Share of voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AIO — measured across 9.6 shopper prompts and 25 brands.
Different AI models weight different sources. A brand that wins ChatGPT may lag in Google AIO if its retail footprint is weak.
Harry's commands 24.2% share of voice across AI search engines in the men's grooming category, about 1.5x the SoV of the nearest competitor and roughly 1.7x the SoV of Dr. Squatch, the category's loudest brand on social. In a market defined by shelf proliferation and subscription churn, a single razor-first DTC brand has become the default answer generative engines return when a shopper asks for grooming guidance.
The competitive dynamic is bifurcated. At the top, four brands (Harry's, Native, Manscaped, Dr. Squatch) collectively hold 68.8% of visible mentions and define the consideration set. Below them, a long tail of 21 brands — including well-funded telehealth entrants like Hims and Ro at 4.2% each — are minor players in pure grooming queries despite significant paid-media presence. Position data reinforces the hierarchy: Manscaped achieves the strongest average position (1.5) when it appears, narrowly ahead of Dollar Shave Club (1.6) and Harry's (1.7). While the margin is tight, the pattern suggests Manscaped's citations are tightly bound to specific product categories rather than general grooming recommendations.
For a brand sitting in the 10–30% SoV band next quarter, the priority is not top-of-funnel brand building. It is targeted authority: owning a defined sub-category (acne-prone skin, post-workout, sensitive shaving) through editorially credible third-party content that AI engines treat as source material. The opportunity cost of continuing to optimize for traditional SEO alone, while Harry's consolidates the generative answer layer, compounds weekly.
Men's grooming is structurally well-suited to AI search disruption. The category is dominated by indecision: shoppers researching razors, deodorants, beard care, and skincare typically ask open-ended questions ("what's the best deodorant for sensitive skin," "Harry's vs Dollar Shave Club") rather than navigating to a known brand. Before AI-generated answers, those queries resolved into a Google SERP with ten blue links; now they increasingly resolve into a single synthesized paragraph naming three to five brands. The winner-take-most dynamic of that paragraph is what our data captures.
We want to be honest about timing. AI search currently represents a minority of total grooming discovery traffic, and attribution remains imperfect. But the behavioral pattern — men asking comparative, problem-led questions before purchase — maps almost perfectly onto the prompt types AI engines handle best. The brands that establish citation density now, while the space is uncrowded and rankings are volatile, will shape the default consideration set as adoption scales. The dynamic rhymes with, though does not perfectly replicate, the window e-commerce brands had in early Google organic: first-mover citation density compounds faster than paid reach.
| Brand | SoV % | Avg Position |
|---|---|---|
| Harry's | 24.2 | 1.7 |
| Native | 15.8 | 2.0 |
| Manscaped | 14.6 | 1.5 |
| Dr. Squatch | 14.2 | 2.8 |
| Jack Black | 12.1 | 2.0 |
| Dollar Shave Club | 10.8 | 1.6 |
| Brickell Men's Products | 10.8 | 1.9 |
| Cremo | 8.3 | 2.5 |
| Bulldog Skincare | 7.5 | 2.2 |
| Huron | 7.1 | 2.3 |
| Oars + Alps | 5.8 | 2.4 |
| Baxter of California | 5.8 | 2.1 |
| Geologie | 4.6 | 2.5 |
| Hims | 4.2 | 2.0 |
| Ro | 4.2 | 1.8 |
| Lumin | 4.2 | 3.2 |
| Hawthorne | 1.3 | 2.0 |
| Caldera + Lab | 1.3 | 2.7 |
| Tiege Hanley | 0.8 | 3.0 |
| Beardbrand | 0.8 | 2.5 |
| By Humankind | 0.8 | 4.0 |
| Hims Hair | 0.4 | 2.0 |
| Schmidt's Naturals | 0.4 | 2.0 |
| Megababe | 0.4 | 6.0 |
| Peak & Valley | 0.0 | — |
The 8.4-point gap between Harry's (24.2%) and Native (15.8%) is wider than the 7.5-point gap between Native and the eighth-ranked brand, Cremo (8.3%), using descending SoV with ties broken alphabetically. Harry's lead is likely driven by two structural advantages: category-defining editorial coverage accumulated during its 2013–2018 growth arc that continues to surface in AI training and retrieval corpora, and a product line broad enough (shave, body, skincare) to be plausibly cited across multiple prompt types. Prompt-level attribution would be required to confirm these mechanisms.
Brickell Men's Products is the clearest case of punching above its weight. At 10.8% SoV, it outperforms several larger brands including Hims, Ro, and Geologie. Despite being materially smaller than the telehealth cohort and likely spending far less on paid media, its visibility appears consistent with long-standing presence in men's-skincare editorial roundups (GQ, Men's Health, Esquire). This is the template for a challenger strategy. Manscaped's 1.5 average position — the strongest in the top ten, though only marginally ahead of Dollar Shave Club at 1.6 — is consistent with a narrower but deeper citation pattern, concentrated in body-grooming contexts.
At the bottom, the telehealth cohort underperforms given company scale. Hims (4.2%) and Ro (4.2%) each sit well below brands a fraction of their market cap. Hims Hair, a sub-line of Hims, registers a further 0.4%; treated as a brand family, Hims + Hims Hair reaches 4.6%, still below most of the mid-tier. These brands appear to be categorized by AI engines as health-adjacent rather than grooming, and they are missing from the general grooming consideration set as a result.
Harry's (31.7%) and Native (28.3%) dominate, consistent with ChatGPT's reliance on well-indexed editorial and Reddit content where both brands have years of accumulated discussion. ChatGPT appears to reward brands with narrative density — not just product mentions, but context and opinion.
The least concentrated engine in this sample. Manscaped (16.7%), Harry's (15%), and Brickell (15%) are effectively tied at the top. Perplexity's live-citation model favors brands with recent review coverage and structured product pages, which may help explain Brickell's parity with far larger peers.
The most top-heavy engine. Harry's (30%), Jack Black (25%), Manscaped (21.7%), and Dr. Squatch (20%) form a dense leader cohort, with Cremo (15%) and Native (13.3%) close behind. Jack Black's Gemini share (25%) is more than 12x its Perplexity share (1.7%), the sharpest engine-to-engine divergence in the dataset and a signal that prestige-skincare brands are surfacing disproportionately in Gemini's retrieval mix. Gemini is a neutral-to-favorable surface for premium grooming brands and should not be deprioritized.
Harry's (20%) leads, followed by Native (13.3%), Manscaped (10.0%), Dr. Squatch (10.0%), and Jack Black (8.3%). The pattern is directionally consistent with AIO leaning on brands that have strong traditional SEO equity, though the underlying citation-source mix is not in this dataset.
Four distinct clusters emerge from the winning-prompt data, each won by a different brand archetype.
Shave-category comparison queries. Harry's owns this cluster decisively, winning prompts like "Harry's vs Dollar Shave Club which is better" and "alternatives to Harry's for shaving and body care." The brand is both the subject and the answer — a reflexive citation pattern that is extremely difficult to displace.
Clean, mass-accessible personal care. Native wins prompts centered on retail availability ("available at Whole Foods"), ingredient positioning ("without parabens"), and lifestyle contexts ("post-workout," "for dads"). This cluster rewards brands that have bridged DTC origins with mainstream retail distribution.
Body grooming and below-the-waist care. Manscaped has effectively monopolized this niche, winning both brand-query and category-defining prompts around daily routine and 2024 trend queries. Category ownership at this level is the strongest strategic position in the data.
Premium skincare-led grooming. A contested cluster where Jack Black, Brickell, Baxter of California, and Geologie fragment the vote. No single winner has emerged, which makes this the most actionable cluster for a challenger brand willing to invest in editorial authority.
Across the prompt set, several problem-led queries returned thin or no clear branded recommendation. These slots are materially cheaper to win than displacing an incumbent — the brand does not need to outrank Harry's; it needs to be the first credible citation the engine finds.
The most strategically valuable under-claimed prompt areas:
The logic is straightforward: occupying a thinly claimed prompt requires one or two high-quality third-party citations, not a brand-building campaign.
For a brand currently in the 10–30% SoV band, three concrete moves over the next 90 days.
Days 1–30: Build clinical authority content on one under-claimed sub-category. Pick acne-prone or sensitive skin. Secure a dermatologist-authored long-form piece (2,500+ words) placed on a credible third-party surface — realistically, a mid-tier grooming or men's-health Substack, an affiliate-driven review site with strong domain authority, or a sponsored-but-editorially-rigorous placement on a tier-1 lifestyle site (budget accordingly: tier-1 advertorial runs $25k–$100k+ and is often down-weighted when heavily tagged as sponsored). The economic case is the citation asset, not the placement traffic. Brands like Brickell and Baxter appear to have accumulated their current SoV through sustained editorial presence of this type; the timeline compresses when the target is an under-claimed prompt.
Days 30–60: Earn comparison coverage in communities and newsletters AI engines cite. ChatGPT disproportionately surfaces Reddit threads and long-form reviews. The compliant play is listening-led: identify active comparison conversations in communities like r/wicked_edge, r/SkincareAddiction, and r/malefashionadvice, send product for honest review through established creator and affiliate programs, and support independent newsletter writers in the men's lifestyle vertical with product access rather than paid placement. Avoid any commissioning of Reddit posts directly — the reputational and policy risk outweighs the citation value.
Days 60–90: Structure your product pages for live-citation engines. Perplexity's top cohort is less concentrated than any other engine in this sample, which means structured, citable product pages (clear ingredient lists, use-case specificity, review schema) move the needle fastest there. Manscaped's parity with Harry's on Perplexity is attributable to a combination of years of affiliate, podcast, and YouTube sponsorship density that generates third-party listicle citations, plus disciplined on-page structure. Audit your top ten product URLs for AI-citation readiness and rewrite the three weakest; in parallel, review your affiliate and creator-sponsorship coverage for listicle-generation potential.
The combined cost of these three moves can be materially lower than one month of paid social at scale — though tier-1 advertorial placements, if pursued, will close that gap. The key difference is that citation assets compound rather than decay.
This analysis is based on 240 engine calls distributed across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, testing 60 shopper prompts constructed to mirror real D2C query distributions in men's grooming (category discovery, comparison, problem-led, retail-availability, and review-intent prompts). Share of voice is computed as the percentage of prompts in which a brand was named in the engine's response. Average position reflects the mean ordinal placement of the brand across prompts in which it was mentioned. Twenty-five brands were tracked. Data reflects a single point-in-time snapshot; AI engine outputs vary week over week, and brands should re-measure on a rolling basis. Causal interpretations of ranking drivers (editorial density, SEO equity, retrieval mix) are directional hypotheses consistent with the data rather than conclusions derived from citation-source analysis.
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