Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about pet care — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Pets at Home owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
Named in 10% of pet care answers, typically in position 2.0. Purina follows at 10%, Zooplus at 10%.
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 | Pets at Home | 10% | 2.0 | 10% | 100% |
| 2 | Purina | 10% | 2.2 | 3% | 20% |
| 3 | Zooplus | 10% | 2.3 | 10% | 15% |
| 4 | Harringtons | 10% | 2.5 | 3% | — |
| 5 | Tesco | 10% | 2.8 | 10% | 67% |
| 6 | Butternut Box | 7% | 1.8 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Tails.com | 7% | 2.0 | 0% | 0% |
| 8 | Royal Canin | 7% | 2.3 | 7% | 15% |
| 9 | PetShop.co.uk | 7% | 3.0 | 7% | — |
| 10 | Skinner's | 7% | 4.3 | 7% | 29% |
| 11 | Oneisall | 5% | 1.3 | 3% | 100% |
| 12 | Wahl | 5% | 1.7 | 0% | 0% |
| 13 | VioVET | 5% | 3.0 | 10% | — |
| 14 | Wagg | 5% | 3.7 | 0% | — |
| 15 | Aldi | 5% | 4.3 | 0% | — |
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 39% of the 41 brands rated above indifference. Pets at Home leads the brands the answers name, at 78% of maximum Desire. On attachment, the most divided driver, Pets at Home indexes 133 against Oneisall at 68, 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 pet care desire edition →
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 65 searches in pet care, Butternut Box is named in 11% 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 independent sources AI models cite when answering pet care questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Pets at Home converts 100% of reads; Wahl just 0%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pets at Home | 10% | 2.0 | 10% | 100% |
| 2 | Purina | 10% | 2.2 | 3% | 20% |
| 3 | Zooplus | 10% | 2.3 | 10% | 15% |
| 4 | Harringtons | 10% | 2.5 | 3% | — |
| 5 | Tesco | 10% | 2.8 | 10% | 67% |
| 6 | Butternut Box | 7% | 1.8 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Tails.com | 7% | 2.0 | 0% | 0% |
| 8 | Royal Canin | 7% | 2.3 | 7% | 15% |
| 9 | PetShop.co.uk | 7% | 3.0 | 7% | — |
| 10 | Skinner's | 7% | 4.3 | 7% | 29% |
| 11 | Oneisall | 5% | 1.3 | 3% | 100% |
| 12 | Wahl | 5% | 1.7 | 0% | 0% |
| 13 | VioVET | 5% | 3.0 | 10% | — |
| 14 | Wagg | 5% | 3.7 | 0% | — |
| 15 | Aldi | 5% | 4.3 | 0% | — |
Ask about pet care and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → Tesco, Gemini → Pets at Home, ChatGPT → Zooplus. Their top-five lists share just 11% of names.
Brands whose visibility swings most between models — the bar per model, widest gap on the right.
| Brand | Claude | Gemini | ChatGPT | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VioVET | 0% | 15% | 0% | 15pp |
| Zooplus | 5% | 10% | 15% | 10pp |
| Pets at Home | 5% | 15% | 10% | 10pp |
| Purina | 5% | 15% | 10% | 10pp |
| Butcher's | 5% | 0% | 0% | 5pp |
| Butternut Box | 5% | 10% | 5% | 5pp |
| Groomers | 5% | 5% | 0% | 5pp |
| Pure Pet Food | 5% | 5% | 0% | 5pp |
| PetShop.co.uk | 5% | 10% | 5% | 5pp |
| YuMOVE | 5% | 5% | 0% | 5pp |
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; How-to guides convert best — 89% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial | 50 | 10 | 83% |
| How-to guides | 47 | 6 | 89% |
| category-page | 29 | 5 | 85% |
| Product pages | 26 | 9 | 74% |
| Comparisons | 21 | 3 | 88% |
| Other | 17 | 6 | 74% |
| Listicles | 9 | 2 | 82% |
| Community threads | 7 | 1 | 88% |
Of the pet care pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Named author is worth -0 percentage points; comparison table pages fare 27pp worse. Measured within the read population, so selection can't flatter it.
| Feature | Pages with | Cited % | Pages without | Cited % | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Named author | 124 | 81% | 159 | 81% | -0pp |
| Structured data | 194 | 78% | 89 | 87% | -8pp |
| Answer up front | 112 | 73% | 171 | 86% | -13pp |
| Specifications | 39 | 69% | 244 | 83% | -14pp |
| Updated this year | 85 | 71% | 198 | 85% | -15pp |
| Hard statistics | 85 | 69% | 198 | 86% | -16pp |
| Comparison table | 78 | 62% | 205 | 88% | -27pp |
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. Burns Pet Nutrition is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Burns Pet Nutrition | 46 | 7% | 14 |
| Purina | 39 | 2% | 109 |
| Tails.com | 38 | 67% | 3 |
| James Wellbeloved | 33 | 20% | 5 |
| VioVET | 31 | 10% | 10 |
| Hyperdrug | 31 | 25% | 4 |
| Harringtons | 28 | 25% | 4 |
| Wahl | 25 | 0% | 3 |
| Butternut Box | 24 | 9% | 11 |
| Animed Direct | 23 | 17% | 6 |
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.
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.
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 13:13:41 GMT.