Seasonal weekly benchmark — Sep 9
Sunscreen
Sep 9Rank Trend
How top brands moved week over week. Rank 1 is the top position.
EltaMD and La Roche-Posay are the only two brands named by all four engines. On the ranking prompt specifically, every engine placed both of them in its top two. That is the tightest agreement at the head of a category this benchmark has recorded. Below those two the engines split by what they optimise for rather than by which product is better.
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
- Eight of the sixteen brands were named by exactly one engine.
- Versed, Eucerin, SolRX, Bare Republic, Bubble, Australian Gold, Black Girl Sunscreen and Coppertone each reached a single engine.
- That is half the field with no cross engine presence at all.
- Supergoop is the strongest brand that is not universal.
- It is named five times and holds a top three position, but one engine never mentions it.
- In this category the gap is reach rather than ranking, because the engines rank generously and name narrowly.
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 | La Roche-Posay | Blue Lizard | EltaMD |
| claude | EltaMD | Neutrogena | Sun Bum |
| gemini | Supergoop | La Roche-Posay | Thinksport |
| perplexity | EltaMD | Neutrogena | Banana Boat |
What This Means
- All four engines agree on the two leaders and disagree on almost everything under them.
- ChatGPT favours La Roche-Posay first.
- Claude and Perplexity both favour EltaMD first.
- Gemini leads with Supergoop.
- Each engine named exactly eight brands, and yet only five of the sixteen were named by more than one of them.
- Gemini is alone in naming Bubble, and Perplexity is alone in reaching for Australian Gold and Black Girl Sunscreen.
- Claude is the only engine to name SolRX and Bare Republic, and ChatGPT the only one to name Versed and Eucerin.
Why These Brands Win
- Eighty minute water resistance is the specification every engine treats as the threshold.
- Broad spectrum SPF 50 is the second filter and almost every ranked product meets it.
- Not stinging the eyes during heavy sweat is cited by all four engines as a deciding factor.
- Mineral formulas are preferred for staying put rather than for being safer.
- Every engine said reapplication matters more than which product is chosen.
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?▾
What sunscreen 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
- Sep 9
- 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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