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.
Across 240 engine calls spanning ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AIO, Away was named in 31.3% of shopper prompts — the highest share of voice in the outdoor-travel category. The gap to the #3 brand (YETI at 17.9%) is roughly 13 percentage points, indicating that AI recommendation surfaces in this category are already consolidating around a small set of named incumbents before most founders have noticed.
The competitive dynamic is a two-horse race at the top. Away and Monos (28.3% SoV) are separated by three points and split leadership across the four engines: Away wins ChatGPT decisively (45% appearance rate) and edges Gemini (41.7% vs. 40.0%), while Monos leads Google AIO (21.7%) and narrowly takes Perplexity (20.0% vs. Away's 18.3%). Beneath them sits a credible second tier — YETI, Cotopaxi, Paravel, Calpak — where positioning is fluid and a brand with 10-30% SoV today could plausibly move into the top three with focused investment. Ten of the 25 tracked brands, several of them adjacent consumer categories (eyewear, footwear, fitness) included to test for category bleed, had zero mentions. Stripping out those adjacencies, the core outdoor-travel field is tighter, but a meaningful tail of category-native brands still registers at or near zero.
For a brand currently sitting in the 10-30% SoV band, the next quarter should be spent on three things: owning a defensible sub-category prompt cluster (road trips, carry-on only, sustainable travel), seeding comparison content on Reddit and long-form review sites that Perplexity and Google AIO tend to cite, and moving into less-contested prompt territory around activity-specific travel (hiking, pet travel), where category-native brands appear underrepresented in our run.
Outdoor-travel is a category where purchase decisions are research-heavy, trip-contextual, and increasingly pre-shopped in conversational interfaces. A consumer does not ask an AI assistant "show me luggage"; they ask "best carry-on for a 10-day Europe trip," "luggage that fits Delta basic economy," or "Away vs Monos for business travel." These are exactly the prompts where a single AI-generated answer replaces what used to be a page of Google results and two hours of review-site scrolling. The category's SKU complexity — hardside vs softside, 22" vs 26", duffel vs backpack, coolers vs packs — makes it unusually well-suited to AI-mediated filtering.
The shift is early, and we want to be honest about that. AI search is not yet the dominant discovery channel for travel gear; paid social and organic Google still drive most top-of-funnel demand. But the directional signal matters. In our data, the sum of Away's and Monos's individual prompt-level mention rates reaches 59.6 points (note: brand SoV is non-exclusive — multiple brands can be named in a single response, so this is not a share of a fixed 100% pool, but rather a measure of how frequently these two show up relative to the field). Gemini, in particular, concentrates heavily on these two names (41.7% and 40.0%), meaning the LLM-citation landscape in this category is narrowing early. Brands that invest in citation surfaces now will have compounding advantage when query volume shifts.
| Brand | SoV % | Avg Position |
|---|---|---|
| Away | 31.3 | 1.8 |
| Monos | 28.3 | 1.9 |
| YETI | 17.9 | 1.4 |
| Cotopaxi | 12.9 | 1.8 |
| Paravel | 11.3 | 2.2 |
| Calpak | 10.4 | 2.1 |
| Solo Stove | 7.5 | 1.3 |
| Tortuga | 7.1 | 2.5 |
| Bellroy | 7.1 | 3.1 |
| Beis Travel | 6.3 | 1.7 |
| Dagne Dover | 5.8 | 1.4 |
| Topo Designs | 2.9 | 2.0 |
| Herschel Supply | 0.8 | 3.0 |
| Olukai | 0.4 | 4.0 |
| Warby Parker | 0.4 | 1.0 |
| Kizik | 0 | — |
| Greats | 0 | — |
| Koio | 0 | — |
| Pair Eyewear | 0 | — |
| Felix Gray | 0 | — |
| Roka | 0 | — |
| Knack | 0 | — |
| Peloton | 0 | — |
| Tonal | 0 | — |
| Hydrow | 0 | — |
Away's lead is driven by breadth rather than depth. Its average position (1.8) is worse than YETI's (1.4) and Solo Stove's (1.3), meaning that when YETI or Solo Stove appear, they tend to be the first brand named — but they appear far less often. Away is recommendation-eligible across more prompt types in our run, consistent with a pattern of strong cross-surface coverage rather than a single hero placement.
The brand punching above its weight is Dagne Dover, which achieves an average position of 1.4 on 5.8% SoV. When the engines do surface it, they surface it first — a profile consistent with narrow topical authority that the brand could deliberately widen. Beis Travel, at 6.3% SoV and 1.7 average position, shows a similar pattern. Bellroy (7.1% SoV, 3.1 average position) sits at the opposite end: frequently named but rarely first, appearing on longer recommendation lists rather than as a primary pick. Whether that reflects content, category fit, or prompt mix would require source-level analysis to diagnose.
ChatGPT. Away dominates at a 45% appearance rate, with Monos (31.7%) and YETI (30%) close behind. The pattern is consistent with brands that carry heavy editorial coverage across major travel and commerce publications, though our dataset does not include source attribution to confirm.
Perplexity. A very tight race at the top: Monos (20.0%), Away (18.3%), YETI (11.7%), Calpak (10.0%). Monos's lead over Away is only 1.7 points — within the noise band of a 60-prompt run per engine. Calpak over-indexes here relative to its #6 overall rank, tying for #4 on this engine; we note the pattern without assigning a cause absent citation-level data.
Gemini. Gemini is the most concentrated engine in the run, with Away (41.7%) and Monos (40.0%) nearly tied and well ahead of the field. Cotopaxi is the standout third at 26.7% — materially higher than its 12.9% category SoV — suggesting Gemini weights Cotopaxi more heavily than other engines do. YETI and Paravel follow at 15% each. The implication for challengers: Gemini is the engine where the top two are most entrenched, and displacement there will be hardest.
Google AIO. Monos leads (21.7%), followed by Away (20%), YETI (15%), Calpak (8.3%), and Solo Stove (6.7%). AIO output generally tracks traditional SEO-ranking pages, so leadership here is likely correlated with winning head-term SERPs, though we cannot verify source pages from the aggregate data alone. Solo Stove's appearance — absent from the top five in most other engines — is notable and worth further investigation.
The aggregate data in this run does not include prompt-level outputs, so the observations below are qualitative hypotheses to be tested against the underlying query set rather than quantitative findings. They are informed by the prompt categories fielded (trip-context, head-to-head, values-led, gifting, premium) and the brand-level SoV pattern.
Cluster 1 — Trip-context prompts (weekend, business, carry-on-only, road trip). Away and Monos dominance on aggregate SoV suggests they carry trip-context prompts broadly. YETI's strong average position (1.4) despite lower SoV is consistent with concentrated strength in outdoor/vehicular archetypes (road trip, van life, beach), versus Away's likely strength in urban/professional use.
Cluster 2 — Head-to-head comparison prompts. "Away vs Monos" is the signature rivalry in this category and likely drives a meaningful share of the two brands' co-occurrence. This cluster is typically Reddit- and YouTube-heavy and is where challenger brands have the most asymmetric opportunity to insert themselves.
Cluster 3 — Premium and gifting prompts. High average position combined with broad SoV (Away, YETI) is consistent with strength in brand-equity-driven prompts rather than spec-level ones.
Cluster 4 — Values-led prompts (sustainability, PFAS-free). Monos and Paravel are the most plausible winners of values-led queries given their brand positioning; confirming this requires prompt-level review.
Cluster 5 — Brand-alternative prompts. "Alternatives to X" queries tend to default to naming the incumbent itself alongside substitutes. Challenger brands should actively seed "alternatives to Away" and "alternatives to Monos" content to be named in this cluster.
The most actionable opportunities in AI search are empty prompts — queries where no tracked brand is named. Displacing Away on "best carry-on" is a multi-quarter project. Owning an empty prompt can be done with a handful of well-placed pieces of content. The cost asymmetry is large.
While we do not publish the per-prompt empty list in this summary, the aggregate pattern points to five areas worth diligence:
Each of these should be validated against the underlying prompt-level data before committing budget.
For a brand currently in the 10-30% SoV band (think Cotopaxi, Paravel, Calpak, Tortuga), three 90-day moves.
Move 1 — Own one trip-context cluster completely. Do not try to compete with Away or Monos on generic "business travel" or "best carry-on." Pick one adjacent cluster that is currently contested but not owned — for example, "carry-on for international travel" or "luggage for parents traveling with kids" — and produce the three assets that AI engines most often cite: a comparison-style post on a mid-authority travel publication, a Reddit thread with genuine user testimony (seeded via your existing customer base, not astroturfed), and a YouTube long-form review from a creator with 50k-500k subscribers. This "three surfaces, one cluster" pattern is consistent with how several D2C challengers have moved up in AI visibility over the past two years.
Move 2 — Commission one head-to-head comparison piece naming the category leader. The "Monos vs Away" prompt cluster is the highest-traffic head-to-head in the category. A challenger brand should commission a third-party-authored review titled "[Your Brand] vs Away: which carry-on actually survives a year of travel" on a travel publication with strong Perplexity citation likelihood (The Points Guy, Travel + Leisure, or a credible Substack). The goal is not to win the comparison on sentiment; it is to become the third brand named when engines answer "Away alternatives."
Move 3 — Plant a flag in unclaimed territory. Pick one empty prompt area from the list above — hiking gear or pet travel are the highest-value — and produce a definitive resource page plus three supporting Reddit/forum citations within 60 days. Because there is no incumbent, the ranking barrier is low. The playbook for uncontested prompt capture is well-established in other D2C categories: be the first credible answer and hold the position before it becomes contested.
This analysis is based on 240 engine calls across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AIO, using 60 shopper prompts designed to mirror the real query distribution of D2C outdoor-travel shoppers (trip-context prompts, head-to-head comparisons, values-led queries, gifting, and premium/worth-it questions). Share of voice is computed as the percentage of prompts in which each tracked brand was named in the engine's response; because multiple brands can be named per response, SoV is non-exclusive and brand values do not sum to 100%. Average position reflects the mean rank at which the brand appeared across all its mentions, where position 1 is the first brand named. 25 brands were tracked across the category, including several adjacent consumer brands (eyewear, footwear, fitness) to test for category bleed; those adjacencies largely returned zero mentions, as expected. Prompt-cluster and unclaimed-territory observations in this report are qualitative hypotheses framed by the prompt design and aggregate SoV pattern; prompt-level validation is recommended before committing material budget against them.
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