Haircare,
according to AI

Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about haircare — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, L'Oréal Paris owns the conversation.

0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated

L'Oréal Paris is the default answer.

Named in 35% of haircare answers, typically in position 2.2. Garnier follows at 20%, Tresemmé at 18%.

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.

Haircare is decided on attraction.

Being named is visibility. Underneath it, every answer describes a brand in three ways — how much it stands out, how much it belongs, and how much it is returned to. In haircare, Color Wow leads attraction at 129 against VO5 at 61, indexed on the category at 100.

Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full haircare desire edition →

Before it answers, it goes looking for Aussie.

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 87 searches in haircare, Aussie is named in 8% of the ones that name a brand at all. ChatGPT Web does not report its 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 haircare.

The independent sources AI models cite when answering haircare questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.

Clairol converts reads into citations. L'Oréal Paris doesn't.

When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Clairol converts 67% of reads; L'Oréal Paris just 20%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.

Three models. Three different answers.

Ask about haircare and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → L'Oréal Paris, Gemini → Garnier, ChatGPT → Amika. Their top-five lists share just 9% of names.

Brands whose visibility swings most between models — the bar per model, widest gap on the right.

Product pages carry haircare.

Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Product pages supply the most citations; How-to guides convert best — 100% of the ones models opened were actually cited.

Structured data is what separates cited from ignored.

Of the haircare pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Structured data is worth 10 percentage points; updated this year pages fare 13pp worse. Measured within the read population, so selection can't flatter it.

Faith in Nature 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. Garnier is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.

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 haircare 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 Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:41:17 GMT.