Evergreen monthly benchmark — Sep 10
Dog Food
Sep 10Rank Trend
How top brands moved week over week. Rank 1 is the top position.
Both unconstrained prompts returned the identical podium on all four engines. Purina Pro Plan first, Hills Science Diet second, Royal Canin third, in eight cells out of eight. No category this benchmark tracks has produced agreement that complete. The engines only begin to differ once a price ceiling is applied.
Top Brands by AI Mention Frequency
Mention frequency counts how many times a brand appeared across all AI responses. This differs from top-pick rank, which reflects each model’s #1 choice.
Opportunity for Brands
- Ten of the nineteen brands were named by exactly one engine.
- Seven of those ten are Claude alone, which is where the long tail of this category lives.
- Eukanuba is the strongest brand with no authority anywhere in the run.
- It is named five times by three engines and its best position on any engine is fourth.
- Royal Canin has the opposite shape and it is the more interesting one.
- It was ranked exactly third in all eight of its appearances, never once higher and never once lower.
Cross-Agent Comparison
How 4 AI models rank the same category. Hover a brand to trace it across models.
4 agents · top 3 each
Royal Canin leads in total mentions (8) but doesn’t appear below. High mention volume doesn’t always equal top-pick authority.
| Agent | #1 | #2 | #3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| chatgpt | Purina Pro Plan | Hills Science Diet | Purina ONE |
| claude | Purina Pro Plan | Purina ONE | Hills Science Diet |
| gemini | Purina Pro Plan | Hills Science Diet | Diamond Naturals |
| perplexity | Purina Pro Plan | IAMS | Hills Science Diet |
Royal Canin·8 mentions, outside top 3 for all models | |||
All 4 models agree on Purina Pro Plan as the top pick
What This Means
- The four engines return the same first three brands on every prompt that does not mention price.
- Disagreement begins at the budget prompt, where six brands appear that no unconstrained cell names.
- Claude ranges widest with fifteen distinct brands and Perplexity narrowest with six.
- Claude is the only engine to reach for fresh feeding names such as Nom Nom, Freshpet and Open Farm.
- Perplexity is the only engine that drops Purina Pro Plan entirely once the seventy dollar ceiling applies.
Why These Brands Win
- WSAVA manufacturer criteria are the screen every engine applies before it names a brand.
- Board certified veterinary nutritionists on staff and published feeding trials outrank any ingredient list.
- All four engines warned against reading the first few ingredients as a quality signal.
- Every engine steered away from grain free formulas and cited the FDA cardiomyopathy reports.
- Body condition rather than the number on the feeding chart is how all four say to set the portion.
Frequently Asked Questions
What dog food does AI recommend most?▾
Which dog food brand ranks #1 across all AI models?▾
Why does ChatGPT recommend different dog food than Claude?▾
What dog food brands are invisible to AI?▾
How we measure this
Each benchmark runs the same standardized prompts across multiple leading AI systems, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. We use consistent, category-specific questions designed to surface genuine product recommendations — not sponsored results.
Responses are parsed to extract brand mentions, rank position, and frequency. We then analyze cross-model agreement, identify which brands consistently appear in top positions, and flag where AI outputs diverge from marketplace trends.
Evergreen categories are benchmarked monthly. Results reflect organic AI behavior at the time of testing. Read the full methodology
How this report was produced
- Evaluation period
- Sep 10
- Cadence
- Monthly
- Prompts evaluated
- 3
- Review status
- Published after human review
- Models included
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity
Full details of how prompts are run, parsed, normalized, and scored are in the methodology, and the platform page explains how the system is built and operated.
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