How AI wants price comparison sites
Price Comparison Sites is decided on affinity: Money Saving Expert indexes 120 there against Quotezone at 88, a 32-point spread. Attachment separates almost nobody (16 points across the whole category), so being described that way is table stakes here rather than an advantage. Money Saving Expert holds the strongest overall profile at 116 — complete desire. But the brand assistants name most often is Money.co.uk, not the category's market leader: being desired and being named are not the same measurement. Across these 11 brands, attraction tracks being named most closely (rank correlation 0.51).
11 brands · 60 AI answers · 163 dimension scores · measured, never estimated
Price Comparison Sitesupset
| # | Brand | Attraction | Affinity | Attachment | Desire shape | Named in |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Money Saving Expert | 118 | 120 | 111 | Complete desire | 7% |
| 2 | Compare the Market | 113 | 106 | 106 | Complete desire | 13% |
| 3 | MoneySuperMarket | 103 | 101 | 103 | Category default | 12% |
| 4 | Uswitch | 103 | 104 | 103 | Quietly trusted | 0% |
| 5 | Tesco Bank | 95 | 109 | 97 | Quietly trusted | 3% |
| 6 | Money.co.uk | 100 | 98 | 97 | Category default | 27% |
| 7 | Confused.com | 97 | 96 | 97 | Magnetic but unbought | 10% |
| 8 | Go-Compare | 98 | 96 | 97 | Magnetic but unbought | 0% |
| 9 | Go.Compare | 98 | 96 | 97 | Magnetic but unbought | 7% |
| 10 | CompareNI | 87 | 88 | 95 | Fading | 0% |
| 11 | Quotezone | 87 | 88 | 95 | Fading | 0% |
Indexed against the price comparison sites average of 11 brands (100 = the category), measured across 60 AI answers in the latest weekly run.
Driver by driver
Where the category actually separates. A wide spread means assistants describe these brands very differently on that driver; a narrow one means it is table stakes.
Affinity
The widest field of the three: this is where the category separates.
Attraction
Real separation, but not the category’s defining contest.
Attachment
The tightest of the three: most brands land close together here.
The shapes AI leaves these brands in
Three indices make a profile, and profiles fall into recognisable shapes. A brand that is magnetic but unbought has a different problem from a habit nobody loves — and a different thing to build next.
What assistants actually talk about
The sixteen dimensions underneath the drivers, scored 0–10 on how the answers describe each brand. Spread is the distance between the strongest and weakest brand: the widest are where a brand can still separate itself, the narrowest are the price of entry.
Where brands separate
| Dimension | Driver | Category avg | Strongest | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Differentiation vs Sameness | Attraction | 5.8 | Money Saving Expert 7.7 | 2.7 |
| Trust & Credibility | Affinity | 7.2 | Money Saving Expert 8.7 | 2.7 |
| Leadership & Momentum | Attraction | 6.7 | Money Saving Expert 8.3 | 2.3 |
| Boldness & Creativity | Attraction | 5.8 | Compare the Market 7.0 | 2.0 |
| Heritage & Authority | Affinity | 6.8 | Money Saving Expert 8.0 | 2.0 |
Where everyone reads alike
| Dimension | Driver | Category avg | Strongest | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Service & Support | Attachment | 6.2 | Money Saving Expert 7.0 | 1.0 |
| Ease of Use & Onboarding | Attachment | 7.5 | Compare the Market 8.0 | 1.0 |
| Sustainability & Ethics | Affinity | 5.3 | Money Saving Expert 6.5 | 1.5 |
| Style & Aesthetic | Attraction | 5.4 | Compare the Market 6.5 | 1.5 |
| Range & Availability | Attachment | 7.5 | Compare the Market 8.5 | 1.5 |
Does desire track being recommended?
Rank correlation between a brand's driver index and the share of answers naming it, across the 11 indexed brands in this category. A relationship inside one run's answers — descriptive, never causal, and easily moved by a single brand at this sample size.
Method & limitations
Every week, each category runs a fixed set of unbranded consumer prompts against ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. A separate model reads the answers and scores every brand named in them across 16 perception dimensions, 0–10. Those dimensions are grouped into the three Drivers of Desire from the Havas Science of Desire framework, and each brand's driver score is indexed against the average of every scored brand in its category — 100 is the category, 115 is fifteen per cent above it.
This measures how AI assistants describe brands in their answers. It is not a survey of people, and it is not an endorsement: the scores are a reading of machine-generated text at the time of the run, and relationships between drivers and how often a brand is named are correlational. A brand needs at least six scored dimensions in a run to be indexed, and a category needs at least four such brands to get a board. See the full methodology.
Other categories
Where next
This edition measures what AI wants from these brands. These answer what comes next — which brands AI names, which websites feed those answers, and how any of it is counted.