Press and Data

In one paragraph

The VIBEAU Index asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok 49 real haircare shopping questions, none naming a brand, three times each in fresh sessions, on 4 October 2026: 735 answers, 159 brands named. Olaplex was named in 30% of answers but named first in only 8%, and no brand was the first pick on every engine. Salon and professional brands took 46% of all brand mentions; independent brands 21%, up from 6% in the sunscreen edition. Asked the same question three times, ChatGPT named the same brand first on 19% of prompts. No brand pays to be in the Index.

Quotable findings

Olaplex is the most-named haircare brand in AI answers, in 30% of 735, but named first in only 8%. No brand is the first pick on all five engines.

Mention rate 30%, first-mention rate 8%

Three engines put Olaplex first most often; ChatGPT puts L'Oréal Paris first; Gemini puts Ouai. The best first-pick rate in haircare is 8%, against 20% for EltaMD in sunscreen.

Per-engine first picks, 147 answers per engine

Salon and professional brands take 46% of all haircare brand mentions. Mass 22%, independent and prestige-indie 21%, dermatologist 7%, Korean and Japanese 4%.

Share of 4,087 brand mentions, grouped

Independent brands took 21% of mentions in haircare, against 6% in sunscreen. Ouai 20% of answers, Briogeo 13%, Nécessaire 9%, Mielle 6%. Prose was not named once.

Mention rates, 735 answers

L'Oréal Paris is the only mass brand in the top ten, ChatGPT's most frequent first pick, and the only brand whose own sites are top-20 sources: lorealparisusa.com in 104 answers, hair.com in 98.

Citation counts across five engines

Asked the same question three times, ChatGPT names the same haircare brand first on 19% of prompts (41% in sunscreen). Gemini 22%, Grok 36%, Claude 42%, Perplexity 65%.

Share of prompts with the same first-named brand across all three runs

44% of hair-loss answers name no brand at all. The ones that do name Nizoral, Rogaine and Nutrafol, and cite the American Academy of Dermatology and PubMed.

Hair loss and thinning cluster, 75 answers

The most cited sources for haircare are magazines: Allure (221 answers), Vogue, Glamour, Who What Wear, Good Housekeeping. YouTube (203) and Reddit (130) enter through Gemini and Grok. Ulta is cited more than Sephora or Amazon.

Answers citing the domain, all five engines

Charts

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PNG, 2000px wide. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Credit: "VIBEAU Index, October 2026".

Named vs named firstMention rate against first-mention rate, top brands
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Who gets the shelfShare of mentions by brand group
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Five engines, five first picksEach engine's most frequent first pick and top mentions
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Same question, three timesFirst-pick stability by engine, sunscreen vs haircare
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Where the answers come fromMost cited domains, all five engines
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Header image2000 × 1000, for article leads
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Brands CSV ↓ Sources CSV ↓

Method

How to describe it

Prompts. 49 English shopping prompts across six clusters (hair type and concern, damage and repair, scalp, hair loss and thinning, routine and format, price and where to buy). No prompt names a brand.
Engines. ChatGPT (gpt-5), Claude (claude-sonnet-5), Gemini (gemini-3.5-flash), Perplexity (sonar) and Grok (grok-4.7), through each provider's API with web search on where the API supports it, US locale, 4 October 2026. Three runs per prompt per engine, each in a fresh session. 735 answers.
Counting. Answers matched against 183 brands and product lines. Mention rate is the share of answers naming the brand; first-mention rate is the share naming it before any other brand. Sponsored placements excluded; none appeared.
Independence. No brand pays to be in the Index, and no VIBEAU client is moved in it.
Limits. API answers can differ from what a signed-in consumer sees in an app. Google AI Mode has no API and is not included. One category, one month; the Index is not a ranking of brand quality.

Suggested description: "the VIBEAU Index, a monthly study of which brands AI assistants recommend, by category, published by brand intelligence platform VIBEAU".

Contact

Questions, interviews, the full dataset

Vivian Qu, founder of VIBEAU, wrote the Index and can speak to the method, the findings and what they mean for beauty brands.

vivian@vibeau.ai · LinkedIn

Replies within one working day. The full response set (all 735 answers) is available to journalists and researchers on request.

Read the edition →

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How to describe it

Questions, interviews, the full dataset