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 33% of haircare answers, typically in position 2.2. Tresemmé follows at 20%, Garnier at 20%.
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 | L'Oréal Paris | 33% | 2.2 | 17% | 50% |
| 2 | Tresemmé | 20% | 2.8 | 0% | — |
| 3 | Garnier | 20% | 3.4 | 8% | 100% |
| 4 | Redken | 18% | 2.3 | 8% | 25% |
| 5 | Olaplex | 17% | 2.6 | 17% | 25% |
| 6 | Pantene | 13% | 3.8 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Color Wow | 12% | 2.0 | 17% | — |
| 8 | Aussie | 12% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Schwarzkopf | 12% | 3.4 | 0% | — |
| 10 | Monday Haircare | 10% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Faith in Nature | 10% | 1.7 | 17% | 100% |
| 12 | K18 | 8% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Clairol | 8% | 1.8 | 0% | — |
| 14 | Living Proof | 8% | 2.2 | 0% | 0% |
| 15 | Moroccanoil | 8% | 2.6 | 8% | 17% |
Dove is the haircare brand AI wants most.
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 36% of the 36 brands rated above indifference. Dove leads the brands the answers name, at 75% of maximum Desire. On attachment, the most divided driver, Kérastase indexes 122 against Imperity at 54, 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 haircare desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for Batiste.
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 82 searches in haircare, Batiste is named in 13% 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 haircare.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering haircare questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
Redken converts reads into citations. Moroccanoil doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Redken converts 25% of reads; Moroccanoil just 17%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | L'Oréal Paris | 33% | 2.2 | 17% | 50% |
| 2 | Tresemmé | 20% | 2.8 | 0% | — |
| 3 | Garnier | 20% | 3.4 | 8% | 100% |
| 4 | Redken | 18% | 2.3 | 8% | 25% |
| 5 | Olaplex | 17% | 2.6 | 17% | 25% |
| 6 | Pantene | 13% | 3.8 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Color Wow | 12% | 2.0 | 17% | — |
| 8 | Aussie | 12% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Schwarzkopf | 12% | 3.4 | 0% | — |
| 10 | Monday Haircare | 10% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Faith in Nature | 10% | 1.7 | 17% | 100% |
| 12 | K18 | 8% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 13 | Clairol | 8% | 1.8 | 0% | — |
| 14 | Living Proof | 8% | 2.2 | 0% | 0% |
| 15 | Moroccanoil | 8% | 2.6 | 8% | 17% |
The models do not agree on who leads.
Ask about haircare and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → L'Oréal Paris, Gemini → L'Oréal Paris, ChatGPT → Garnier. Their top-five lists share just 10% 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tresemmé | 40% | 20% | 0% | 40pp |
| Garnier | 5% | 35% | 20% | 30pp |
| L'Oréal Paris | 40% | 40% | 20% | 20pp |
| Redken | 15% | 30% | 10% | 20pp |
| Olaplex | 15% | 25% | 10% | 15pp |
| VO5 | 15% | 0% | 5% | 15pp |
| Pantene | 15% | 20% | 5% | 15pp |
| Schwarzkopf | 10% | 20% | 5% | 15pp |
| Aussie | 5% | 20% | 10% | 15pp |
| Monday Haircare | 10% | 15% | 5% | 10pp |
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.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product pages | 65 | 1 | 98% |
| category-page | 42 | 1 | 98% |
| Editorial | 34 | 4 | 89% |
| Listicles | 28 | 3 | 90% |
| How-to guides | 24 | 0 | 100% |
| Comparisons | 18 | 0 | 100% |
| Reviews | 16 | 2 | 89% |
| Community threads | 14 | 1 | 93% |
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.
The data behind this chart
| Feature | Pages with | Cited % | Pages without | Cited % | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structured data | 214 | 94% | 66 | 85% | +10pp |
| Specifications | 71 | 97% | 209 | 90% | +7pp |
| Comparison table | 30 | 97% | 250 | 92% | +5pp |
| Answer up front | 85 | 95% | 195 | 91% | +5pp |
| Named author | 98 | 90% | 182 | 93% | -4pp |
| Hard statistics | 47 | 83% | 233 | 94% | -11pp |
| Updated this year | 54 | 81% | 226 | 95% | -13pp |
Head & Shoulders 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. Head & Shoulders is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head & Shoulders | 37 | 0% | 27 |
| Faith in Nature | 33 | 80% | 5 |
| L'Oréal Paris | 25 | 8% | 101 |
| Color Wow | 24 | 7% | 14 |
| Redken | 23 | 5% | 74 |
| Garnier | 19 | 0% | 95 |
| Clairol | 19 | 25% | 4 |
| Kérastase | 19 | 25% | 4 |
| Olaplex | 17 | 2% | 103 |
| John Frieda | 15 | 20% | 5 |
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 Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:14:58 GMT.