Seasonal weekly benchmark — Jul 27
Lawn Fertilizer
Jul 27Rank Trend
How top brands moved week over week. Rank 1 is the top position.
Scotts owns this category outright. It is named in all twelve responses and leads eight of them, including the explicit ranking prompt in three of four engines. That position is unchanged from last week. All of the movement is underneath it. Milorganite now holds second place in three of four engines and took the top slot on the Claude ranking prompt and the Perplexity budget prompt. Lesco went from four mentions to zero, a complete exit for a brand this tracker called a climber ten days ago. Pennington slipped to five mentions and now leans on ChatGPT, where it still holds a top-three slot, for most of its remaining visibility.
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.
Dropped this week
Opportunity for Brands
- Lesco is the story this week.
- It went from four mentions across three engines to zero.
- Last week this read called it the pro-grade value step-up and described it as climbing.
- A brand can hold a defensible niche in the copy and still vanish from the index in ten days.
- Nothing moved into that position.
- Yard Mastery, the other contractor-channel name, fell to a single mention.
- The pro-grade tier is now effectively unrepresented in AI answers for this persona.
- Espoma and Simple Lawn Solutions took the space instead.
- Espoma went from three mentions to five and now appears in three of the four engines.
- Simple Lawn Solutions went from one to three, all of it inside Claude and Gemini.
Cross-Agent Comparison
How 4 AI models rank the same category. Hover a brand to trace it across models.
4 agents · top 3 each
| Agent | #1 | #2 | #3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| chatgpt | GreenView | Scotts | Pennington |
| claude | Scotts | Milorganite | The Andersons |
| gemini | Scotts | Milorganite | The Andersons |
| perplexity | Scotts | Milorganite | GreenView |
What This Means
- The cross-agent table above ranks the top three for each engine across all three prompts.
- Read prompt by prompt the picture is sharper.
- Scotts leads the open discovery prompt in three of four engines.
- ChatGPT is the holdout and opens with the GreenView Fairway Formula instead.
- On the explicit brand-ranking prompt Scotts again leads three of four.
- Claude is the exception there and ranks Milorganite first.
- The under-forty-dollar prompt is where the engines split hardest.
- ChatGPT leads with GreenView, Claude and Gemini with Scotts, and Perplexity with Milorganite.
- Breadth varies by more than a factor of two.
- ChatGPT names twenty-six brand positions across its three answers; Perplexity names ten.
- ChatGPT is also the only engine that surfaces Vigoro, Expert Gardener, Sunday or Yard Mastery.
- Those names come out of its shopping listings rather than its written recommendation.
- Claude and Gemini each name exactly six brands across three answers and never leave that core.
Why These Brands Win
- All twelve responses recommend slow-release nitrogen.
- Not one engine leads with a liquid feed or a fast-green formula for this weekend-maintenance homeowner.
- Each brand arrives attached to a specific bag: Scotts Turf Builder, Milorganite 6-4-0, The Andersons PGF Complete, GreenView Fairway Formula.
- The recommendation unit in this category is the product, not the brand.
- Three of four engines put timing ahead of product choice, arguing that a late-summer and fall feeding schedule beats any label.
- Gemini is the exception and goes straight to products.
- Six of twelve responses tell the homeowner to run a soil test before buying anything.
- Gemini never mentions one.
- The brands that win share two things: broad big-box availability plus a published N-P-K number the engines can quote back.
Frequently Asked Questions
What lawn fertilizer does AI recommend most?▾
Which lawn fertilizer brand ranks #1 across all AI models?▾
Why does ChatGPT recommend different lawn fertilizer than Claude?▾
What lawn fertilizer 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.
Seasonal categories are benchmarked weekly during active periods. Results reflect organic AI behavior at the time of testing. Read the full methodology
How this report was produced
- Evaluation period
- Jul 27
- Cadence
- Weekly
- 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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