Evergreen monthly benchmark — Jul 21
Skincare
Jul 21Rank Trend
How top brands moved week over week. Rank 1 is the top position.
For a first-time routine builder, AI routes to CeraVe and La Roche-Posay as the twin pillars in every engine. With Vanicream, The Ordinary, Paulas Choice, and EltaMD completing a six-brand consensus. Every engine gives the same routine architecture and differs only on which brand fills each slot - Which means the winnable unit is the slot, not the routine. , one engine answered the discovery prompt with no brands at all, recommending product types instead. A reminder that brand visibility is not guaranteed to be the surface AI answers on.
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
- Skincare remains the most contestable category tracked, with the largest single-engine tail of any category - many real brands surface in exactly one engine And none of the challengers has consolidated cross-model presence.
- K-beauty is thin and scattered (Beauty of Joseon in two engines, Innisfree, Goodal, and COSRX in one each).
- Indie and DTC actives brands (Naturium, Timeless, The Inkey List, cocokind) hold single or double-engine positions without breaking into the consensus set.
- Prestige remains the starkest gap: Drunk Elephant, Tatcha, and U Beauty surface only in one or two engines and are explicitly framed as poor value for a beginner.
- While Glossier, Youth To The People, Olay, and Garnier do not surface at all despite major marketing spend.
- The dermatologist-recommended core is entirely drugstore plus one medical-grade sunscreen brand.
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 | SkinCeuticals | CeraVe | Timeless |
| claude | CeraVe | La Roche-Posay | Cetaphil |
| gemini | CeraVe | La Roche-Posay | Timeless |
| perplexity | CeraVe | Vanicream | La Roche-Posay |
What This Means
- CeraVe takes the aggregate #1 for three of the four engines - Claude, Gemini.
- And Perplexity - with La Roche-Posay second for two of them, confirming the twin-pillar pattern.
- ChatGPT is the exception, and it is worth reading carefully: its aggregate #1 is SkinCeuticals.
- But that reflects a single appearance at rank one (the premium vitamin C pick it names if budget allows) rather than a broad endorsement.
- ChatGPT's own brand-ranking prompt puts CeraVe first and does not rank SkinCeuticals at all.
- Because the aggregate averages rank position across prompts.
- A brand mentioned once at the top can outscore a brand in the top three - CeraVe appears in all three ChatGPT responses and averages 1.67.
- The same effect puts Timeless in two engines' top three on one high mention each.
- Below the pillars the engines diverge in how they answer as much as in what they name.
- ChatGPT is the most commerce-formatted, price-tagging every SKU across three tiers and uniquely surfacing cocokind, Biore, Supergoop, and Timeless.
- Claude is the most tier-structured, organizing by price band before ranking, uniquely surfacing Differin, Goodal.
- U Beauty, and Drunk Elephant while arguing prestige offers small marginal benefit for a beginner.
- Gemini is the most table-driven and ingredient-first, pairing a budget and mid-range pick for every step, and uniquely surfaces Innisfree and Barrier+.
- Perplexity is the most brand-minimal: its discovery answer named no brands at all, recommending product types and ingredients instead.
- And produced a ranked list only when the prompt demanded one - its ranking uniquely includes COSRX.
Why These Brands Win
- The brands AI favors share dermatologist-developed positioning, ceramide or barrier-repair formulation, fragrance-free labeling, and wide US drugstore availability.
- Every engine converges on the identical routine architecture - gentle cleanser, vitamin C in the morning.
- Retinoid at night, daily broad-spectrum SPF - and every engine independently frames sunscreen as the single highest-impact anti-aging product.
- All four also tell the buyer to introduce one product at a time, start retinoids at two to three nights per week.
- Expect eight to twelve weeks before visible results, and skip toners, eye creams, scrubs, and overlapping serums.
- The advice is unusually uniform: engines differ on which brand fills each slot, not on what the slots are.
Frequently Asked Questions
What skincare does AI recommend most?▾
Which skincare brand ranks #1 across all AI models?▾
Why does ChatGPT recommend different skincare than Claude?▾
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 21
- 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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