We asked AI for a fertility clinic in London. This is who it recommended.

We asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to recommend fertility clinics in London. Twenty prompts per engine, 60 queries total, clean-room conditions. The engines named 19 clinics between them. Fifteen of those 19 (78.9 per cent) appeared on all three engines. Zero clinics were exclusive to a single engine. HFEA licenses approximately 35 fertility clinics across London. AI named 19 of them: over half the regulated market. In Sydney, AI covered fewer than 5 per cent of a market with thousands of real estate agencies. In Phuket, about 20 per cent of villa agencies. The pattern is clear: in a concentrated, regulated market, AI does not pick favourites. It covers the field. But the clinics with the highest birth rates were not the ones AI recommended most. Clinical outcomes played no measurable role in which London fertility clinics these engines chose to surface.

Data collected: April 2026.

What Happens When You Ask AI for a Fertility Clinic in London?

All three AI engines returned specific clinic names for every prompt we tested. Across 60 queries, 19 unique clinics were named, but only 14 of those are unique HFEA-licensed providers once you account for sub-brands operating under the same licence. We ran 20 prompts per engine across seven intent categories: generic recommendation, need-specific (age, treatment type), comparative, area-specific, cost and fees, advisory, and quality-benchmark. Every query used a fresh API call with no login and no conversation history.

We are Cited, an AI visibility research firm. We have not worked with any of the clinics in this article. No clinic paid to be included or excluded. We ran this experiment to understand what AI engines tell patients who ask for help finding a fertility clinic in London.

The volume of citations varied substantially by engine.

Gemini produced 2.5 times ChatGPT's citation count. Perplexity sat in the middle. The gap is not random noise. These engines pull from different source pools with different priorities, and the fertility space shows that clearly.

AI Doesn't Know Who Owns What, and It Changes the Rankings

Five of the 19 clinic names in our data are sub-brands operating under the same HFEA licence as another clinic on the list. AI treats each name as a separate entity because it has no concept of corporate ownership. KIND IVF is run by London Women's Clinic under HFEA licence #0105. ABC IVF is a CREATE Fertility brand. London IVF & Genetics and FertilityPlus both operate under Care Fertility London's licence #199. HCA Healthcare and The Lister Fertility Clinic share licence #6.

Consolidate those brands by parent entity and the rankings shift dramatically. London Women's Clinic moves from 37 mentions to 52 when you add KIND IVF. The Lister Fertility Clinic and HCA Healthcare combine for 33 mentions. Care Fertility London jumps from 4 to 22 across its three brand names. CREATE Fertility goes from 15 to 23.

Which London Fertility Clinics Do ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini Recommend?

London Women's Clinic leads with 37 total mentions across all three engines, followed by IVI London at 35 and IVF London and The Evewell tied at 26. But look at the per-engine numbers. The Evewell, for instance, picked up 13 mentions on Perplexity and only 3 on ChatGPT. CRGH scored 9 on Perplexity and just 1 on ChatGPT. Being visible on one engine tells you nothing about the other two.

London Women's Clinic is the most consistent presence: top two on every engine. IVI London leads Gemini with 13 mentions and is strong on ChatGPT (10) and Perplexity (12). The largest engine skew belongs to The Evewell: ranked 2nd on Perplexity, 11th on ChatGPT. ARGC showed the opposite bias, picking up 6 mentions on ChatGPT but only 2 on Gemini.

Consistency matters. A clinic that dominates one engine but barely registers on the others is vulnerable. The patient who asks Perplexity today may switch to ChatGPT tomorrow.

Do the Three AI Engines Agree on Which Clinics to Recommend?

Fifteen of 19 clinics (78.9 per cent) appeared on all three engines. The remaining four appeared on exactly two. No clinic was exclusive to a single engine. That rate looks remarkable compared to our other experiments, but the explanation is structural: London has approximately 35 HFEA-licensed fertility clinics. AI named 19. When the total market is that small, high cross-engine overlap is less about engine consensus and more about market concentration.

The correlation is near-perfect: smaller market, higher coverage, higher agreement. The question is not "why do the engines agree?" but "what happens when AI covers over half a regulated market?"

The four clinics on two engines: FertilityPlus (Perplexity and Gemini), London Fertility Centre (Perplexity and Gemini), Care Fertility London (ChatGPT and Gemini), and King's Fertility (Perplexity and ChatGPT). All four sit at the bottom of the total mention count, between 2 and 7 mentions each.

But agreement on who to name is not agreement on who matters. The rankings diverge sharply. The Evewell is a case study: 13 mentions on Perplexity, 10 on Gemini, 3 on ChatGPT. Same clinic, same data environment, three different assessments of its importance. CRGH shows an even more extreme ratio: 9 on Perplexity, 1 on ChatGPT.

AI Recommendations Don't Follow Clinical Outcomes

The clinics with the highest birth rates averaged fewer AI mentions than clinics with below-average birth rates. CRGH, which reports the highest birth rate in our dataset at 48 per cent, ranks only 5th for AI visibility. We cross-referenced every clinic's AI mention count against its HFEA birth rate data (births per embryo transferred) and patient ratings.

The national average IVF birth rate is 34 per cent. The top-performing clinics (40 per cent and above) averaged 17.6 AI mentions. The mid-tier averaged 17.0. Below-average clinics averaged 19.5. All three tiers land within a narrow band. The pattern is noise. The takeaway is clear: you cannot predict a clinic's AI ranking from its birth rate.

Concept Fertility has a 44 per cent birth rate and the highest HFEA patient rating (5 out of 5, based on 60 responses). It ranks 11th in AI visibility with 14 mentions. IVI London has a below-average birth rate of 30 per cent and ranks 2nd with 35 mentions. HFEA patient experience ratings show no correlation either.

What Does Predict Which Fertility Clinics AI Recommends?

Every factor that shows a positive association with AI citations is a proxy for website investment. Every factor that shows no association is a proxy for clinical quality. We tested seven variables against each clinic's total AI mention count. The signal map is clear, if uncomfortable for a regulated medical category.

Organic traffic shows the clearest gradient. High-traffic clinics (above 2,000 monthly visitors) averaged 24.5 AI mentions. Mid-range clinics (500 to 2,000) averaged 19.2. Low-traffic clinics (below 500) averaged 9.1. That is a 2.7-times spread from bottom to top. Google SERP presence tells a similar story: clinics in the top three Google positions averaged 32.7 AI mentions, compared to 11.2 for clinics with low Google visibility.

Content type offers an interesting signal, though the sample is too small to draw firm conclusions. Clinics whose top-ranking keywords are educational (treatment guides, patient information) averaged 31 AI mentions. Clinics whose top keywords are pricing-related averaged 12.7. But n=7 for that comparison, and educational content drives traffic, so the two variables are confounded.

One case we cannot explain: Aria Fertility. Just 110 monthly visitors and directory-level backlinks, yet 17 AI mentions and rank 7 overall. Possible unmeasured factors include structured data and NHS referral page listings. The model does not account for everything.

Four caveats are essential. This is a sample of 19 clinics. All findings are hypothesis-generating, not hypothesis-confirming. Content type was classified using Keywords Everywhere keyword profiles, not content audits. Organic traffic and content type are confounded. And the backlink tier averages are driven heavily by London Women's Clinic and IVI London in Tier A; remove them and Tier A drops substantially.

Where Do AI Engines Get Their Information on London Fertility Clinics?

Clinic websites account for 55 to 69 per cent of all citations across the three engines. The second most-cited domain is not a clinic at all: it is hfea.gov.uk, the UK fertility regulator, with 55 total citations. But the engines use that regulator data unevenly, and what they substitute when they do not cite HFEA is revealing.

ChatGPT cites HFEA in only 3.6 per cent of its responses. Gemini cites HFEA at 14.2 per cent and Perplexity at 12.7 per cent. Where other engines cite the regulator, ChatGPT substitutes Google search page links: 15.5 per cent of ChatGPT's citations pointed to Google search result pages rather than primary sources. Neither Perplexity nor Gemini did this.

Review platforms are almost entirely absent. Trustpilot, WhatClinic, Doctify: collectively they account for somewhere between zero and 0.5 per cent of citations, depending on the engine. Forums (Mumsnet, Reddit) barely register at 0 to 1.4 per cent. Yet Google organic results for fertility clinic queries include Trustpilot prominently. The AI engines are not pulling from the same source pool as Google Search.

HFEA is the standout non-clinic domain. Fifty-five total citations across all three engines make it the single most-cited source that is not a clinic website. For a government regulator that publishes standardised outcome data, that level of citation should translate into outcome-informed recommendations. It does not. The engines cite HFEA pages without apparently using the clinical data on them to rank clinics.

Google Rankings and AI Citations Don't Match

ARGC has the strongest brand search volume of any clinic in our dataset (1,000 monthly searches) and appears in six Google SERP positions including the number-one result for branded and success rate terms. In AI, it ranks 12th. Google presence and AI visibility overlap in some cases and diverge sharply in others. We tracked Brave Search top-10 organic results for 10 IVF-related search terms (total addressable search volume approximately 17,620 per month in the UK).

Strong on Google, Weak in AI

ARGC appeared in 6 SERP positions, including number one for branded and success rate terms. AI gave it 12 mentions, ranking it 12th. The Fertility Academy had 5 SERP appearances but managed only 11 AI mentions, ranking 14th. Brand awareness and Google rankings did not carry over.

Invisible on Google, Strong in AI

Three clinics with minimal or zero Google organic presence ranked well in AI. Aria Fertility had a single SERP appearance (9th for reviews) yet collected 17 AI mentions, ranking 7th overall. CREATE Fertility had zero organic appearances from its own domain but picked up 15 AI mentions (rank 10). Concept Fertility had zero SERP appearances and still earned 14 AI mentions (rank 11).

Strong on Both

IVI London led both channels: number one on Google with 8 SERP appearances and number two in AI with 35 mentions. London Women's Clinic was number two on Google (7 appearances) and number one in AI (37 mentions). IVF London matched the pattern: 7 SERP appearances, 26 AI mentions, 3rd in AI. For these three, the signals aligned. For the rest, they did not.

What This Means for London Fertility Clinics

AI engines have converged on a shared shortlist of London fertility clinics, and that shortlist is shaped by website investment rather than clinical outcomes. Fifteen of 19 clinics appeared on all three engines. Being on that shortlist appears to depend on organic discoverability and content depth, not birth rates or patient ratings.

The same clinic gets recommended whether a patient asks about cost, success rates, donor IVF, or same-sex couples. Intent does not dramatically shift the core list in the way it did in our Australian real estate experiment. The fertility market is more concentrated, and the AI shortlist reflects that concentration.

For clinics not on the list: traditional authority signals are not sufficient. Care Fertility London has Forbes and Guardian backlinks and a 40 per cent birth rate. It ranks 18th. Our data points to content depth and organic discoverability as stronger signals than press coverage or clinical excellence.

For clinics on the list: position is not fixed. Engine-specific skews are large enough that a clinic can rank 2nd on one engine and 11th on another. Different engines weight different signals, and those weightings are not transparent.

The finding with the broadest implications is the disconnect between clinical quality and AI visibility. HFEA publishes birth rate data so patients can choose on outcomes. The three largest AI engines do not use that data to inform their recommendations. As patient journeys increasingly begin with AI, this gap will widen unless something changes.

Want to see where your clinic stands? Check your AI visibility instantly, or request a full AI visibility report for your practice.

Sources

1. HFEA Choose a Clinic : birth rates, patient ratings, inspection data
2. Brave Search : Google SERP position data
3. Keywords Everywhere : organic traffic estimates, keyword rankings, backlink data
4. ChatGPT API, Perplexity API, Gemini API : citation audit data, April 2026