizenM leads attraction at 145 against Premier Lodge at 69, indexed on the category at 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full budget hotels desire edition →
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.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Premier Inn converts 67% of reads. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Premier Inn | 40% | 1.6 | 48% | 67% |
| 2 | Travelodge | 37% | 1.8 | 43% | 0% |
| 3 | ibis | 25% | 3.9 | 9% | — |
| 4 | Holiday Inn | 12% | 3.3 | 0% | — |
| 5 | Holiday Inn Express | 12% | 4.3 | 0% | — |
| 6 | easyHotel | 10% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Point A Hotels | 3% | 6.5 | 0% | — |
| 8 | Alhambra Hotel | 2% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Crowne Plaza | 2% | 2.0 | 0% | — |
| 10 | The Pilgrm | 2% | 2.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Z Hotels | 2% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Bloc Hotels | 2% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Mercure | 0% | — | 0% | — |
| 14 | 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 | 35% | 70% | 15% | 55pp |
| Travelodge | 30% | 65% | 15% | 50pp |
| ibis | 25% | 35% | 15% | 20pp |
| easyHotel | 0% | 20% | 10% | 20pp |
| Holiday Inn Express | 10% | 15% | 10% | 5pp |
| Holiday Inn | 10% | 15% | 10% | 5pp |
| Alhambra Hotel | 5% | 0% | 0% | 5pp |
| Crowne Plaza | 5% | 0% | 0% | 5pp |
| Point A Hotels | 5% | 0% | 5% | 5pp |
| The Pilgrm | 5% | 0% | 0% | 5pp |
Editorial carry budget hotels.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; faq convert best — 90% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial | 25 | 10 | 71% |
| How-to guides | 24 | 10 | 71% |
| Community threads | 11 | 14 | 44% |
| faq | 9 | 1 | 90% |
| Product pages | 9 | 4 | 69% |
| Listicles | 8 | 8 | 50% |
| Other | 5 | 17 | 23% |
| Documentation | 3 | 15 | 17% |
Answer up front 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. Answer up front is worth 15 percentage points; hard statistics pages fare 27pp 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer up front | 96 | 63% | 93 | 47% | +15pp |
| Updated this year | 44 | 64% | 145 | 52% | +11pp |
| Comparison table | 25 | 60% | 164 | 54% | +6pp |
| Named author | 66 | 52% | 123 | 57% | -5pp |
| Hard statistics | 44 | 34% | 145 | 61% | -27pp |
Travelodge 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. Set against how often those pages are actually cited.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Travelodge | 17 | 50% | 6 |
| Premier Inn | 9 | 72% | 18 |
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.
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 05:02:34 GMT.