US Beauty & Personal Care: AI Shelf Visibility Insights for Brands

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US Beauty & Personal Care: AI Shelf Visibility Insights for Brands

A study of AI Recommendation Coverage (ARC) across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, measuring 1,671 beauty and personal care brands against 800 shopper prompts

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AI Recommendation Coverage Leaderboard

AI beauty brand leaderboard

  • CeraVe is the most-recommended brand in US beauty, by a distance. 1,434 mentions and 5.8% of the shelf, against 1,160 for La Roche-Posay.
  • It converts far better as well. 472 first-place answers to La Roche-Posay’s 120, including 45% of every #1 in moisturizers and 42% in cleansers.
  • Vanicream ranks 4th on mentions and 2nd on first place. 169 #1 answers from 669 recommendations, 92 of them from ChatGPT alone.
  • Native is the only clean-positioned brand in the top ten. 384 recommendations, in a category where clean and natural products take 24% of deodorant answers but 7% of the shelf overall.

*All interactive charts are best viewed on Desktop or Tablets

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Which brands hold up across all AI surfaces?

AI beauty brand consistency by assistant

  • La Roche-Posay is the steadiest brand on the shelf. 4.5%, 5.1%, 5.1% and 4.2% — a 1.2x spread across the four assistants.
  • Even the leader is surface-dependent. CeraVe peaks at 7.4% on Claude and drops to 4.7% on Gemini.
  • Vanicream is a ChatGPT brand. 4.0% there against 1.7% on Perplexity, and 92 of its 169 first-place answers come from ChatGPT.
  • Cetaphil falls away on Gemini. 3.1% on both ChatGPT and Claude against 1.4% on Gemini, the widest gap among the drugstore names.

*Each cell is the brand's share of that assistant's total recommendations. Only the top 15 brands are shown, so a column sums to roughly a third rather than 100%.

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Recommendations, redrawn by parent company

AI beauty recommendations by parent company

  • L’Oréal owns 18% of the shelf on its own. 4,507 recommendations, more than Unilever and Procter & Gamble combined.
  • Four owners take more than half of everything attributed. L’Oréal, Unilever, P&G and Kenvue total 9,839 of the 17,925 recommendations with a known parent.
  • Two independents outrank the conglomerates behind them. Pharmaceutical Specialties, which makes Vanicream, at 680 and e.l.f. Beauty at 616 both place ahead of Beiersdorf and Colgate-Palmolive.
  • A quarter of the shelf has no owner attached. 6,625 of 24,550 recommendations go to brands with no public parent.

*Covers the 17,925 of 24,550 recommendations attributable to a parent company. Brands with no known parent are excluded from this view.

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Sources the assistants get their evidence from

AI beauty citation sources by assistant

  • Gemini cites nothing you can act on. 5,635 of its citations route through grounding redirects, so its sourcing cannot be audited or influenced through the usual channels.
  • Beauty retail splits by assistant. ChatGPT leans on target.com (1,988) and ulta.com (739); Perplexity on sephora.com (930) and amazon.com (728), a site ChatGPT cites just 6 times.
  • Brand-owned pages do get cited here. laroche-posay.us at 268 and cerave.com at 175 outrank every publisher, so the two category leaders are also the two brands whose own sites the assistants trust.
  • General news outranks beauty media. nbcnews.com at 304 and today.com at 181 are the largest editorial sources on the list.

*Counts are citations rather than product recommendations. All interactive charts are best viewed on desktop or tablet.

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What this means for your brand

This report is built from 800 real shopping prompts run across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Every brand each assistant recommended was captured using DataWeave’s platform, along with the position it held in the answer and the sources cited. Recommendations are rank-weighted so first place counts for more than eighth, and brands are normalized and mapped to parent companies where ownership is known.

Run against your own portfolio, the same method answers three questions most brands cannot currently answer: where you rank in AI answers and against whom, which assistants you are losing on, and whether the fix sits in your retailer product pages or in third-party editorial.

This report analyzes the Beauty and Personal Care category. DataWeave measures the same thing across any category and market, continuously rather than as a snapshot. Talk to us to find out where your brands stand on the AI shelf.

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