Dermatological Skincare,
according to AI
Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about dermatological skincare — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Vaseline owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
Vaseline is the default answer.
Named in 17% of dermatological skincare answers, typically in position 4.0. CeraVe follows at 15%, Cetaphil at 12%.
Every brand AI names, ranked.
Visibility is the share of answers naming the brand; citation share is its slice of all brand-owned pages cited; read→cited is how often its pages convert a read into a citation.
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vaseline | 17% | 4.0 | 5% | 100% |
| 2 | CeraVe | 15% | 3.4 | 5% | 100% |
| 3 | Cetaphil | 12% | 2.4 | 0% | — |
| 4 | E45 | 12% | 2.9 | 0% | — |
| 5 | Superdrug | 10% | 1.3 | 21% | 40% |
| 6 | Nivea | 8% | 2.8 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Aveeno | 8% | 4.6 | 0% | 0% |
| 8 | La Roche-Posay | 7% | 3.0 | 0% | 0% |
| 9 | Simple | 5% | 2.7 | 5% | — |
| 10 | Cetraben | 5% | 3.7 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Dove | 5% | 5.3 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Childs Farm | 3% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Avene | 3% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 14 | Epaderm | 3% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
| 15 | Garnier | 3% | 5.5 | 0% | — |
Vaseline is named most. That is not the same as being wanted.
Being named is visibility. Underneath it, asked to rate each brand directly, the AI assistants judge it three ways — how much it stands out, how much it belongs, and how much it is returned to. They put 51% of the 43 brands rated above indifference. Dove leads the brands the answers name, at 77% of maximum Desire. On attraction, the most divided driver, Dove indexes 122 against Zerafite at 72, on a category average of 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared (84 / 92 / 100 / 108 / 116). Above indifference means Desire above two-thirds of its maximum. See the full dermatological skincare desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for Superdrug.
An assistant does not answer from memory alone. It runs its own web searches first, and whoever it searches for is the shortlist it then chooses from. Across 70 searches in dermatological skincare, Superdrug is named in 67% of the ones that name a brand at all. ChatGPT Web, Copilot do not report their searches, so these shares are measured against the ones that do.
These are the assistants' own searches, read from their answers — not what anyone typed into a search engine.
The referees of dermatological skincare.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering dermatological skincare questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
Superdrug converts reads into citations.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Superdrug converts 40% of reads. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vaseline | 17% | 4.0 | 5% | 100% |
| 2 | CeraVe | 15% | 3.4 | 5% | 100% |
| 3 | Cetaphil | 12% | 2.4 | 0% | — |
| 4 | E45 | 12% | 2.9 | 0% | — |
| 5 | Superdrug | 10% | 1.3 | 21% | 40% |
| 6 | Nivea | 8% | 2.8 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Aveeno | 8% | 4.6 | 0% | 0% |
| 8 | La Roche-Posay | 7% | 3.0 | 0% | 0% |
| 9 | Simple | 5% | 2.7 | 5% | — |
| 10 | Cetraben | 5% | 3.7 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Dove | 5% | 5.3 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Childs Farm | 3% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Avene | 3% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
| 14 | Epaderm | 3% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
| 15 | Garnier | 3% | 5.5 | 0% | — |
Three models. Three different answers.
Ask about dermatological skincare and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → Cetaphil, Gemini → Vaseline, ChatGPT → CeraVe. Their top-five lists share just 38% of names.
Brands whose visibility swings most between models — the bar per model, widest gap on the right.
The data behind this chart
| Brand | Claude | Gemini | ChatGPT | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cetaphil | 20% | 15% | 0% | 20pp |
| Vaseline | 20% | 25% | 5% | 20pp |
| CeraVe | 15% | 25% | 5% | 20pp |
| Superdrug | 5% | 20% | 5% | 15pp |
| La Roche-Posay | 0% | 15% | 5% | 15pp |
| E45 | 15% | 15% | 5% | 10pp |
| Simple | 5% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
| Aveeno | 5% | 15% | 5% | 10pp |
| Cetraben | 5% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
| Avene | 0% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
Editorial carry dermatological skincare.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; Comparisons convert best — 91% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial | 238 | 77 | 76% |
| How-to guides | 226 | 34 | 87% |
| Product pages | 88 | 12 | 88% |
| category-page | 42 | 13 | 76% |
| Listicles | 33 | 13 | 72% |
| Other | 31 | 47 | 40% |
| Documentation | 22 | 21 | 51% |
| Comparisons | 21 | 2 | 91% |
Structured data is what separates cited from ignored.
Of the dermatological skincare pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Structured data is worth 28 percentage points; cites its sources pages fare 41pp worse. Measured within the read population, so selection can't flatter it.
The data behind this chart
| Feature | Pages with | Cited % | Pages without | Cited % | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structured data | 899 | 82% | 373 | 54% | +28pp |
| Named author | 580 | 83% | 692 | 66% | +17pp |
| Specifications | 69 | 88% | 1203 | 73% | +15pp |
| Answer up front | 433 | 76% | 839 | 73% | +2pp |
| Updated this year | 285 | 75% | 987 | 74% | +1pp |
| Comparison table | 188 | 69% | 1084 | 75% | -6pp |
| Hard statistics | 340 | 59% | 932 | 79% | -20pp |
| Cites its sources | 55 | 35% | 1217 | 76% | -41pp |
QV builds pages AI can quote.
Readiness scores each brand's own pages on the structure models reward — a direct answer up front, tables, hard numbers, named authors, structured data, recency, specifications. Childs Farm is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| QV | 54 | 67% | 3 |
| The Ordinary | 52 | 57% | 7 |
| E45 | 42 | 27% | 11 |
| Childs Farm | 42 | 0% | 3 |
| No7 | 41 | 71% | 7 |
| Inkey List | 37 | 72% | 29 |
| Aveeno | 35 | 21% | 38 |
| Simple | 30 | 79% | 19 |
| Eucerin | 30 | 24% | 34 |
| La Roche-Posay | 30 | 20% | 35 |
Readiness is the share of eight measurable structural signals present on a brand's profiled pages. It is a build-quality measure, not a ranking of the brand.
The questions dermatological skincare pages have to settle.
Read straight off the pages AI cited: the consumer questions cited content answers most often. Content that fails to settle these is content models have no reason to quote.
Nineteen more categories.
Method: 20 unbranded consumer prompts per category, spread across the buying journey, run weekly against ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Read→cited uses Claude and ChatGPT only (Gemini does not separate the two). Correlational observations of model behaviour at the time of the run. Data from the run completed Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:58:13 GMT.