When Someone Asks ChatGPT About Football Near Them, Does Your Club Exist?

Volunteer at a non-league clubhouse table checking the club's online presence on a laptop, pitch visible through the window

There's a new front door to your club, and most committees don't know it exists.

Ofcom's 2026 media use report found that 54% of UK adults now use AI services like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini — for everything from writing letters to deciding what to do at the weekend. That second one matters to you. Because somewhere in your town this week, a parent typed "football clubs near me for a 9-year-old" into ChatGPT. A new arrival asked Perplexity "where can I watch local football on a Saturday?" A lapsed player asked Google's AI mode "veterans football near [your town]".

The question is brutal and simple: did the answer mention your club — or the one two miles down the road?

Why this suddenly has a price tag

If you want proof this matters, look at where the money's going. A solo developer called Yogesh built a small tool called Promptmonitor that did one thing: tracked whether AI assistants mentioned your brand when people asked relevant questions. It pottered along at $500 a month in revenue — then in January 2026 it sold for $85,000, nine days after being listed. Whole agencies now sell "AI visibility" audits to businesses for four figures.

You don't need to buy any of that. What those tools do, you can do for your club in twenty minutes with a cup of tea. The industry calls it generative engine optimisation. We'll call it making sure the robots know you exist.

The 20-minute audit

Open ChatGPT (the free version is fine), Google with AI mode, and Perplexity if you're feeling thorough. Ask each of them these six questions, swapping in your own details:

"What football clubs near [your town] take junior players?"
"Where can I watch non-league football near [your town] this Saturday?"
"How do I join [your club's name]?"
"Who plays at [your ground's name]?"
"What league is [your club] in and how are they doing?"
"How can I volunteer at a local football club in [your area]?"

Score yourself honestly. For each answer: were you mentioned at all? Was the information correct — right league, right ground, right contact route? Was it current, or does the AI think you're still in the division you left two seasons ago, playing at a ground you sold?

Most clubs that run this audit find one of three things. They're invisible. They're visible but wrong. Or — rarest of all — they're accurate and easy to join. That third group is quietly hoovering up the new families, the groundhoppers and the volunteers.

Why AI can't see you

AI assistants don't watch your matches. They read the public web, and they lean hardest on pages that are plain, factual and crawlable. Which is exactly what most grassroots clubs don't have. The usual failure list:

Your club only really exists on Facebook or a WhatsApp group. Most AI crawlers can't read either. To them, your club genuinely isn't there.
Your website is a wall of images and widgets. If the fixtures, the ground address and the "come and play" info live inside graphics or an embedded app, text crawlers get nothing.
Your basics contradict each other. The league site says one ground, your site says another, the county FA listing has a training night from 2023. When sources disagree, AI either hedges or skips you.
Nobody neutral mentions you. AI answers lean on pages the wider web already links to and trusts — league tables, local press, county FA directories. If you appear nowhere but your own site, you're a whisper.

The fixes that cost nothing

The good news: this is one of the few games where a village club can outrank a bigger neighbour, because almost nobody at this level is trying.

Write your facts as boring text. One page on your site with the answers to the six questions above, in plain sentences a human would actually ask: who you are, where you play (full address), what teams you run and for what ages, when training happens, what it costs, and exactly how to get in touch. Headings phrased as questions — "How do I join?", "Where do you play?" — do double duty, because AI assistants love lifting from FAQ-style pages.

Make it a real page, not a post. Social posts scroll away and die. A static page with a stable address is something crawlers return to and answers get built from. We've written before about the five pages every non-league club website gets wrong — this is now the sixth, and it might be the most valuable.

Line your details up everywhere. Same club name, same ground, same contact email on your site, your league's site, your county FA listing and your social bios. Ten minutes of tidying, and you go from "conflicting sources" to "confirmed fact".

Get mentioned by pages AI trusts. Your league's club directory, the local paper's season preview, the council's sports page. One line and a link in each is worth more to your AI visibility than fifty likes on a match graphic.

Re-run the audit each pre-season. Details drift — divisions change, secretaries change, grounds change. The clubs that stay accurate in AI answers will be the ones that check.

The payoff

None of this is about vanity. Every accurate AI answer is a parent who emails the right secretary, a fan who turns up at the right ground at the right time, a volunteer who finds you before they find the rugby club. And when your fundraiser rolls around, it's a supporter asking "how can I support [your club]?" and getting pointed at your actual prize draw page — clubs running draws through platforms like PlayFundWin have a live, crawlable page for exactly that moment.

Twenty minutes. Six questions. A page of boring text. That's the whole job — and right now, being the one club in your league that's done it is a genuine competitive edge.

Up the volunteers. Non-league — making the difference.