If someone opened ChatGPT right now and typed "what's the best gym wear brand in the UK," would your brand come up? We decided to find out, not with guesswork, but with data. We ran 100 real consumer searches across three AI platforms and collected 300 responses. The results were eye-opening.
Five brands captured 91% of every single mention. The other seven brands we tracked? They shared the scraps. One brand (Born Primitive) wasn't mentioned a single time across all 300 responses. Not once.
This is what AI visibility looks like in the UK activewear market right now. And if you're a brand that didn't make the shortlist, the window to change that is closing fast.
300 AI responses collected
91% mentions taken by just 5 brands
0 mentions for Born Primitive across all platforms
How We Did It
We wrote 100 prompts that real UK shoppers might actually type (or say out loud) when using an AI assistant to help them choose gym kit. Things like "best leggings for running," "gym wear that holds its shape," "affordable workout clothes UK," and "gym brands women actually rate." No brand names were seeded into the questions. We wanted raw, organic recommendations.
Those 100 prompts were run across Claude, GPT-4o, and Perplexity. Every brand mention in every response was logged and scored. We tracked which brands were mentioned, how often they came up as the outright top pick, and how consistent their scores were across platforms.
The brands we looked at included Lululemon, Gymshark, Nike, Adidas, Sweaty Betty, Alo Yoga, Fabletics, Varley, Castore, Tala, Represent, and Born Primitive. Twelve brands in total. A mix of global giants, UK-born success stories, and sustainability-led challengers.
The Results: A Visibility Cliff Drops Off Fast
The gap between the top five and everyone else isn't just large, it's structural. The dominant brands averaged 182 total mentions each across the three platforms. The remaining seven averaged just 16. That's an 11-times difference. And it compounds. Every week, the dominant brands gather more reviews, more editorial coverage, more citations. The gap gets wider without anyone at the top having to do anything extra.
- Lululemon got a total of 212 mentions, 86 top picks, and a visibility score of 71%
- Gymshark got a total of 197 mention, 131 top picks, and a visibility score of 66%
- Nike (a personal favourite) got a total of 190 mentions, 42 top picks, and a visibility score of 63%
- Adidas got a total of 157 mentions, only 1 top pick and a visibility score of 52%
- Sweaty Betty got a total of 155 mentions, 19 top picks and a visibility score of 52%
- Alo Yoga got a total of 35 mentions, only 1 top pick and 12% visibility score
- Fabletics got 35 mentions, only 2 top picks and 9% visibility score
- Varley got 19 mentions, 0 top picks and 6% visibility score
- TALA (another favourite) got 13 mentions, 2 top picks and a 4% visibility score
- Born Primitive, 0 mentions, 0 top picks, 0 Visibility
Gymshark Is the Brand AI Picks First
Here's something interesting. Lululemon had the highest overall mention count at 212, but Gymshark was named the outright top pick 131 times, 52% more than Lululemon's 86. That's not a small difference. That's the difference between being in an AI's response and being AI's first choice.
When AI gives a single recommendation (the one it leads with) it chooses Gymshark. For brands trying to understand what winning actually looks like in AI search, that's the metric to aim for. Visibility is one thing. Being the top pick is another level entirely.
"AI is not a level playing field. It is a winner-takes-most environment, and the winners were decided before most brands knew the game had started."
The Three Platforms Don't Agree, And That Matters
One of the most useful things we found wasn't just which brands appeared, but how differently they performed depending on which AI platform was doing the answering. Claude and GPT-4o both draw heavily on their training data, essentially their knowledge of the internet up to a certain point. Perplexity is different. It actively searches the live web before responding.
That distinction created some stark divergences. Adidas received 79 mentions on Claude but just 22 on Perplexity, a drop of 72%. Sweaty Betty fell from 66 mentions on Claude to just 27 on Perplexity. These are brands with strong historical reputations, but weaker recent web presence. When the platform is searching the internet as it stands today, rather than relying on what it learned in training, those brands lose ground fast.
Gymshark, meanwhile, scored 64 on Claude, 69 on GPT-4o, and 64 on Perplexity. That kind of consistency, near-identical scores across all three, is the clearest possible signal that its digital presence is genuinely solid. It's not riding on old authority. It's being surfaced by current, active content and reviews, right now.
The Perplexity effect: As Perplexity grows (and it is growing fast) brands that rely on legacy reputation without keeping their web presence active and review-heavy will increasingly fall behind. The platform that searches the live internet is the one most likely to win new users. Being invisible on it is a real commercial problem.
Sustainability Brands Are Missing the Conversation
We included sustainability-focused prompts in our testing. "Ethical gym wear UK," "sustainable activewear brands," "gym kit made from recycled materials", the kinds of searches you'd expect eco-conscious shoppers to make. Tala, a brand that leads with sustainability as its core identity, received just 13 total mentions across all 300 responses. Only 1 of those came from Claude.
That's not because AI is anti-sustainability. It's because there isn't enough consistent, cross-platform evidence pointing to Tala as the authority in that space. The brand messaging exists, but the surrounding ecosystem, the reviews, the editorial coverage, the repeat signals across multiple independent sources, isn't dense enough yet for AI to reach for Tala with confidence.
The flip side of that is opportunity. The sustainability conversation in activewear is still wide open in AI search. The brand that builds the right evidence base first will own it.
What AI Actually Uses to Make a Decision
It's tempting to think AI recommendations are shaped by what brands say about themselves, their website copy, their press releases, their brand story. They're not. AI is trying to reduce uncertainty. When it has to recommend a product or brand, it leans on signals that are hard to fake and hard to manipulate: things that aggregate real outcomes across lots of different people.
That means reviews, especially on retailer platforms. Editorial coverage from publications that have no stake in the brand. Community discussion. Consistent mentions across independent sources. The brands that dominate AI recommendations have built up years of that kind of evidence. It's not their marketing budget that got them there. It's the accumulated weight of genuine customer experience, documented across the internet.
What This Means If You're an Activewear Brand
The hard truth is that being a great product isn't enough to be visible to AI. Born Primitive almost certainly makes quality kit. But with no meaningful presence in the AI-accessible record of the internet, no dense reviews, no widespread editorial, no consistent community discussion, it simply doesn't exist as far as AI is concerned. It's not penalised. It's just absent.
Absence is actually riskier than negativity. Brands with thin digital footprints don't get cautious, hedged responses from AI. They get confident answers that substitute another brand in their place. Your customers get pointed somewhere else, with complete confidence, every single time.
The brands that move now, that start building the right kind of digital evidence deliberately, can shift their AI visibility over a 6 to 12 month period. But every week of inaction is a week the dominant brands extend their lead. That compounding effect doesn't pause while you're deciding whether this matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do AI platforms decide which brands to recommend?
AI platforms don't just search what brands say about themselves. They look for consistent, repeated signals across independent sources, things like retailer reviews, editorial coverage, and community discussion. The more of that evidence a brand has, and the more recent it is, the more likely AI is to recommend it. A flashy website or a big social following doesn't translate directly into AI visibility.
Does this only apply to activewear?
No. The same dynamics play out across every consumer category. We've run similar research in FMCG, and the pattern is identical, brands with dense, recent, cross-platform evidence dominate. The category changes, but the underlying logic of how AI makes decisions doesn't. [INTERNAL LINK: our FMCG AI visibility research]
Is it too late for smaller brands to compete in AI search?
Not yet. The window is still open, but it is narrowing. The brands at the top have a compounding advantage, the more they're mentioned, the more they get mentioned. But smaller brands that invest deliberately in building AI-accessible evidence now can still carve out a meaningful position, particularly in underserved niches like sustainability.
What's different about Perplexity compared to ChatGPT or Claude?
Perplexity searches the live web in real time before answering, rather than relying purely on what it learned during training. That makes it more sensitive to current web presence, how many recent reviews you have, how active your coverage is right now. Brands with strong historical reputations but weak current output tend to drop significantly on Perplexity compared to the other platforms.
How do I find out where my brand stands?
We run a free AI visibility audit, testing your brand across all three platforms against queries specific to your product range, price point, and customer profile. You get a full AI Visibility Score, a platform-by-platform breakdown, and a plain-English roadmap for improving your position. So let us help you with that.
The Bottom Line
AI search is already shaping where shoppers go and what they buy. It's not a future problem. In the UK activewear market, five brands have already established dominance that self-reinforces week on week. The other seven brands we tracked are, in most meaningful senses, invisible to AI-powered shoppers.
The brands that make it onto AI shortlists aren't there by accident. They're there because the accumulated weight of genuine customer experience documented across hundreds of independent sources points unmistakably in their direction. That's buildable. But it takes time, and the time to start is now.
