CommerceV3: AI shopping answers repeat the same brands
Generative AI platforms concentrate shopping recommendations on a small set of brands per category, and most e-commerce brands never appear at all, according to a CommerceV3 study run from March through July 2026. The AI-visibility vendor ran more than 1 million prompts (12 million total prompt-runs, each query repeated five times per engine) across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, covering seven e-commerce categories and roughly 25,000 brands sourced from marketplace listings and retail directories. It found 75% of recommendation slots go to the same handful of brands within a category, and 78% of brands never appear in their own category at all — rising to 84% on problem-solving prompts; the absence rate ranged from 74% on Perplexity to 81% on Gemini. CommerceV3 also found AI platforms source their answers mostly from editorial sites (34%) and Reddit or forums (22%), with marketplaces at 18% and a brand’s own site cited only 14% of the time.
Why it matters: The study comes from a vendor selling AI-visibility services, but its scale — 1 million-plus prompts across three platforms — is large enough that the core finding holds regardless of motive: most absent brands aren't ranked lower, they're simply never mentioned.
The record: ChatGPTGeminiPerplexity
Via CommerceV3 ↗ · Chief Marketer ↗
Posted to the wire October 17, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.