We tested four UK multisite golf operators using the same set of real buyer prompts run across Perplexity and ChatGPT: St Mellion Estate, Redlibbets Golf Club, Orpington Golf Centre and Nizels Golf & Country Club. None of the four had ever checked what these tools say about them before. The findings, first covered by The Golf Business, were more varied than any of the operators expected.
| Club | Perplexity | ChatGPT |
|---|---|---|
| St Mellion Estate | Not mentioned | Ranked 4th of 4 |
| Redlibbets Golf Club | Not mentioned | Ranked 5th of 6 |
| Orpington Golf Centre | Afterthought mention | Not mentioned |
| Nizels Golf & Country Club | Ranked last | Ranked last |
Not one of the four clubs was strong across both platforms. Two were absent from Perplexity entirely. One was absent from ChatGPT entirely. Only one, Nizels, was consistent, and consistently at the bottom on both.
What actually separates a club that gets named from one that doesn't
Reputation and course quality clearly matter, but they are not the whole story. In our fuller diagnostic testing on St Mellion, the club scored strongly on brand authority (awards, press coverage, review presence) yet still lost entirely on Perplexity for a location based prompt that two other AI platforms called it the outright standout for. The gap was not the club's reputation. It was which sources each AI platform draws from, and whether the club's own site gives the model enough plain, structured, quotable detail to work with.
The clubs that fare worst tend to share the same pattern. Green fee pricing and course detail live only inside a booking widget rather than as plain crawlable text. There is no FAQ style content answering the exact questions a prospective member or visitor would actually ask. And nothing on the site explicitly states, in plain language, who the course suits, what it costs, and how it compares, leaving the model to infer that from thinner third party sources instead.
The commercial risk this creates
A golfer planning a trip, a society organiser booking a day out, or someone new to an area looking for a club to join is increasingly likely to ask an AI assistant the question directly rather than search and compare ten results themselves. If your club is not one of the two or three names that comes back, you are not losing a ranking position. You are often not in the conversation at all.
The uncomfortable part is that most clubs have no visibility into this whatsoever. Every one of the four operators in this study was surprised by at least one of their results, in both directions, some pleasantly and some not.
What to check first
Ask each of the major AI assistants the exact questions a prospective visitor, member or society organiser would ask about your club and your area. Note which platforms name you, which don't, and where you rank when you do appear. That single exercise, repeated across four or five real prompts, tells you more about your current AI visibility than any generic SEO audit will.