{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BlogPosting","headline":"AI Search for Climbing Gyms in Prague (2026): The Density Law Finds Its Ceiling","description":"The series' first Slavic-language city, picked to stress the right end of the density law: climbing gyms publish route-setting, hours and day passes on their own domains, so Prague's registry is the densest owned-web layer in thirteen city studies — 84.6% of its 39 gyms/walls run an own-domain site (full-registry reading 66.0% counting the 11 crags, which cannot own a domain; both ship in summary.csv). 22 prompt templates × EN/CS × US/CZ proxies × 4 engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Mode), all 308 reachable captures, captured 2026-09-09 (Gemini/Copilot/AI Mode 88/88 each; ChatGPT 44/44 US-proxy only — the capture tool rejects the CZ country for that scraper; a fifth engine, Perplexity, landed 37/88 and is excluded from the study after error-item batches and one targeted refire of only the missing pairs — all 95 absent captures disclosed, never imputed). ChatGPT's own-website citation share sets a series record at 47.7% (95 of 199) — over Helsinki's 45.5% by barely two points despite six more density points: the six-city curve (CDMX 12.5%→0, Seoul 13%→2.3, Istanbul 22.1%→21.3, BA 37.7%→25.3, Helsinki 78.4%→45.5, Prague 84.6%→47.7) keeps perfect rank order while flattening toward a ceiling near one citation in two — the other half of ChatGPT's budget goes to guides, directories and the climbing web regardless of supply (theexpatcity.com alone out-drew every individual gym domain in its citations). Climbing Center SmíchOff is named in 253 of 308 answers (82.1%, the strongest single-venue consensus measured, over Löyly's 79.8%) and tops the citation board too (score 152; lezeckecentrum.cz is the study's most-cited real-world domain at 95 — a series first for a venue site). Ghost-gym finding: 12 captures across three engines (Google AI Mode 9, Gemini 2, Copilot 1) recommend 'Boulder Bar', the pre-rebrand name of a Holešovice gym with no remaining Google Maps listing; ChatGPT — live search in 30 of 44 captures — never does. ChatGPT cited Reddit zero times in Reddit's most discourse-heavy hobby (12 study-wide). EN vs CS control overlap 43% with a 43% median across 22 templates; the sole 0% is the 'most famous gyms' prompt — fame is the one thing the languages disagree on. TLD coupling 1.37×. Copilot back at 95.3% entity; Gemini routes 40.9% of citations to Google properties (mostly Maps); AI Mode's searchviewer wrap eased to 74.5% from BA's 100%. 1,384 citations, 556 map entities, 1,453 extracted mentions (93.3% resolved after a hand-checked Czech-alias needle pass) against a 122-row registry, 50 real venues.","datePublished":"2026-09-09","dateModified":"2026-09-09","url":"https://nicolassitter.com/research/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026","category":"research","keywords":["AI search climbing gyms","ChatGPT climbing Prague","best climbing gyms Prague AI","SmíchOff AI recommendations","bouldering Prague AI","density law AI citations","Boulder Bar Prague","AI rebrand visibility","Czech AI search","GEO local business"],"articleSection":"Research","wordCount":3000,"readTime":"12 min","articleBody":"|\n\n|\n\nSeptember 2026AI Search Studies\n\n# AI Search for Climbing Gyms in Prague (2026):the density law finds its ceiling\n\n**TL;DR:** Four AI engines, 22 climbing questions, English and Czech — 308 of 308 captures landed — every capture the platforms allow. Prague’s gyms are the best-webbed vertical this series has measured (84.6% run an own-domain site), and ChatGPT put 47.7% of its citations on those sites — the highest share the series has recorded, on a batch that is US-proxy only because the CZ country is refused for that scraper. Every engine agrees on the city’s #1 (253 of 308 answers name SmíchOff, the strongest consensus yet), three engines keep recommending a bouldering gym under a brand that no longer exists, and ChatGPT gave Reddit zero citations in the most Reddit-native hobby we could find.\n\nPublished September 9, 2026 · data captured September 9, 2026\n\n47.7%\n\nChatGPT own-website share — series high, US-proxy batch\n\n253/308\n\nanswers naming SmíchOff — the series’ strongest consensus\n\n12\n\nanswers recommending a gym that no longer exists\n\n[Read the Report](#executive-summary)\n\n[Summary](#executive-summary)[1\\. The Ceiling](#density-ceiling)[2\\. SmíchOff](#leaderboard)[3\\. The Ghost Gym](#ghost-gym)[4\\. Source Mix](#source-mix)[5\\. Two Languages](#languages)[6\\. Top Sources](#top-sources)[7\\. Geography](#geography)[8\\. Instrument Notes](#instrument-notes)[For Gyms](#takeaways)[Conclusion](#conclusion)[Methodology](#methodology)[FAQ](#faq)\n\n## Executive Summary\n\nWe went looking for the one vertical where every business runs a real website — because climbers need this week’s route-setting, today’s opening hours and a day-pass price, and Instagram carries none of that. The question was whether ChatGPT’s citations would follow the supply all the way up.\n\nThey followed it — and then stopped climbing. Of the 39 gyms and walls in the registry, 33 (84.6%) run an own-domain site, the densest owned-web layer this series has measured. ChatGPT placed **47.7%** of its 199 citations on those domains (95 of them) — a series record, ahead of [Helsinki’s](/research/saunas-helsinki-ai-search-2026) 45.5% — but only just. Six points from CDMX’s 12.5%→0% to here, the rank order has never once broken, and the slope has fallen with every step. Roughly half of what ChatGPT cites is reserved for the layer that talks _about_ businesses — guides, directories, the crag database varp.cz, the expat press — no matter how good the businesses’ own web gets.\n\nThe city itself produced the cleanest agreement the series has seen: Climbing Center SmíchOff is named in 253 of 308 answers (82.1%), by all four engines, in both languages — and it also tops the citation-counted board, so for once the two scoring methods crown the same winner. Further down the answers, something stranger: 12 captures across three engines recommend “Boulder Bar”, the pre-rebrand name of a Holešovice bouldering gym that Google Maps no longer lists. ChatGPT — the engine that searched the live web in 30 of its 44 captures — never once does.\n\nBy the numbers: 308 of 308 captures, 1,384 cited URLs, 1,453 extracted venue mentions, 93.3% resolved against a 122-row registry. One platform limit is disclosed rather than filled: the ChatGPT scraper refuses a CZ proxy, so ChatGPT ran US-proxy only — 44 of the 44 it is allowed. A fifth engine, Perplexity, landed 37 of 88 after error-item batches and is excluded from the study rather than reported.\n\nTerminology, as on every page in this series: _citations_ are the URLs an engine attaches under its answer, _mentions_ are the venue names inside the answer text. Source analysis uses the former, the leaderboard the latter.\n\nSection 1\n\n## Supply keeps rising; the share barely moves\n\nThe density law says ChatGPT cites businesses’ own websites in proportion to how many of them have one. Prague was chosen to test the end of that claim — a vertical whose product (route resets, opening hours, day passes) forces every gym onto its own domain.\n\ndensity-law-six-cities-prague\n\nPrague’s density bar is the business-venue reading: 33 of 39 gyms and walls. The registry also holds 11 outdoor crags, which cannot own a domain (their “website” is a varp.cz database page); counting them puts the full-registry density at 66%, below Helsinki — a reading under which Prague’s record share would _break_ the rank order instead of extending it. Every prior registry in the series contained only businesses, so the business-only bar is the like-for-like one. One asymmetry to hold in mind on the share bar: Prague’s 47.7% is measured on 44 US-proxy captures, where every earlier city pooled two proxy countries — the [language-and-IP study](/research/chatgpt-hotel-language-ip-2026) found the query’s country barely moves ChatGPT’s source set, but this run has no CZ-proxy ChatGPT captures to check that against. Both density numbers ship in [summary.csv](/data/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026/summary.csv).\n\nchatgpt-own-website-thirteen-cases-prague\n\nRead the six measured density points as a sequence of slopes. Istanbul returned almost exactly what its market supplied (22.1% density, 21.3% share). Buenos Aires got two-thirds of its density back. Helsinki got 58% of its. Prague, with six points more density than Helsinki, gets a share two points higher — a marginal return of about 40%. The ordering has survived all six measured cities; the proportionality has not.\n\nWhat occupies the rest of ChatGPT’s citation budget here is instructive, because it can’t be blamed on missing gym websites: 51 citations (25.6%) go to local editorial and expat guides (theexpatcity.com alone out-drew every individual gym domain in ChatGPT’s citations, 26 to SmíchOff’s 23), and 33 more to the climbing web — the varp.cz crag database, the national federation, climbing press. Even talking to the best-webbed market we could find, ChatGPT spends half its evidence on third parties.\n\n**The six-city curve, read as a limit**12.5%→0. 13%→2.3. 22.1%→21.3. 37.7%→25.3. 78.4%→45.5. 84.6%→47.7%. Below ~20% density the engine barely cites venues at all; through the middle it returns most of what the market supplies; past ~75% it saturates near one citation in two. A gym site gets you into that half — nothing gets you out of the other one.\n\nSection 2\n\n## Five engines, one answer: SmíchOff\n\nA converted Smíchov factory hall with the country’s best-known lead walls is named in 253 of 308 answers — 82.1%, the highest agreement on any venue in twelve studies (Helsinki’s Löyly held the record at 79.8%). It leads the citation-counted board too (152), so the mention canon and the citation economy point the same way for once — Buenos Aires, Seoul and Mexico City each split the two crowns.\n\nclimbing-leaderboard-answer-mentions\n\nAll four engines recommend ten of the twelve board venues — exactly the count Buenos Aires produced on the same four engines. What separates Prague is the depth of the agreement, not its breadth: SmíchOff sits in 82.1% of answers where La Viruta topped out at 60.4%. With ~39 climbing venues and a web layer this dense, the canon is short, famous and identically retrievable everywhere.\n\nThe pecking order tells a Prague story. BigWall (215 mentions) is the rope-wall counterweight to SmíchOff; HUDY Boulder Karlín rides the country’s biggest outdoor-retail brand; and the three Jungle branches split what would otherwise be a podium finish — counted as one brand they’d sit near BigWall. The smallest board member, Cibulka, earns most of its presence from a single engine (Copilot, 29 of its 39 mentions).\n\n**One winner, both metrics**SmíchOff tops answer mentions (253) and citation score (152) simultaneously — its lezeckecentrum.cz is also the study’s most-cited real-world domain at 110 citations. When a market’s most-loved venue also runs its best website, the two leaderboards this series always publishes collapse into one. That coincidence is rarer than it sounds: it has now happened in three of seven cities where both boards were computed.\n\n### Who recommends whom — the per-engine matrix\n\nEach cell: how often that engine’s answers name the venue. Copilot names SmíchOff in 90.9% of its answers; Gemini is the JamJam enthusiast; AI Mode leans hardest on Jungle’s Letňany branch.\n\n#\n\nVenue\n\nAI Mode88 captures\n\nChatGPT44 captures\n\nGemini88 captures\n\nCopilot88 captures\n\n1\n\nClimbing Center SmíchOff\n\n79.5%(70)\n\n77.3%(34)\n\n78.4%(69)\n\n90.9%(80)\n\n2\n\nBigWall\n\n65.9%(58)\n\n50%(22)\n\n75%(66)\n\n78.4%(69)\n\n3\n\nHUDY Boulder Karlín\n\n36.4%(32)\n\n52.3%(23)\n\n54.5%(48)\n\n44.3%(39)\n\n4\n\nJungle Sport park\n\n48.9%(43)\n\n40.9%(18)\n\n28.4%(25)\n\n18.2%(16)\n\n5\n\nLezecká stěna Třináctka\n\n17%(15)\n\n38.6%(17)\n\n21.6%(19)\n\n40.9%(36)\n\n6\n\nClimbing wall Ruzyne\n\n12.5%(11)\n\n31.8%(14)\n\n22.7%(20)\n\n46.6%(41)\n\n7\n\nJungle Holešovice\n\n15.9%(14)\n\n31.8%(14)\n\n13.6%(12)\n\n50%(44)\n\n8\n\nLOKAL BLOK\n\n17%(15)\n\n18.2%(8)\n\n19.3%(17)\n\n28.4%(25)\n\n9\n\nUltraAnt Climbing Club\n\n11.4%(10)\n\n20.5%(9)\n\n2.3%(2)\n\n35.2%(31)\n\n10\n\nJamJam\n\n13.6%(12)\n\n27.3%(12)\n\n26.1%(23)\n\n0(0)\n\n11\n\nBoulder V Síti\n\n11.4%(10)\n\n22.7%(10)\n\n9.1%(8)\n\n10.2%(9)\n\n12\n\nClimbing Centre Cibulka\n\n0(0)\n\n6.8%(3)\n\n4.5%(4)\n\n33%(29)\n\nChatGPT’s column runs on its 44 US-proxy captures; the others on the 37 of 88 that landed (section 8).\n\n#### Top 12 venues by answer mentions — click a marker for per-engine counts\n\n1Climbing Center SmíchOff2BigWall3HUDY Boulder Karlín4Jungle Sport park5Lezecká stěna Třináctka6Climbing wall Ruzyne7Jungle Holešovice8LOKAL BLOK9UltraAnt Climbing Club10JamJam11Boulder V Síti12Climbing Centre Cibulka\n\nSection 3\n\n## Four engines recommend a gym that isn’t there\n\n“Boulder Bar” was for years the name in Prague bouldering — and its Holešovice hall now operates under the Jungle brand, with no Google Maps listing left under the old name. Search Google Maps for “Boulder Bar Praha” and it hands you the Jungle gyms. Yet 12 captures across 3 engines — AI Mode (9), Gemini (2), Copilot (1) — recommend Boulder Bar by name, as a place you could walk into tomorrow.\n\nThe exception is the engine this series usually catches in a lie: ChatGPT recommended the ghost exactly zero times in 44 answers. It also searched the live web in 30 of those 44. The engines that skipped or half-ran retrieval are the ones reciting a market map that expired years ago — a failure mode this series hadn’t isolated before: not a fabricated name, but a real, once-beloved brand served past its death.\n\nThe rest of the unresolved pile is honest geography rather than error: asked for outdoor climbing “near Prague”, the engines correctly leave the city — Srbsko, Alkazar, Svatý Jan pod Skalou, Roviště, the Prachov Rocks — all real crags, all outside a Prague registry by construction. After a hand-checked Czech-alias pass, 97 of 1,453 mentions stay unresolved, and the ghost plus the out-of-town crags account for most of them.\n\nThe ghost, by engine\n\nBoulder Bar — 12 answers\n\nAI Mode 9 · Gemini 2 · Copilot 1 · ChatGPT 0\n\n**Rebrands are an AI-visibility event**A closed or renamed business doesn’t leave the engines’ answers when it leaves Google Maps — it lingers wherever training data and stale guides still praise it. If you have rebranded, the old name is still competing with you inside three of the four engines, and only a live-retrieval engine notices the switch. Worth a redirect page and an updated mention anywhere the old brand still ranks.\n\nSection 4\n\n## The engine personalities, on their best behavior\n\nGive the engines a market where the venues’ own web is actually good and the structural personalities snap back to their extremes: Copilot returns to the 95% entity band it held in the series’ early cities, and Gemini puts a majority of its citations on venue sites for the first time, and no booking-platform layer exists to distract anyone — climbing has no ClassPass.\n\nsource-mix-by-platform-climbing-prague\n\n95.3%\n\nCopilot’s entity habit, fully fed\n\n261 of 274 citations on venue-owned sites — back in the 95–97% band it held in Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin, after sliding as low as 25.7% in Seoul where there was nothing to cite. Copilot’s share has always been the market’s own-web layer read back at maximum gain; Prague confirms it from the supply-rich end.\n\n0\n\nReddit’s hardest possible test\n\nClimbing is one of Reddit’s loudest hobbies — and ChatGPT, which put 17–20% of its citations on Reddit for four straight studies in the spring, cited it 0 times here. Study-wide Reddit received 12 citations of 1,384, none from ChatGPT. Three cities in a row now (Helsinki, Buenos Aires, Prague): whatever changed in ChatGPT’s retrieval this summer, it wasn’t vertical-specific.\n\n40.9%\n\nGemini cites the mothership\n\n85 of Gemini’s 208 citations are Google properties — overwhelmingly plain google.com/maps links standing where a venue’s website would go. Add its 23.6% entity share and Gemini reads like an engine that knows the right venues but prefers to route you through its own map to reach them.\n\nSection 5\n\n## English and Czech agree on everything except fame\n\nFirst Slavic language in the series. The control prompt overlaps 43% between English and Czech — Buenos Aires’ number exactly, far above the Istanbul/CDMX floor of 0% — and the tourist prompt returns the identical five gyms in both languages. Then the pattern inverts in one place: ask for the _most famous_ gyms and the two languages agree on nothing at all.\n\nen-vs-local-control-overlap-series-prague\n\nEN vs CS top-5 overlap by prompt (ChatGPT × US proxy, map-widget top-5) — all 22 comparable templates\n\nPrompt template\n\nEN vs CS top-5 overlap\n\ntourist persona (\"visiting for a few days\")\n\n100% (5/5)\n\nday pass, no membership\n\n67% (4/6)\n\nbouldering gyms\n\n67% (4/6)\n\nrope climbing walls\n\n67% (4/6)\n\nserious training\n\n67% (4/6)\n\nopen late\n\n67% (4/6)\n\nbiggest and most modern\n\n67% (4/6)\n\ncontrol (best climbing gyms)\n\n43% (3/7)\n\ngyms with a climbing wall (bleed control)\n\n43% (3/7)\n\noutdoor rock near Prague (bleed control)\n\n43% (3/7)\n\ndistrict: Žižkov / Karlín\n\n43% (3/7)\n\nfor kids\n\n43% (3/7)\n\nrope parks (bleed control)\n\n25% (2/8)\n\ndistrict: Smíchov\n\n25% (2/8)\n\nshoe rental\n\n25% (2/8)\n\nfor beginners\n\n25% (2/8)\n\nfirst time climbing\n\n25% (2/8)\n\naffordable gyms\n\n25% (2/8)\n\nnot too crowded\n\n25% (2/8)\n\nadult courses\n\n11% (1/9)\n\ndistrict: city centre\n\n11% (1/9)\n\nmost famous gyms\n\n0% (0/10)\n\nOverlap = shared venues ÷ distinct venues across both top-5 lists (Jaccard), read from ChatGPT’s map carousel — present in all 44 captures this run. Both language columns come from the US proxy, because the capture tool’s ChatGPT scraper refuses a CZ proxy (section 8).\n\nThe agreement sits exactly where a visitor’s and a local’s needs coincide: what’s open late, where to boulder, where to get a day pass — 67% overlap each, with the tourist prompt at 100%. The median across all 22 templates is 43% — Buenos Aires, the previous convergence high, measured a 25% median.\n\nThe one zero is the “most famous” prompt, and it’s a telling zero: English fame and Czech fame are different canons. The English answers reach for what expat guides celebrate; the Czech answers for institutions Czech climbers grew up with. Meanwhile the language→TLD coupling is mild — Czech prompts put 83.5% of ChatGPT’s citations on .cz domains, English prompts 61.1% (1.37×, beside Buenos Aires’ 1.33× and nowhere near Tokyo’s 5×) — because in a market this webbed, even the English answers end up on Czech gym sites.\n\n**Where bilingual disagreement now lives**Across twelve cities the split keeps retreating: from whole-market disagreement (Istanbul, CDMX at 0%) to disagreement only in the un-webbed corners (Buenos Aires’ private lessons) to, here, disagreement only about _prestige_. The better a vertical documents itself online, the less language decides what you’re told — until the question becomes cultural instead of practical.\n\nSection 6\n\n## The twelve domains that answer climbing questions\n\nFor the first time in this series, the most-cited real-world domain is a venue’s own website — in every other city that spot went to a government portal, a ticket seller or a directory. Ten of the twelve are Czech domains, and four of the twelve are cited by every engine in the study — varp.cz, the volunteer-run crag database, alongside two gym sites and the Czech yellow pages.\n\nMost-cited non-Google domains across 1,384 citations (normalized), 2026-09-09\n\nDomain\n\nEngines\n\nCitations\n\nWhat it is\n\nlezeckecentrum.cz\n\n3/4\n\n95\n\nClimbing Center SmíchOff — the consensus #1 on both boards\n\nbig-wall.cz\n\n3/4\n\n81\n\nBigWall Vysočany, the biggest hall in the country\n\nvarp.cz\n\n4/4\n\n47\n\nThe Prague crag database — cited by every engine in the study\n\nstena-ruzyne.com\n\n4/4\n\n39\n\nClimbing wall Ruzyně\n\nhudysteny.cz\n\n4/4\n\n33\n\nHUDY Boulder Karlín (the outdoor-retail chain’s gym arm)\n\nholesovice.jungle.cz\n\n3/4\n\n30\n\nJungle Holešovice\n\ntheexpatcity.com\n\n2/4\n\n29\n\nAn English-language expat guide to Prague\n\njungleletnany.cz\n\n2/4\n\n24\n\nJungle Sport park’s alternate domain\n\nstenastodulky.cz\n\n1/4\n\n23\n\nLezecká stěna Třináctka — one engine cites it, 23 times\n\nultraant.cz\n\n2/4\n\n21\n\nUltraAnt Climbing Club, Old Town\n\nsquashpark.cz\n\n2/4\n\n20\n\nClimbing Centre Cibulka (inside the Squashpark complex)\n\nfirmy.cz\n\n4/4\n\n20\n\nSeznam’s business directory — the Czech yellow pages\n\ngoogle.com itself drew 609 citations — 524 of them AI Mode’s searchviewer wrap, 85 Gemini’s Maps links — and is excluded here as self-reference rather than a source.\n\nSection 7\n\n## A ring of gyms, an empty centre\n\nPrague’s climbing lives where industrial halls are cheap — Smíchov, Holešovice, Vysočany, Letňany, Stodůlky — and the registry map shows a ring with almost nothing inside the tourist core (UltraAnt, on Old Town’s edge, is the exception). The engines know it: asked for gyms “in central Prague”, ChatGPT’s recommendations land in the actual centre 0% of the time, because there is nothing there to recommend — it answers with the ring, which is the right answer to a slightly different question. District prompts for Smíchov and Žižkov/Karlín stay local only 10–17% of the time; the canon outranks the neighborhood even when you name the neighborhood.\n\n#### All 50 mapped registry venues across Prague\n\nOne cross-city bleed surfaced: asked for rope walls, ChatGPT’s map widget twice offered “Climbing wall Kladno” — a real wall, 25 km outside Prague, in a list of Prague gyms.\n\nSection 8\n\n## What the instruments did this run\n\n### ChatGPT could not be proxied from Czechia\n\nThe ChatGPT scraper rejects the CZ country outright (“Selected country is not available for this scraper”), a per-scraper limitation the series hadn’t hit before. ChatGPT’s 44 captures are complete but US-proxy only, so its language comparison measures prompt language alone, with proxy held constant — arguably a cleaner isolate, and the one disclosed on every overlap table above. The other three engines accepted CZ.\n\n### Perplexity landed 37 of 88, and is out of the study\n\nMost of both Perplexity batches returned as error items (29 captures survived); a targeted refire of only the missing prompt×proxy pairs recovered 8 more, leaving 37 of 88. Fewer than half a grid cannot be compared with the engines that ran complete, so it is excluded from the study rather than charted behind a disclosed denominator. Those captures remain in the source database.\n\n### AI Mode’s publisher links are partially back\n\nA week ago in Buenos Aires, 100% of AI Mode’s citations were google.com searchviewer self-references — the instrument change decoded in [the svid study](/research/google-ai-mode-searchviewer-svid-2026). This run, 179 of its 703 citations (25.5%) are real publisher URLs again, slightly more via the CZ proxy. The wrap is evidently a rollout dial, not a completed migration; the domain dimension remains untrustworthy either way.\n\n### ChatGPT skipped the web in 14 of 44 answers\n\nweb\\_search\\_triggered was false in 14 ChatGPT captures — the engine answered a local-business question from parametric memory alone, though its map carousel still rendered in all 44 (556 map entities). 8 captures study-wide recommended no venue at all (3 Gemini, 3 Copilot, 1 AI Mode, 1 Copilot).\n\n## If you run a climbing gym (in Prague or anywhere)\n\n1\n\n**Your website only gets you to the start line.** In a market where 84.6% of gyms have one, the site gets you counted — the separation happens in the third-party half of the citation budget: the guides, the crag database, the expat press. That is where SmíchOff’s 253-answer dominance was built.\n\n2\n\n**Treat a rebrand as an AI-visibility migration.** 12 answers in this study recommend a brand that no longer exists. If the old name still outranks the new one inside three engines, you want the old domain redirecting, the old name mentioned once on the new site, and updated mentions in whatever guides the engines cite for your city.\n\n3\n\n**The English canon is written by expat media.** The “most famous” prompt overlapped 0% between languages, and theexpatcity.com drew more ChatGPT citations than any single gym site. If tourists matter to your fill rate, one well-placed mention in the city’s English-language guides moves the English answers in a way your own site can’t.\n\n4\n\n**Don’t buy Reddit advice for this channel.** The spring’s “get discussed on Reddit” playbook is three studies dead: 0 ChatGPT citations here, in Reddit’s own favorite hobby. The layers that replaced it are venue sites and local editorial.\n\n## Conclusion\n\nPrague was picked as a boundary experiment: feed the engines the best-documented small-business vertical we could find and see what maxes out. The answer is nearly everything — Copilot at 95.3% entity citations, a consensus #1 named in four answers out of five, both leaderboards agreeing, the two languages converging on every practical question — except the one number the experiment was aimed at. ChatGPT’s own-website share set its record and still stopped short of half, on citations, in the market that made the strongest possible case for venue websites.\n\nSo the density law survives its sixth test with an amendment: supply decides how close you get to the ceiling, and the ceiling is structural. The engines keep half their evidence budget for the web that talks _about_ a market — and in Prague that half runs through a volunteer crag database, an expat magazine and the Czech yellow pages. The ghost of Boulder Bar haunting three engines is the same lesson from the other side: what the third-party web remembers about you matters as much as what you publish yourself.\n\nNext in the series: still owed — a continent the series hasn’t visited.\n\n## Methodology\n\n### The grid\n\n22 prompt templates (control, disciplines, personas, price, access, districts, plus outdoor / generic-gym / rope-park entity-bleed controls) × 2 languages (English, Czech — translations competent but not native-reviewed) × 4 engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Mode) × 2 proxy countries (US, CZ), fired 2026-09-09 through the pipeline’s own capture runner. All 308 reachable captures landed: Gemini, Copilot and AI Mode each 88/88; ChatGPT 44/44 on the US proxy, because the CZ proxy is refused for that scraper (“Selected country is not available for this scraper”) — a standing per-engine limitation, disclosed on every language table. A fifth engine, Perplexity, landed 37 of 88 after error-item batches and is excluded from the study rather than reported.\n\n### The registry\n\nTwo broad Google Maps pulls (“climbing gym”, “bouldering gym”, “lezecká stěna”, “boulderová stěna”, then “bouldering”, “horolezecká stěna”, “lezecké centrum”, “boulder”) yielded 121 unique places; one name-targeted recovery pass added Divoká Šárka. Classification by an observed category map keeps 50 rows real — 39 gyms/walls and 11 outdoor areas (Google’s “Observation deck” rows here are the Hlubočepy and Dívčí hrady crags) — and classifies out playground walls, rope parks, fitness centers, gear shops and rope-access firms. Four venues Google files under plain “Gym” (JamJam, Rock Gym Skalka, Horolezecká Hala Chodov, the Gutovka wall) were flipped real by hand; each flip is recorded in the run provenance and flagged in the PR for review.\n\n### Extraction and resolution\n\nVenues named in each prose answer were extracted by the pipeline’s language-model NER pass, yielding 1,453 mention rows. Resolution precedence: exact normalized match, fuzzy (≥0.86), unique token containment, then a hand-checked Czech alias pass — the seed carries Google’s English titles while the engines answer in Czech (“Lezecké centrum SmíchOFF” vs “Climbing Center SmíchOff”), so a diacritic-folding needle table, every entry verified unambiguous against the registry, resolves what string distance cannot. 93.3% of mentions resolved; the 97 that remain are dominated by the Boulder Bar ghost and real out-of-town crags, both reported as findings rather than repaired.\n\n### Counting rules\n\nCitations are per-capture deduplicated URLs; source buckets are keyword-and-domain based, with venue identity decided by registry website domains plus two verified alternate domains (jungleletnany.cz, stenatrinactka.cz). varp.cz — the crag database eight outdoor rows list as their “website” — is barred from counting as any venue’s identity and buckets as climbing web instead; that guard is why the density figure comes in two disclosed readings (business-only 84.6%, full-registry 66%). The leaderboard counts each venue once per capture; the citation score counts ChatGPT map presence plus citation-domain matches. Source-mix percentages are largest-remainder rounded per engine to sum to exactly 100. All headline stats ship as [summary.csv](/data/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026/summary.csv).\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n## Related studies\n\n[\n\nAI Search for Saunas in Helsinki\n\nThe previous density record-holder — 78.4% supply, 45.5% share\n\n](/research/saunas-helsinki-ai-search-2026)[\n\nAI Search for Tango Schools in Buenos Aires\n\nThe density curve’s middle point, and the bilingual canon\n\n](/research/tango-schools-buenos-aires-ai-search-2026)[\n\nAI Search for Specialty Coffee in Seoul\n\nWhere the density hypothesis was first framed — from the bottom end\n\n](/research/specialty-coffee-seoul-ai-search-2026)[\n\nAI Mode Stopped Linking Publishers\n\nThe searchviewer wrap — at 100% last week, 74.5% this week\n\n](/research/google-ai-mode-searchviewer-svid-2026)","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Nicolas Sitter","url":"https://nicolassitter.com/about","sameAs":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolassitternolleau/","https://github.com/Nicositter88","https://hotelrank.ai"]},"publisher":{"@type":"Person","name":"Nicolas Sitter","url":"https://nicolassitter.com"},"image":"https://nicolassitter.com/api/og/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://nicolassitter.com/research/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026"},"tags":["AI Search","Local Search","Climbing","Prague","Citations","GEO"],"sameAs":["https://hotelrank.ai/research/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026"],"alternateFormat":{"html":"https://nicolassitter.com/research/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026","json":"https://nicolassitter.com/api/post/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026","rss":"https://nicolassitter.com/rss.xml"},"datasets":[{"name":"summary","contentUrl":"https://nicolassitter.com/data/climbing-gyms-prague-ai-search-2026/summary.csv","encodingFormat":"text/csv"}]}