Golfers are increasingly turning away from Google and towards AI for recommendations for which golf courses to play at, and a new study has found the results vary widely depending on which AI platform is being used.
AI Score, a company that audits how AI assistants describe and recommend businesses, has found that the answer a golfer gets depends heavily on which platform they open, with the same club appearing strongly on one assistant and disappearing entirely on another.
The company tested four UK multisite golf operators, The Club Company, Crown Golf, Mytime Active and Get Golfing, using realistic buyer prompts such as “best golf club near Sevenoaks” and “best golf club in Cornwall,” run on both Perplexity and ChatGPT. The results showed sharp inconsistency between platforms for the same business:
• St Mellion Estate, a Crown Golf resort with a Nicklaus-designed course and European Tour history, did not appear at all on Perplexity for “best golf club in Cornwall,” while ChatGPT ranked it fourth out of four with an accurate, positive description.
• Redlibbets Golf Club (Get Golfing) was invisible on Perplexity but ranked fifth of six on ChatGPT, described as “very welcoming” with “excellent practice facilities.”
• Orpington Golf Centre (Mytime Active) was the one consistent gap, an afterthought on Perplexity and entirely absent on ChatGPT, the only club of the four to score poorly on both platforms.
• Nizels Golf & Country Club (The Club Company) appeared on both platforms but was ranked last each time, with both AIs naming other nearby clubs as the stronger choice.
The findings point to a gap most operators have no visibility into. A business can rank well on Google and still be missing or misrepresented when a prospect asks an AI assistant the same question, and the outcome can change completely depending on which assistant they use. For multi-site operators, that inconsistency can mean material differences in enquiry volume between clubs in the same portfolio, for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the course.
“Most clubs are testing nothing and assuming AI treats them the way Google does. It doesn’t. We found two clubs in this sample that get a completely different answer depending on which AI a prospect happens to open, and one club that’s losing out everywhere. None of these operators knew any of this until we ran the test,” said David Mullins, founder of AI Score.
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