Supermarkets,
according to AI
Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about supermarkets — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Tesco owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
Tesco is the default answer.
Named in 35% of supermarkets answers, typically in position 1.3. Asda follows at 27%, Sainsbury's at 22%.
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 | Tesco | 35% | 1.3 | 32% | 18% |
| 2 | Asda | 27% | 2.6 | 5% | — |
| 3 | Sainsbury's | 22% | 2.9 | 32% | 17% |
| 4 | Morrisons | 20% | 3.9 | 0% | — |
| 5 | Waitrose | 15% | 4.7 | 11% | 33% |
| 6 | Aldi | 13% | 2.6 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Next | 10% | 2.7 | 0% | — |
| 8 | Lidl | 10% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Ocado | 10% | 4.8 | 5% | 0% |
| 10 | Marks & Spencer | 8% | 4.2 | 0% | 0% |
| 11 | Co-op | 5% | 2.7 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Sous Chef | 2% | 1.0 | 5% | — |
| 13 | Fine Food Specialist | 2% | 2.0 | 11% | — |
| 14 | Lina Stores | 2% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 15 | Boots | 2% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
Supermarkets is decided on affinity.
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 supermarkets, Marks & Spencer leads affinity at 136 against Budgens at 79, indexed on the category at 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full supermarkets desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for Tesco.
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 53 searches in supermarkets, Tesco 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 supermarkets.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering supermarkets questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
Waitrose converts reads into citations. Sainsbury's doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Waitrose converts 33% of reads; Sainsbury's just 17%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tesco | 35% | 1.3 | 32% | 18% |
| 2 | Asda | 27% | 2.6 | 5% | — |
| 3 | Sainsbury's | 22% | 2.9 | 32% | 17% |
| 4 | Morrisons | 20% | 3.9 | 0% | — |
| 5 | Waitrose | 15% | 4.7 | 11% | 33% |
| 6 | Aldi | 13% | 2.6 | 0% | — |
| 7 | Next | 10% | 2.7 | 0% | — |
| 8 | Lidl | 10% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Ocado | 10% | 4.8 | 5% | 0% |
| 10 | Marks & Spencer | 8% | 4.2 | 0% | 0% |
| 11 | Co-op | 5% | 2.7 | 0% | — |
| 12 | Sous Chef | 2% | 1.0 | 5% | — |
| 13 | Fine Food Specialist | 2% | 2.0 | 11% | — |
| 14 | Lina Stores | 2% | 3.0 | 0% | — |
| 15 | Boots | 2% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
Three models. Three different answers.
Ask about supermarkets and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → Sainsbury's, Gemini → Tesco, ChatGPT → Waitrose. Their top-five lists share just 25% 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tesco | 35% | 55% | 15% | 40pp |
| Sainsbury's | 35% | 25% | 5% | 30pp |
| Asda | 35% | 35% | 10% | 25pp |
| Morrisons | 15% | 30% | 15% | 15pp |
| Aldi | 15% | 20% | 5% | 15pp |
| Next | 5% | 20% | 5% | 15pp |
| Co-op | 0% | 15% | 0% | 15pp |
| Lidl | 15% | 10% | 5% | 10pp |
| Ocado | 10% | 15% | 5% | 10pp |
| Marks & Spencer | 5% | 15% | 5% | 10pp |
Editorial carry supermarkets.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; Product pages convert best — 74% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial | 93 | 92 | 50% |
| How-to guides | 88 | 76 | 54% |
| Listicles | 45 | 35 | 56% |
| Other | 26 | 59 | 31% |
| Product pages | 25 | 9 | 74% |
| Community threads | 24 | 9 | 73% |
| News | 21 | 8 | 72% |
| category-page | 20 | 16 | 56% |
Specifications is what separates cited from ignored.
Of the supermarkets pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Specifications is worth 10 percentage points; cites its sources pages fare 23pp 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Specifications | 47 | 62% | 740 | 52% | +10pp |
| Named author | 408 | 56% | 379 | 49% | +7pp |
| Answer up front | 324 | 55% | 463 | 51% | +3pp |
| Structured data | 403 | 54% | 384 | 51% | +3pp |
| Updated this year | 242 | 53% | 545 | 52% | +1pp |
| Hard statistics | 193 | 44% | 594 | 56% | -12pp |
| Comparison table | 121 | 41% | 666 | 55% | -13pp |
| Cites its sources | 55 | 31% | 732 | 54% | -23pp |
Marks & Spencer 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. Marks & Spencer is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marks & Spencer | 28 | 3% | 31 |
| The Artisan Food Company | 25 | 33% | 3 |
| Tesco | 23 | 30% | 40 |
| Sainsbury's | 23 | 67% | 18 |
| Fine Food Specialist | 19 | 83% | 6 |
| Amazon Fresh | 18 | 0% | 5 |
| Waitrose | 17 | 22% | 9 |
| Sous Chef | 15 | 83% | 6 |
| Morrisons | 14 | 2% | 59 |
| Aldi | 13 | 0% | 9 |
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 supermarkets 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 Mon, 14 Sep 2026 06:41:27 GMT.