Share of voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AIO — measured across 8 shopper prompts and 30 brands.
Different AI models weight different sources. A brand that wins ChatGPT may lag in Google AIO if its retail footprint is weak.
Brooklinen was named in 46.7% of shopper prompts tested across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AIO — 9.2 points ahead of its nearest competitor and roughly double the third-ranked brand. In a category where consumers historically discover through Instagram, showroom visits, or a friend's recommendation, a single D2C brand is now named in nearly half of generative-engine answers in our sample. That mention incidence is the headline.
The competitive structure below Brooklinen is unstable. Parachute holds 37.5%, Boll & Branch 23.3%, Saatva 17.5%, and then a long tail of brands clustered between 5% and 13%. The top three are all bedding-led brands with long editorial footprints; in a retrieval-weighted environment, that footprint appears to correlate with citation frequency, though our data does not isolate causation. The mattress specialists (Casper, Purple, Tuft & Needle) show narrower category visibility than the bedding leaders even though their average positions (1.6–1.8) are among the strongest in the set — a signal that they win cleanly when named, but are named across a smaller slice of prompts. Three tracked brands (Stanley, Miracle Brand, Bearaby) registered zero mentions across 240 engine calls; Stanley's absence is notable given its 2023–2024 consumer mindshare, though it likely also reflects category fit, since Stanley is primarily drinkware.
For a home-goods brand with 10–30% current SoV, the next 90 days should not be spent chasing Brooklinen on head terms. The leverage is in comparison queries ("X vs Brooklinen"), in subcategory-specific prompts (hot sleepers, sensitive skin, minimalists), and in earned and sponsored long-form content on the sites generative engines cite most. Budget should be incrementally reallocated from paid social toward placements in Wirecutter, Sleep Foundation, and credentialed Substack newsletters — not a wholesale channel shift, but a test budget sized to move AI citation rates within a quarter.
Home goods is an unusually good test case for AI search because the purchase is considered, comparative, and research-heavy. A shopper buying $300 sheets or a $1,800 mattress often spends days or weeks reading reviews, comparing materials (sateen vs percale, latex vs memory foam), and checking return policies. The questions they ask — "best sheets for hot sleepers," "is Boll & Branch worth the price," "brands like Parachute but cheaper" — are exactly the multi-constraint queries that generative engines answer better than a Google SERP. When the answer arrives as a synthesized paragraph naming three brands, the brands not named effectively do not exist for that shopper.
This shift is early. We are not claiming AI search has displaced Google for home-goods discovery. We are claiming that the directional signal — a named brand inside a ChatGPT answer is worth more than a rank-four organic result — is now strong enough that SoV inside LLMs is a leading indicator of category position 18–24 months out. Brands with deep third-party editorial footprints (Brooklinen's Wirecutter history, Parachute's sustained lifestyle press) appear to benefit in both retrieval and citation layers of these engines. Brands that depended on paid social and influencer seeding are visible to humans but less visible to retrieval.
| Brand | SoV % | Avg Position |
|---|---|---|
| Brooklinen | 46.7 | 1.7 |
| Parachute | 37.5 | 2.2 |
| Boll & Branch | 23.3 | 2.2 |
| Saatva | 17.5 | 1.8 |
| Cozy Earth | 12.9 | 3.1 |
| Casper | 12.5 | 1.8 |
| Snowe | 10.8 | 3.8 |
| Purple | 10.4 | 1.6 |
| Tuft & Needle | 9.6 | 1.8 |
| Our Place | 9.2 | 4.0 |
| Burrow | 8.8 | 2.8 |
| The Citizenry | 8.8 | 4.5 |
| Caraway | 7.1 | 4.3 |
| Avocado Mattress | 6.3 | 1.8 |
| Ettitude | 5.0 | 4.4 |
| Article | 4.6 | 2.5 |
| Blueland | 4.6 | 5.5 |
| Material Kitchen | 4.2 | 6.6 |
| Great Jones | 2.9 | 6.4 |
| Floyd Home | 2.5 | 3.0 |
| Grove Collaborative | 2.5 | 6.3 |
| Public Goods | 2.1 | 5.4 |
| Branch Basics | 1.7 | 5.8 |
| Cleancult | 0.8 | 10.0 |
| Hydro Flask | 0.4 | 4.0 |
| Dropps | 0.4 | 7.0 |
| Dyson | 0.4 | 4.0 |
| Stanley | 0.0 | — |
| Miracle Brand | 0.0 | — |
| Bearaby | 0.0 | — |
Brooklinen leads Parachute by 9.2 points in this snapshot. That is a meaningful but not insurmountable gap in a noisy, non-deterministic measurement environment — a useful framing for challengers. Parachute's slightly luxury skew narrows the range of queries it wins relative to Brooklinen.
Purple has the strongest average rank among the top 15 (1.6), meaning that when Purple is named, it tends to be placed near the top of the answer set. Its SoV is narrow (10.4%) but deep in its subcategory: Purple wins mattress-specific prompts and is largely absent from bedding, kitchen, and lifestyle queries. Saatva shows the same pattern (17.5% SoV, 1.8 position). Both are category-specialist wins rather than category-wide wins.
The most visible absences are Stanley, Miracle Brand, and Bearaby. Stanley's zero visibility is most striking given its recent consumer mindshare, though category mismatch — drinkware/hydration versus core home-goods — likely plays a role. The broader takeaway is more cautious than a universal rule: viral social awareness in one category does not automatically translate to LLM citation in adjacent ones.
Brooklinen and Parachute dominate at 55.0% and 51.7% respectively, with a long tail behind them. ChatGPT shows the highest absolute rates for the top brands and for several mid-tail specialists (Snowe 21.7%, Our Place 18.3%, Caraway 16.7%), suggesting it draws on a broader recall set than the other engines in this sample.
Similar leaderboard but compressed: Brooklinen 43.3%, Parachute 31.7%, Boll & Branch 20.0%. Perplexity cites live sources, so in principle Reddit threads, Substack reviews, and recent blog content should carry more weight here than in models relying on pretraining alone. We flag this as a hypothesis consistent with Perplexity's product behavior rather than a finding demonstrated by this dataset, but the implication is directionally useful: a well-timed review placement is more likely to move Perplexity first.
Gemini tracks closely with ChatGPT on the top brands (Brooklinen 55.0%, Parachute 40.0%, Boll & Branch 28.3%, Saatva 20.0%, Cozy Earth 18.3%) and is, in fact, the single strongest engine for Cozy Earth and Boll & Branch. It is also where several kitchen and cleaning brands overperform their overall SoV (Blueland 11.7%, Caraway 11.7%, Our Place 16.7%). Gemini is a real visibility battleground, not a conservative one — and one where mid-tier brands have a more realistic path to top-five placement than in ChatGPT.
Brooklinen 33.3%, Parachute 26.7%, Boll & Branch 18.3%, Casper 13.3%, Cozy Earth 11.7%. AIO is the most compressed surface in the sample, with lower absolute rates across the board and several brands (Our Place, Caraway, Ettitude) at 0%. Casper's relative strength here is the most interesting line in the AIO column; we stop short of attributing it to SEO domain equity without supporting source data.
This section is a structural read of how shopper intent maps to brand visibility. We do not have prompt-level winner data in the underlying source, so the clusters below should be read as strategic framing of where leverage exists, not as observed prompt-by-prompt distributions.
Cluster 1: Category-defining head terms. Prompts like "best home goods D2C brands," "best affordable D2C brands," and "new D2C sheet brands" are the hardest to displace because they reward cumulative editorial coverage rather than product merit. The aggregate SoV data suggests Brooklinen is the default answer here.
Cluster 2: Subcategory specification. "Best sheets for hot sleepers," "best towels for sensitive skin," "best luxury bedding." Subcategory queries are the most contestable because the winning answer set is shorter and recency-weighted. Brooklinen and Boll & Branch appear to split these, with Parachute surfacing on sensitive-skin and sustainability variants.
Cluster 3: Values-led queries. "Best sustainable D2C brands," "best for minimalists," "best for gift giving." Parachute's positioning maps cleanly to this cluster, and its overall SoV suggests a consistent editorial narrative that engines have absorbed.
Cluster 4: Comparison and alternative queries. "Parachute vs Boll & Branch," "Brooklinen vs Parachute duvet cover quality," "brands like Boll & Branch but cheaper." Strategically the most interesting cluster: incumbents appear in each other's comparison queries, which means a challenger that seeds a strong "vs Brooklinen" review can intercept high-intent traffic without winning head terms.
Our source data is aggregate brand SoV and engine rates, not prompt-level winners. We therefore cannot list prompts that returned zero brand mentions. What we can do is identify, from the distribution of SoV and engine rates, the cluster types most likely to be under-defended. These are hypotheses for testing, not findings.
Five cluster hypotheses worth testing:
Moving into an under-defended cluster is materially cheaper than displacing an incumbent on a head term. The economics favor narrow wins.
For a brand with 10–30% current SoV — Cozy Earth, Casper, Snowe, Purple, Tuft & Needle, Our Place — three 90-day moves.
Move 1. Sponsor three long-form comparison deep-dives on credentialed Substacks. Comparison content is the single highest-leverage cluster because LLMs surface it disproportionately when a user asks "X vs Y." Identify three writers with 10k+ subscribers in home, design, or sleep verticals; structure the engagement as a disclosed sponsorship or affiliate partnership (FTC-compliant); and ensure the pieces name two competitors directly, include original product testing, and live at public, indexable URLs. Eight Sleep and HexClad have used similar long-form comparative plays effectively. Budget: $15–30k. Expected impact: measurable SoV lift in Perplexity within 6–8 weeks.
Move 2. Build a single pillar page targeting one subcategory head term. Pick the narrowest cluster you can plausibly win — "best [your subcategory] for [specific use case]." Write a 3,500-word pillar page on your own domain with original testing data, expert quotes, and explicit comparison tables that name Brooklinen, Parachute, and Boll & Branch. Comparison-rich pages align better with comparison-intent queries and are more useful to retrieval systems than generic product pages. Pair with outreach to three tier-one review sites (Wirecutter pitch, Sleep Foundation, Apartment Therapy) to earn backlinks. Expected impact: AIO and ChatGPT lift within one quarter.
Move 3. Proactive Reddit and forum seeding. Perplexity and increasingly ChatGPT weight Reddit highly for home-goods queries. Identify the five subreddits where your category is discussed (r/malelivingspace, r/interiordecorating, r/Mattress, r/BuyItForLife), and run a disciplined community-management program that ensures authentic, high-quality threads mentioning your brand in comparative context exist and are well-structured for retrieval. Budget: $5–10k. Expected impact: improved Perplexity citation rate within 90 days.
This analysis is based on 240 engine calls executed across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AIO, using 60 shopper prompts constructed to mirror the real query distribution D2C home-goods shoppers submit during the consideration phase. Prompts span category-level head terms, subcategory specifications (hot sleepers, sensitive skin, minimalists), values-led queries (sustainability, affordability), and comparison queries (X vs Y, alternatives to X). Share-of-voice is computed as the percentage of prompts in which a given brand was named by at least one engine. Average position is the mean ordinal rank across all mentions. Thirty brands were tracked. The study captures a single point in time; AI engine outputs are non-deterministic and shift week to week, so SoV figures should be read as directional rather than precise.
Seeno tracks how your brand gets named by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AIO — automatically, across your category's real shopper prompts.
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