We asked ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for the best salon in 20 UK towns

On 8 September 2026 we asked ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the same thing twenty times over, with the town swapped in each time: best salon in Harrogate, best salon in Ipswich, best salon in Wrexham. Between them the three assistants named 157 different businesses, and we then went looking for every one of them to see whether it had a website of its own.

Here is all of it, including the part where we still came up empty.

How we did it

20 towns, spread from Lisburn to Exeter. Three assistants, one prompt each, so 60 questions. All 60 came back with an answer and none errored. From each answer we took the businesses it recommended, deduped them within the town, and capped the list at eight.

Then we tried to find each named business, in three steps, stopping at whichever one worked.

1. A Google Places search for the name plus the town. We read the top five results rather than only the first, and accepted a listing whose name scores at least 0.75 for similarity against the name the assistant gave us.
2. Nothing yet: a second Places search on the name and the word salon, with no town in it. That one has to score 0.90, because a query with no town in it can match a similar name at the other end of the country, and a mistake like that is invisible in a count.
3. Still nothing: one Google search for the name, the town and the word salon. A result on a domain of the business's own counts as a site of its own. A Treatwell, Fresha or Facebook page carrying the name counts as the business existing without one.

An own site means a domain that is not a directory, a booking platform or a social network. Google holding a Fresha link for a salon is Google holding somebody else's page, so we counted that as no site of its own.

Anything all three steps missed is "no listing": we looked three ways and Google had nothing under that name. "Unknown" is a separate column, and it means only one thing: a lookup errored, so we never got an answer to read. Two businesses landed there on the day. We ran those two again on the same date, both came back, and the column is now empty. We have never counted an unknown as a business without a website. They are not the same thing, and treating them as one is how a survey like this quietly lies.

No business is named in the data. Counts are all we kept. The full method and the counts behind every figure here are on our research page, where you can download the dataset and check the working yourself.

What came back

The one thing the numbers support

Of the 157 businesses named, we found 138. Of those, 101 have a website of their own and 37 do not. That is 73%, checked 8 September 2026.

So among the salons three assistants picked out as worth naming, a site of your own was the common case, and a booking profile or a Facebook page on its own was the minority. Not a small minority, mind. More than a quarter of the ones we could check had no address of their own on the web. That is the narrow finding, and it is the only one in here.

What the numbers do not show

Four things, and between them they matter more than the finding does.

• 19 of the names went nowhere. We searched Google three ways and found no listing under them, which most likely means the assistant produced a plausible name for a salon that is not trading under it. That is worth knowing on its own, but it also means this is a result about 138 businesses.
• Nothing here says the website is the reason. A salon busy enough to be named is also a salon likely to have a site, and one day of counts cannot pull those two apart.
• Ask again and you get a different set. Out of 157 named businesses, 4 were named by all three assistants. The three barely agreed with each other, so any single answer is one opinion on one day.
• It says nothing about your salon. We cannot tell you where you come up, and nor can anyone else.

What we are not saying

That a website is why any of these businesses were named. We did not measure that and we cannot, and anybody telling you otherwise is guessing. What the counts show is narrower and duller: among the businesses an assistant named and we could actually check, roughly three in four had a page at an address of their own, and the rest were relying on somebody else's platform.

If you want to know what the assistants say about your business today, the free rank check asks the same sort of question and shows you what came back, with the date on it.

What this means if you run a salon

A page at your own address is the version of your business that anything on the web can fetch, quote and link to. A profile on a booking platform is written to that platform's template, sits on that platform's domain, and has every competitor in your town a tap away on the same screen. One of those two you control.

That part is fixable this afternoon. We build your site from your Google Business Profile, so your hours, phone number, address, reviews and photos are the ones Google already shows, on a domain with your name on it, with a page for each service you offer rather than one profile in one layout. Your booking system keeps doing the bookings behind it. £30 a month, your own .com included, hosting and updates in that, free to look at first, cancel any month and the domain stays yours.

Put your salon's name in and look at yours.