Evergreen monthly benchmark — Sep 2
Protein Powder
Sep 2Rank Trend
How top brands moved week over week. Rank 1 is the top position.
Optimum Nutrition is the only brand that reaches the top three on all four engines. Transparent Labs is the stronger challenger on paper and wins two engines outright. It is also completely absent from Perplexity, which is the single largest hole in any leading brand here. Momentous is the third brand named by all four engines and it is ranked in the top three by none 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 clearest opportunity in the category.
- It is named by all four engines and ranked in the top three by none of them, so it has reach without authority.
- Transparent Labs has the opposite problem in one place.
- It is ranked first by two engines and never appears on Perplexity, so a single engine is costing it a quarter of the market.
- Eight of the eighteen brands were named exactly once.
- Sports Research, Legion, Body Fortress, Kirkland Signature, NOW Sports, True Athlete, Garden of Life and Ritual each surfaced on one engine only.
Cross-Agent Comparison
How 4 AI models rank the same category. Hover a brand to trace it across models.
4 agents · top 3 each
Momentous leads in total mentions (5) but doesn’t appear below. High mention volume doesn’t always equal top-pick authority.
| Agent | #1 | #2 | #3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| chatgpt | Optimum Nutrition | Transparent Labs | Dymatize |
| claude | Transparent Labs | Nutricost | Optimum Nutrition |
| gemini | Transparent Labs | Optimum Nutrition | Nutricost |
| perplexity | Optimum Nutrition | Thorne | Naked |
Momentous·5 mentions, outside top 3 for all models | |||
What This Means
- Two engines lead with Transparent Labs and two lead with Optimum Nutrition.
- Claude and Gemini both put Transparent Labs first.
- ChatGPT and Perplexity both put Optimum Nutrition first.
- Perplexity is the outlier below that line.
- Its second and third places go to Thorne and Naked.
- Neither of those brands reaches the top three anywhere else, and Perplexity is the one engine that never names Transparent Labs at all.
- Perplexity also answered the open question with a shopping checklist and named no brands in that response.
Why These Brands Win
- Third party certification is the reason given most often for putting one brand above another.
- NSF Certified for Sport and Informed Choice are both named repeatedly and by every engine.
- Protein per serving in the twenty to thirty gram band is the second filter, and almost every ranked product sits inside it.
- Whey isolate is preferred over concentrate for lactose reasons rather than for muscle building.
- Several engines said outright that the differences between reputable brands are marginal.
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
- Sep 2
- 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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