Share of voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AIO — measured across 7.273 shopper prompts and 33 brands.
Different AI models weight different sources. A brand that wins ChatGPT may lag in Google AIO if its retail footprint is weak.
Gatorade leads the hydration category in AI search with a 45.0% share of voice, but the more telling number is this: LMNT, a direct-to-consumer electrolyte brand launched around 2018, has closed the gap to 2.1 percentage points (42.9% SoV) and actually outranks Gatorade on average position (1.8 vs. 2.5). In this dataset, LMNT is unusually close to a multi-billion-dollar incumbent — a gap that, in most mass-market beverage categories, one would not expect to see compressed inside the answer layer.
The competitive dynamic is bifurcated. At the top, four brands — Gatorade, LMNT, Liquid I.V., and Nuun — have escaped into a tier of their own (all above 36% SoV), with the nearest challenger, DripDrop, sitting at 13.8%. Below that, a long tail of 29 brands competes for a much smaller pool of mentions, and 12 brands tracked in this study received zero mentions across all 240 engine calls. Our working hypothesis — not proven by this dataset, but consistent with its shape — is that the moat at the top is less traditional brand awareness than citation density in the sources LLMs retrieve: wellness-vertical publishers, Reddit threads, and retailer review corpora. Validating that hypothesis requires source-level citation analysis beyond the scope of this study.
A hydration brand in the 6–30% SoV band should treat Q1 as a citation-acquisition quarter, not a performance-marketing quarter. The priority is to appear in the source material LLMs retrieve — long-form comparison content on sites plausibly influential in this space such as Healthline, Garage Gym Reviews, and Outside Online — rather than to buy incremental paid traffic. The brands pulling ahead are not, by any visible signal, spending more on Meta. They are being written about more thoroughly in the places AI models appear to cite.
Hydration is one of the most AI-search-exposed categories in consumer beverage. The purchase decision is unusually research-heavy for a sub-$40 item: shoppers ask about sodium content, sugar load, keto-compatibility, pediatric safety, endurance use, and ingredient sourcing before committing to a 30-stick multipack. Our interpretation is that these are the prompt shapes where ChatGPT and Perplexity have displaced a portion of the traditional blue-link research pattern, because the answer requires synthesizing multiple attributes across multiple brands. Our 60-prompt battery spanned use-case (endurance, travel, hot weather, post-workout), demographic (teens, Gen Z, adults), and channel (Amazon, Target, Costco) framings, and the engines returned structured brand comparisons in the large majority of cases — though not uniformly, as the unclaimed-territory section below makes clear.
That said, the behavioral shift is still early. AI search is a meaningful minority of pre-purchase research, not the majority. The honest read is that a hydration brand invisible in AI answers today is not yet losing material revenue — but the asymmetry of the moment is that citation positions are being set now, cheaply, and will be expensive to displace in 18 months. The brands building retrievable source material in 2025 are underwriting their 2026 and 2027 answer-layer position.
| Brand | SoV % | Avg Position |
|---|---|---|
| Gatorade | 45.0 | 2.5 |
| LMNT | 42.9 | 1.8 |
| Liquid I.V. | 37.9 | 2.5 |
| Nuun | 36.7 | 2.5 |
| DripDrop | 13.8 | 3.5 |
| Cure Hydration | 11.7 | 2.3 |
| Prime Hydration | 10.0 | 2.6 |
| Celsius | 9.2 | 4.5 |
| Body Armor | 7.9 | 2.6 |
| Liquid Death | 7.1 | 1.2 |
| Waterloo | 7.1 | 1.8 |
| Nooma | 7.1 | 2.4 |
| Hydrant | 6.3 | 3.0 |
| Sanzo | 2.1 | 1.2 |
| Humm Kombucha | 1.7 | 1.0 |
| Flow Water | 1.7 | 1.3 |
| BioSteel | 1.7 | 4.3 |
| De La Calle | 1.3 | 2.0 |
| Alani Nu | 0.8 | 5.0 |
| Owyn | 0.4 | 3.0 |
| Ghost Lifestyle | 0.4 | 6.0 |
| Hoist | 0.0 | — |
| NoCoco | 0.0 | — |
| Hint Water | 0.0 | — |
| Waterdrop | 0.0 | — |
| Athletic Brewing | 0.0 | — |
| Lyre's | 0.0 | — |
| Cann | 0.0 | — |
| Gem & Bolt | 0.0 | — |
| Karma Wellness Water | 0.0 | — |
| Zoa Energy | 0.0 | — |
| Update | 0.0 | — |
| Guru Energy | 0.0 | — |
Note on coverage: several brands in the tracked set — notably Athletic Brewing (non-alcoholic beer), Lyre's (non-alcoholic spirits), and Cann (THC-infused seltzer) — are included as out-of-category controls to measure bleed-over into hydration-framed prompts. As expected, they received zero mentions.
The leaderboard has three tiers. The leaders (Gatorade, LMNT, Liquid I.V., Nuun) all clear 36%, and the drop to the fifth brand is 22.9 percentage points — an unusually sharp cliff that indicates a winner-take-most dynamic in retrieval. Gatorade's lead is consistent with decades of incumbent citation mass: sports science references, retailer co-marketing, and deep entity recognition. LMNT's near-parity appears to come from a narrower but deeper footprint in podcast transcripts, Reddit, and founder-led long-form content — a pattern we infer from the engine-mix but cannot prove at the citation level from this dataset alone.
The brand punching most visibly above its weight is Liquid Death. At 7.1% SoV it sits mid-pack, but its average position of 1.2 is the best of any brand in the top 20. When LLMs include Liquid Death, they tend to include it first. This is plausibly a downstream effect of disproportionate editorial coverage (brand-of-the-year lists, marketing case studies), though the dataset does not prove citation-source attribution. Cure Hydration is the other brand worth flagging: 11.7% SoV at an average position of 2.3 suggests its citations are substantive, not incidental, and it is the highest-ranked brand in the second tier on a position-weighted basis.
LMNT leads at 71.7% prompt coverage, ahead of Liquid I.V. (61.7%), Gatorade (58.3%), and Nuun (58.3%). ChatGPT's retrieval appears to favor long-form wellness editorial and Reddit — environments where LMNT has outsized presence relative to its revenue. This is the single engine where a D2C brand decisively beats Gatorade.
Gatorade returns to the top at 33.3%, followed by LMNT and Nuun (both 21.7%). Perplexity's citation surface skews toward conventional web publishers and retailer sites, which rewards incumbent brand mass. This is the engine where legacy SEO still translates most directly into AI visibility.
Liquid I.V. leads decisively at 70.0% prompt coverage, followed by LMNT (65.0%), Nuun (55.0%), and Gatorade (51.7%). Gemini is the most top-heavy engine in the set — the top four brands all clear 50%, and the drop to the fifth brand (Nooma at 18.3%) is the steepest cliff across any engine. For brands that have built structured, retailer-aligned web presence (Liquid I.V.'s core strength), Gemini is the single most rewarding surface. Nooma's 18.3% on Gemini against 7.1% overall SoV is the most striking individual over-index in the dataset.
Gatorade leads at 36.7%, with Prime Hydration an unexpected second at 20.0% — roughly double its overall SoV. One hypothesis is that Google AIO weights retail-shelf presence and YouTube/search-trend signal more heavily, which is where Prime (Logan Paul/KSI) over-indexes; the dataset is consistent with that read but does not prove it. LMNT and Body Armor tie for third at 13.3%.
Five prompt clusters were designed into the 60-prompt battery. The cluster-level patterns below are directional reads consistent with the leaderboard and engine-rate data; prompt-level win logs are available on request but are not reproduced here.
Daily-use and mainstream queries. Prompts like "top hydration drinks for daily use" and "best for adults" appear to be won by Gatorade and LMNT in combination. These are the highest-volume, lowest-specificity queries, and they reward brand ubiquity.
Performance and endurance queries. Prompts covering endurance training, post-workout recovery, and hot weather split between Gatorade and LMNT. LMNT wins on sodium-forward positioning; Gatorade wins on category-default status.
Value and retail-channel queries. Prompts containing "under $20," "multipacks," "on Amazon," "at Target," and "at Costco" skew to Liquid I.V., consistent with its retail distribution density and Amazon review volume — both of which feed retrieval.
Demographic queries. "Best for Gen Z" and "best tasting" skew to Liquid I.V.; "best for teens" skews to Gatorade. Flavor and identity-coded queries reward brands with strong social and retailer review corpora.
Forward-looking and recency queries. "Best hydration drinks 2026" skews to LMNT. Recency-framed prompts are disproportionately influenced by recent editorial coverage, which favors brands with active PR flywheels over brands relying on legacy citations.
The prompt battery surfaced several areas where no brand was cited with any material frequency. Where no brand is cited, LLMs either hedge ("consult a professional") or return generic ingredient advice. These gaps are cheaper to capture than contested territory because a single well-sourced editorial placement can move a brand from zero to cited. Displacing Gatorade on "best for endurance" requires rewriting a decade of sports science corpus. Owning an uncontested adjacency requires one clinically-reviewed explainer on a mid-tier wellness site.
The five prompt territories we would prioritize:
The principle: in AI search, a 100% share of a narrow, unclaimed prompt is more defensible than a 5% share of a crowded one.
For a brand sitting between 6% and 30% SoV — realistically DripDrop, Cure Hydration, Prime, Celsius, Body Armor, Liquid Death, Waterloo, Nooma, or Hydrant — three concrete 90-day moves.
Move 1 (Days 0–90): Run an earned-media push on three tier-two wellness publishers. Pitch long-form comparison features to bylined dietitians or sports medicine practitioners on sites such as Garage Gym Reviews, Outside Online, or Well+Good. Where the budget calls for paid placement, use properly disclosed sponsored editorial with schema markup — not undisclosed advertorial, which violates FTC guidelines and tends to get de-weighted by retrieval systems regardless. Target the unclaimed-territory prompts above, where a single authoritative piece can move a brand from zero citation to cited.
Move 2 (Days 30–120): Build organic presence in use-case-specific subreddits. Following the 2024 OpenAI–Reddit licensing deal, Reddit is a plausibly important retrieval source for ChatGPT, and LMNT's ChatGPT dominance (71.7% coverage) is directionally consistent with strong organic presence in r/keto, r/running, and r/fasting — though we have not confirmed this at the citation level. A brand cannot fake Reddit presence, but it can participate: founder AMAs, transparent ingredient discussions, and ambassador-led thread contributions in r/migraine, r/Semaglutide, or r/Menopause are the vehicles.
Move 3 (Days 60–150): Publish structured, schema-marked clinical content on the brand's own domain. A dosing guide, an electrolyte-comparison table, or an ingredient transparency page with schema.org markup. Both Perplexity and Google AIO retrieve from brand domains, and structured machine-readable data is a practical way to improve the odds of being pulled into an answer. This is the lowest-cost move and the one most brands skip. Cure Hydration's relatively strong average position (2.3) is consistent with on-site medical content being part of the retrieval story, though the dataset does not prove causality.
This study executed 240 engine calls across four AI surfaces (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews) using 60 shopper prompts designed to mirror real D2C query distributions in the hydration category — spanning use case, demographic, channel, price, and recency framings. 33 brands were tracked, including three out-of-category controls (Athletic Brewing, Lyre's, Cann) used to measure bleed-over. Engine rates are the percentage of the 60 prompts, per engine, in which a brand was named. Share of voice is the cross-engine aggregate of brand mentions across the full 240-call sample, expressed as a percentage of prompts in which the brand was named in at least one engine slot. Average position is the mean ordinal rank of the brand across all mentions. Zero-mention brands are reported but excluded from position calculations. The study is a snapshot; AI retrieval surfaces shift week to week, and results should be re-measured quarterly.
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