London Burger AI Visibility Index 2026: which burger and casual dining brands ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI name on their own

Last updated: 8 September 2026

There is plenty of opinion about which burger AI engines think is best in London, and almost no public data on which brands they actually name. This index closes that gap. On 8 September 2026 we put 200 real diner questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overview across London, and recorded 1,376 answers. We tracked 31 burger and casual dining brands, and 26 of them came up at least once. Every brand was scored against that same 1,376-answer denominator. The finding worth remembering: even the most-named brand in London still fails to appear in just under three-quarters of the answers we recorded.

The numbers in brief

• Bleecker is named most often, in 26.89 percent of the 1,376 answers, ahead of Honest Burgers on 21.08 percent.
• The median across the 26 brands that appeared at least once is 2.91 percent.
• Outside the published fifteen, no brand clears 2.25 percent.
• Burger and Beyond sits third at 11.63 percent, then Supernova on 9.30 percent.
• Time Out is retrieved in 15.99 percent of answers, more than any other single source.

What we measured, and how

We track 200 questions phrased the way a diner actually types them. They span eight themes: which burger is simply the best, first-time visitor discovery, general "where to eat" recommendations, occasions and group bookings, quick and casual value meals, neighbourhood-specific searches, dietary and style needs, and questions about quality and where the meat comes from. Every question is anchored to London, or to a landmark inside it. Without that anchor, a model will happily answer a burger question for a different city altogether, and the measurement then measures nothing.

The figures in this report are drawn from 1,376 answers recorded on 8 September 2026 across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overview. We record what the engine returns, not what it was asked to return. Thirteen of the 200 tracked questions name a brand directly, or ask for a head-to-head against a named rival; we exclude those from every figure here, because they measure whether a model can repeat a name we handed it, not what it recommends unprompted.

Three measures, in plain words:

• How often AI names them: the share of the 1,376 answers in which the brand is named.
• Share of the mentions: the brand's portion of all 3,132 brand mentions recorded across every answer.
• Average position: where the brand tends to land in a list when it is named. Lower is better.

Every brand was measured against the same 1,376-answer denominator. No brand paid to be included, and the names in this report identify research subjects, not customers and not endorsements.

Who the engines actually name

The table above is the visible top of a field with a real leader, but also a long tail underneath it. Across the 26 brands that appeared at least once, the median is 2.91 percent. Outside the published fifteen, the ceiling is 2.25 percent, held jointly by Bun and Sum and MEATliquor, followed by Dumbo on 1.82 percent. Five of the 31 brands we track did not appear in a single answer.

One note on how to read the top line honestly. Bleecker runs more than one site in London, and this cohort tracks two separately named listings for the same operator, sharing the same domain. Only one of those two listings earned any presence at all in the 1,376 answers we recorded; the other did not appear once. The 26.89 percent figure above belongs entirely to the listing that did appear. It is not two locations added together, and the operator's multi-site footprint does not inflate the number: a single named identity carries the whole score.

The finding that matters more than the ranking

The stronger conclusion is not that Bleecker leads. It is that leading does not mean winning every conversation. Bleecker and Honest Burgers together are named in 370 and 290 answers, a two-name cluster some way ahead of the rest of the field, yet even Bleecker fails to appear in just under three-quarters of the answers we recorded. And once the 1,376 answers are split by the kind of question being asked, the picture changes brand by brand. Bleecker owns the question of which burger is simply the best, at 47.95 percent of that topic's 219 answers, and the question of quality and where the meat comes from, at 68.85 percent of 122 answers. But Honest Burgers, not Bleecker, leads the quick and casual value questions at 38.61 percent of 158, and the dietary and style questions at 35.48 percent of 124. Blacklock, fifth on the overall table, leads the general "where to eat" question at 22.28 percent of 202. Dishoom, an Indian restaurant that appears in this casual dining cohort because visitor questions cast a wide net, leads visitor and first-trip discovery at 17.87 percent of 207. And Flat Iron, sixth overall, leads neighbourhood-specific searches at 14.19 percent of 155. No single brand wins the whole conversation. Whoever is best positioned for one kind of question is often absent from another.

Named often and taking up the room are different things

There is a second layer worth separating from the naming figures. Bleecker is not just named most often, it is mentioned more than once inside a typical answer: 842 mentions across the 370 answers it appears in works out to 2.28 mentions per answer, the highest ratio among the top eight brands, and it also holds the best average position of the leaders at 1.8. Supernova, fourth on the table, shows a similar pattern at 2.17 mentions per answer despite trailing Bleecker by a wide margin on how often it is named at all. Burger and Beyond and Blacklock sit at the other end of that scale, at 1.56 and 1.53 mentions per answer, which points to a single clean call-out rather than a repeated presence inside the reply. For a brand running several sites, a high mentions-per-answer ratio usually means the model is naming a specific location, not just the brand, inside one answer. That is worth knowing before deciding where to put the next site, or the next piece of coverage.

Where the answers come from

Three things stand out.

First, editorial still leads, but only barely. Time Out and The Infatuation together are retrieved in over 30 percent of answers between them, ahead of any single listings platform, yet Tripadvisor's UK domain alone is retrieved in 12.86 percent, more than any individual editorial title bar Time Out.

Second, a brand's own domain can become a retrieved source in its own right. Honest Burgers' own site is pulled in 7.78 percent of answers, and Bleecker's site is pulled in 4.29 percent. That is a direct line from a brand's own pages into what the model says, and it is the one channel on this list a brand fully controls.

Third, community and institutional sources carry real weight. Reddit sits at 4.72 percent, ahead of several editorial titles, and Visit London is retrieved in 7.56 percent of answers, more than most paid listing platforms. If your own site is thin on detail and your city's visitor board doesn't carry an accurate, current listing for you, that is worth fixing before anything else on this list.

What this report can and cannot tell you

These results are directional, not definitive. They describe one question set, on three engines, on one day.

Read this way, the data can answer a bounded set of questions:

• Which London burger and casual dining brands the engines name without being prompted with a brand name.
• How concentrated the field is overall, and where that concentration breaks down once you split by question type.
• Which source types the engines reach for when they build a London burger recommendation.
• How a brand's naming frequency compares with how much room it takes up inside an answer it appears in.

It cannot do several other things, and it is worth being blunt about them. It cannot prove that appearing more often produces more covers or more revenue. It cannot establish a causal link between any single change a brand made and its position here. And it cannot tell any individual operator that they should appear in every one of the 200 questions, because most brands have no real business appearing in most of them. A quick-service counter has no claim on an anniversary-dinner question.

The operating instruction is therefore not to chase the leaderboard as one blended score. Split the questions by the ones a brand could genuinely win, read the exact answers the engines give for those, and repair the weakest layer of evidence underneath them.

What this means if you run a burger or casual dining brand in London

If you run a single site, the topic breakdown above is the more useful map than the overall rank. A brand does not need to win "best burger in London" outright to win the questions that actually drive the booking it wants, whether that is the quick lunch crowd, a dietary-specific search, or a neighbourhood query. Start by reading the exact answers for the topic closest to your business, then check whether your own site, your city listings and the most-retrieved editorial titles actually carry your current name and menu. Our companion piece on London's cookie and bakery scene covers a category with a very different shape: one brand leads almost everywhere, and the interesting story is where that lead disappears.

If you run more than one site, the mentions-per-answer pattern above matters more than the headline rank. Engines recommend places, not always companies, so a group with several well-documented locations can pick up a second or even third mention inside a single answer. Check each location as its own entity, with its own page and its own current listing, rather than assuming one strong flagship carries the whole group.

If you want the wider context, our UK Restaurant AI Visibility Index and Texas Dining AI Index both cover broader dining categories on the same method, and both show a flatter field than this one: even their leaders sit well under 10 percent. And the same measurement holds outside hospitality entirely: our indexes for UK tech recruitment, contact centre QA software, crypto wallets and Middle East on-demand strategy consulting all turn up the same pattern: a strong position on one question rarely carries over to the next one for free.

Sources

• Schmitdy category tracking, London burger and casual dining question set, 8 September 2026. The 1,376 answers, 200 questions and 31 tracked brands behind every figure in this report.
• Bleecker, bleecker.co.uk. Official site of the most-named brand in the index.
• Honest Burgers, honestburgers.co.uk. Official site, second in the published table.
• Burger and Beyond, burgerandbeyond.co.uk. Official site, third in the published table.
• Supernova, supernovaburger.com. Official site, fourth in the published table.
• Blacklock, theblacklock.com. Official site, fifth in the published table.
• Flat Iron, flatironsteak.co.uk. Official site, sixth in the published table.
• Dishoom, dishoom.com. Official site, seventh in the published table.
• Junk, junkburgers.co.uk. Official site, eighth in the published table.
• Black Bear Burger, blackbearburger.com. Official site, ninth in the published table.
• Hoppers, hopperslondon.com. Official site, tenth in the published table.
• Five Guys, fiveguys.co.uk. Official site, eleventh in the published table.
• Shake Shack, shakeshack.co.uk. Official site, twelfth in the published table.
• Bao, baolondon.com. Official site, thirteenth in the published table.
• Lina Stores, linastores.co.uk. Official site, fourteenth in the published table.
• Patty and Bun, pattyandbun.co.uk. Official site, fifteenth in the published table.
• Time Out, timeout.com. The most-retrieved source across the tracked answers.
• The Infatuation, theinfatuation.com. Second most-retrieved source.
• Tripadvisor UK, tripadvisor.co.uk. Most-retrieved user-generated content source.
• thatsup, thatsup.co.uk. Most-retrieved aggregator source.

Every brand named in this report is a research subject. Inclusion is not an endorsement, and no brand paid to appear.

If you want to know which of these questions your own brand already shows up in, we can run the same measurement for your market.