Strava, Myfitnesspal & Oura Have Become Ai’s Go-to Fitness Apps, Report Finds

Jack of all trades, master of none: new findings show that philosophy is exactly what’s hurting fitness and wellness apps in the age of AI

In the good old days, finding a fitness app meant a Google search and a lot of your own judgment. Now you can just ask your preferred chatbot, skipping the scrolling entirely, with AI handing you an answer.

Except it isn’t giving you one answer. It’s giving you several, and a new AI Visibility Index report from communications firm 5W shows exactly which fitness and wellness brands have already claimed each spot.

The communications firm tracked more than 60 real-world prompts, including “best running app,” “best app for sleep” and “Whoop vs. Oura,” run five times each across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews during the second quarter of the year. It then scored 25 fitness and wellness apps by how often AI engines cited them in response. 

Strava, the social fitness app reportedly close to an IPO, led the field with an estimated 13% share of overall citations, followed by nutrition app MyFitnessPal at 10% and Peloton at 8%. Whoop and Oura, two leading wearable companies, sit fifth and sixth at 5.5% and 5%.

“There is no ‘best fitness app’ answer anymore,” 5W founder Ronn Torossian said. “There is a best app for running, a best app for recovery, a best app for sleep. AI engines route by the problem, not the brand.”

Meanwhile, the “generalist” apps are losing – although they don’t know it yet, he added. 

“You win by owning one behavior so completely that the machine cannot answer the question without naming you,” Torossian added.

Peloton, however, is a special case. The connected fitness giant holds the third overall citation share in the index, and the report credits that not to its bike hardware but to a successful reframing of its app as a standalone platform.

5W is explicit that revenue rank does not predict citation rank. A platform can perform well financially yet remain functionally invisible in the chatbot recommendation space.

When put to the test, the free version of ChatGPT said that prompts like “What’s the best fitness app? or “Which workout app should I use?” are among the more common requests for recommendations it receives.

“People usually ask about one of a few scenarios,” ChatGPT said, listing things like finding an app for weight loss or muscle gain, choosing between popular apps like Strava, MyFitnessPal, Nike Training Club and Apple Fitness+, looking for free alternatives, finding an app that works well with a smartwatch and wanting an app that keeps them motivated or provides a structured plan.

ChatGPT said it doesn’t have access to exact usage statistics, but described fitness app recommendations as a very common topic across conversations, a real-time, if informal, confirmation of what the 5W data shows at scale.

When it comes to recommendations, 5W’s advice boils down to one main instruction: start owning a category and build content that matches how users phrase their problem. Take advantage of Reddit’s user communities, and if possible, position around recovery and sleep. 

“It is the fastest-growing query surface and still loosely held below the two leaders,” the report notes.

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