Evergreen monthly benchmark — Jul 29
Protein Powder
Jul 29Rank Trend
How top brands moved week over week. Rank 1 is the top position.
Optimum Nutrition stopped being unanimous. It appeared in all twelve responses last run and eleven of twelve this run, missing only the ChatGPT discovery answer. It still leads the under-fifty-dollar prompt in all four engines, which is the only unanimous result in the run. Transparent Labs holds the aggregate top slot in three of four engines for the second run running. The real movement is Momentous. Two mentions in two engines last run, five mentions in all four this run, and the top rank on the Claude comparison prompt. Dymatize is the mirror image, holding seven mentions across three engines without taking a single top-three slot in any of them.
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
- Momentous is the move this run.
- It went from two mentions in two engines to five mentions in all four, the only challenger with cross-model presence.
- It also took the top slot on the Claude ranking prompt, displacing Transparent Labs there.
- The positioning that carried it is per-batch NSF certification, not price and not protein count.
- Dymatize is the counterweight.
- Seven mentions and presence in three engines, and not one top-three slot in the cross-agent table.
- It is this run version of a brand that everyone names and nobody leads with.
- Ascent and Orgain each went from one mention to three.
- Orgain now appears in three of the four engines, the widest reach of any dedicated plant-based brand this run.
- Ritual, MuscleTech and Kaged all fell to zero.
Cross-Agent Comparison
How 4 AI models rank the same category. Hover a brand to trace it across models.
4 agents · top 3 each
Dymatize leads in total mentions (7) but doesn’t appear below. High mention volume doesn’t always equal top-pick authority.
| Agent | #1 | #2 | #3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| chatgpt | Transparent Labs | Optimum Nutrition | NOW Sports |
| claude | Optimum Nutrition | Momentous | Naked Nutrition |
| gemini | Transparent Labs | Optimum Nutrition | Nutricost |
| perplexity | Transparent Labs | Optimum Nutrition | Momentous |
Dymatize·7 mentions, outside top 3 for all models | |||
What This Means
- The cross-agent table above ranks the top three for each engine across all three prompts.
- Read prompt by prompt the split is cleaner.
- Optimum Nutrition leads the under-fifty-dollar prompt in all four engines, the only unanimous result in this run.
- Transparent Labs leads the open discovery prompt in three of four.
- Claude is the holdout and opens with Optimum Nutrition.
- The explicit ranking prompt is where the engines scatter.
- Gemini and Perplexity rank Transparent Labs first, ChatGPT ranks Optimum Nutrition first, and Claude ranks Momentous first.
- Claude ranked Transparent Labs first on that prompt last run.
- Breadth is tighter than in most categories.
- Perplexity names nineteen brand positions across three answers and Claude names fourteen.
- Perplexity is the only engine to surface Muscle Milk, GNC and Isopure.
- Gemini is the only one to surface Levels.
Why These Brands Win
- All four engines open the discovery prompt with whey isolate as the default protein for this lifter.
- None leads with a plant-based or blended formula.
- Third-party certification appears in all twelve responses.
- NSF Certified for Sport, Informed Sport and Informed Choice are now explained unprompted rather than listed.
- Every brand arrives attached to a specific tub and a protein number.
- Transparent Labs is quoted at twenty-eight grams, Dymatize ISO100 at twenty-five, and Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard at twenty-four.
- The recommendation unit here is the SKU, not the brand.
- Price per serving rather than price per tub is the value frame in every budget answer.
- The heavy-metals contamination story that two engines carried last run now appears in Claude alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
What protein powder does AI recommend most?▾
Which protein powder brand ranks #1 across all AI models?▾
Why does ChatGPT recommend different protein powder than Claude?▾
What protein powder 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
- Jul 29
- 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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