Seasonal weekly benchmark — Jul 23
Sunscreen
Jul 23Rank Trend
How top brands moved week over week. Rank 1 is the top position.
For a health-conscious active woman, AI sunscreen discovery rewards clean-filter credibility plus proven sport performance. And Supergoop is the most-mentioned brand in the category - present in all four engines - anchoring the clean daily-wear position. But every engine tells the buyer to mix brands rather than trust one. So the winnable unit is a category slot (the daily-face slot or the sport-body slot) held across all four engines, not brand-wide presence in a single answer. The decisive movement is the clean-ingredient bar hardening into a gate. Alongside a persistent aspirational-versus-practical split that hands premium brands the ranking and mass-market brands the actual purchase recommendation.
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
- The two-product split every engine recommends - daily face plus sport body - is assembled from two different brands in nearly every answer; no brand cleanly owns both jobs.
- An open positioning for a range that credibly spans them.
- The mineral-purist lane (EWG-style, non-nano zinc, reef-safe) is crowded with small single-engine players (Thinksport, Badger, MDSolarSciences, COOLA, Sky And Sol) but has no dominant, widely available cross-engine leader - the clearest slot-capture target in the category.
- Tinted mineral for active women who want light coverage without makeup was named only sparingly (Australian Gold), an underserved sub-niche.
- And the budget tier stays fragmented: mass-market brands win the under-25-dollar prompts on price and availability.
- Not on any owned attribute, leaving room for a value brand to claim a clean-and-affordable position no incumbent holds.
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 | EltaMD | Blue Lizard | La Roche-Posay |
| claude | Supergoop | La Roche-Posay | Sun Bum |
| gemini | Supergoop | MDSolarSciences | Neutrogena |
| perplexity | Sky and Sol | Neutrogena | La Roche-Posay |
What This Means
- All four engines anchor on the same five-brand clean core but diverge sharply in tail and emphasis.
- ChatGPT is the broadest commerce surface, price-tagging a dozen-plus SKUs across budget, mid, and premium tiers And running the longest explicit ranking (ten brands, surfacing Thinksport, Badger, Eucerin, and Vacation that others omit).
- Claude leans skincare-forward and dermatologist-framed, uniquely elevating Cetaphil as a value mineral pick and pairing every recommendation with a specific standout product.
- Gemini is the most attribute-structured, building a scored comparison table and uniquely championing MDSolarSciences And COOLA - a clinician brand and an organic brand that appear in no other engine.
- Perplexity is the most source-attributed, citing Wirecutter and EWG by name.
- And is the only engine to surface Sky and Sol, a DTC sport-mineral brand holding a single-engine beachhead.
- The category's central fault line is aspirational versus practical: engines rank premium clean brands at the top of open queries, then pivot to mass-market Neutrogena.
- Banana Boat, and Blue Lizard the moment a budget is named - the same rank-versus-recommend split the tracker documented in protein powder and running shoes.
- Top-slot ownership splits four ways and no brand is unanimous.
- Supergoop takes the number-one position in two engines, Claude and Gemini.
- And it earns the Claude slot on consistency rather than luck - it places first in all three Claude prompts.
- ChatGPT and Perplexity each hand their top slot to a brand no other engine ranks first: EltaMD for ChatGPT And Sky and Sol, a DTC sport-mineral newcomer, for Perplexity, each on a single first-place mention.
- The more telling pattern sits one row down.
- La Roche-Posay is the only brand inside three of the four top threes and it wins none of them.
- While Neutrogena leads the entire category on total mentions with ten and still takes no top slot anywhere.
- Breadth of presence and ownership of the top position are separate currencies in this category, and the brands winning one are largely not the brands winning the other - Which is why mention count belongs next to rank in any honest reading of this table.
Why These Brands Win
- Every engine converged on identical buying logic for an active, health-conscious woman: broad-spectrum SPF 50, 80-minute water and sweat resistance.
- A no-sting formula for running, and clean filters framed as the default - oxybenzone-free, frequently reef-safe, with mineral zinc oxide treated as the safest lane.
- All four recommended a two-product split (a lightweight daily-face SPF plus a sport-grade body formula) rather than one do-everything bottle.
- And several told the buyer to prioritize a texture she will actually reapply over chasing the highest SPF number.
- Antioxidant and anti-aging framing (vitamin C, red algae, botanical extracts) recurred as a health-conscious differentiator.
- The clean-ingredient bar now reads as a gate rather than a bonus: EWG rating, reef-safety.
- And oxybenzone-free status are cited as entry requirements, echoing the certification-as-gate pattern the tracker documented in protein powder.
Frequently Asked Questions
What sunscreen does AI recommend most?▾
Which sunscreen brand ranks #1 across all AI models?▾
Why does ChatGPT recommend different sunscreen 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.
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 23
- 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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