If you own or manage a BJJ academy in the United States, your gym is almost certainly already listed on BJJ Recon. We have mapped approximately 4,800 academies across all 50 states. Your name, location, and affiliation are on the map right now, and practitioners are finding you when they search for gyms in your area.
But an unclaimed listing is a missed opportunity. It is the difference between a pin on a map and a complete, verified profile that tells travelers everything they need to know before they walk through your door.
Claiming your gym is free. It takes about two minutes. And it gives you control over how your academy shows up to the thousands of practitioners who use BJJ Recon to find places to train.
How to Claim Your Gym
Head to bjjrecon.com and find your academy on the map or use the search bar. Click into your gym’s info card and you will see a “Claim This Gym” button. The form asks for your name, your role (owner, head instructor, or manager), your phone number, and an optional message.
Every claim is personally reviewed and verified by the BJJ Recon team. This is not an automated process. We verify each claim to make sure the person requesting control of a listing is the actual owner or an authorized representative. It protects you and it protects the platform.
Once verified, your gym gets a verified badge that is visible to everyone who views your listing. That badge is a trust signal. It tells traveling practitioners that the information on your card is accurate and maintained by someone who actually runs the gym.
What You Get for Free
The free tier gives you everything you need to make your listing useful. You can edit your Gym Intel: drop-in fees, class types offered (Gi, No-Gi, Kids, Open Mat, Competition Team, Women’s), amenities (showers, changing rooms, parking, A/C, gear shop), and public transport access. You can set your operating hours, add your website link, and display your phone number with tap-to-call.
You also get a Gym Greeting, which is a short welcome message that appears on your info card. Think of it as the first thing a potential visitor reads about your academy. Something like “Visitors always welcome. Drop-ins $20. Come train with us” goes a long way toward making someone feel comfortable showing up.
Your Gym Intel feeds directly into the filter system. When a practitioner searches for “No-Gi” gyms with “Showers” in your city, your gym shows up in those results if you have filled in those fields. Gyms that have not completed their intel get pushed below a divider. The more complete your profile, the more discoverable you are.
And here is the thing that matters most for your business: community ratings. Practitioners rate your gym across four dimensions: Cleanliness, Visitor-Friendly, Female-Friendly, and Vibe. Those scores are visible on your card. You cannot edit them, but you can see them, and they tell you exactly what the community thinks about the experience at your academy. That is free market research.
What Paid Unlocks
The free tier handles your listing. The paid tier, at $199 per year, handles your operations.
The centerpiece is QR Check-In. You generate a QR code for your academy, print it, and hang it on the wall. Students scan it with their phone and their check-in is logged automatically with a timestamp. There is a 50-minute cooldown to prevent duplicate scans. No clipboard, no tablet, no monthly hardware fees. Just a printed QR code and a phone.
Those check-ins flow into your Owner Dashboard. You get an attendance calendar heat map showing training density by day, stat cards for this month and this week with month-over-month trend comparisons, and an insight card that tells you things like “Busiest day: Saturday. Morning classes see the most activity.” You can click any day to see exactly who trained, and you can export your attendance data to PDF or CSV for tax records, insurance, or staff planning.
The paid tier also includes student retention tools. You get a student roster with last-seen dates and training frequency. Students who have not trained in 14 or more days are flagged automatically. You can see belt and stripe info on each student card. The idea is simple: if someone is fading, you reach out with a genuine check-in before they disappear completely. Acquiring a new student costs significantly more than keeping one, and these tools help you keep the students you already have.
You can also upload photos and embed a YouTube Shorts video on your listing, giving travelers a real sense of what your gym looks and feels like before they visit.
Why This Matters for Your Business
Traveling practitioners are a real and growing market. Every tournament weekend, every business trip, every family vacation brings grapplers into your city who want to train. The gyms that make it easy to find them, easy to learn about them, and easy to show up are the ones that capture that traffic.
A complete, verified BJJ Recon profile does that for you. It is the most practical thing you can do in two minutes to increase your visibility to the exact audience that is looking for you.
Find your gym on bjjrecon.com and claim it today. It is free, it takes two minutes, and the travelers are already looking.
