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.
The Giving Movement was named in 66.7% of AI engine responses, averaged across 240 engine calls spanning ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AIO on 60 shopper prompts — more than double the second-place incumbent, Namshi, at 27.9%. In a category where the next six brands cluster between 20% and 28% average mention rate, the leader has achieved a structural position that AI engines, within this UAE-focused prompt set, now treat as the default answer for modest athleisure.
The competitive dynamic is not a two-horse race but a fragmented middle. Six global and regional players — Namshi, Nike, Gymshark, Ounass, noon, Adidas — sit within an approximately 3-point band just above 25%, with Lululemon trailing at 20.4%. None of them owns the category narrative. Meanwhile, nine of the 30 tracked brands, including Sun and Sand Sports, Sports Direct UAE, Outdoor Voices, and Beyond Yoga, register zero mentions. The middle is contested on generic athleisure terms. The modest-athleisure intersection in this prompt set is effectively owned.
For a brand sitting in the 10% to 30% SoV band, the next quarter should not be spent attacking the leader head-on. The efficient move is to claim a defensible sub-vertical — humidity performance, price-tiered modest sets, or KSA-specific fit — and seed that territory with third-party content that AI engines cite. Narrower territories are likely more efficient to test than head-on displacement, but the relative cost and impact would need to be measured against a control.
Modest athleisure in the UAE and KSA is a category where the purchase decision is disproportionately shaped by discovery queries. A shopper looking for non-see-through leggings that meet both gym-performance and modesty requirements cannot rely on a single category page at a department store; the product intersection is too narrow. Historically this shopper turned to Instagram and peer recommendations. Increasingly, our prompt testing suggests, the same shopper asks ChatGPT or Google AIO a full-sentence question — "modest workout clothes in Riyadh that are breathable and stylish" — and treats the first two or three brands named as the consideration set.
This shift is early and should not be overstated. AI search traffic remains a minority of total discovery volume in the Gulf. But the direction is clear: prompts in this category are long, specific, and conversational — the exact query shape where classical SEO underperforms and generative engines outperform. Brands that wait until AI-mediated discovery is unambiguously material before investing will find the leader's citation moat already compounded.
| Brand | SoV % | Avg Position |
|---|---|---|
| The Giving Movement | 66.7 | 1.5 |
| Namshi | 27.9 | 4.0 |
| Nike | 27.5 | 3.1 |
| Gymshark | 26.7 | 2.4 |
| Ounass | 26.3 | 3.4 |
| noon | 25.4 | 4.3 |
| Adidas | 25.0 | 3.4 |
| Lululemon | 20.4 | 2.8 |
| Under Armour | 17.1 | 3.8 |
| Puma | 14.2 | 4.4 |
| Alo Yoga | 6.7 | 2.6 |
| Modanisa | 6.7 | 5.4 |
| H&M Move | 5.0 | 5.8 |
| Vuori | 3.8 | 1.8 |
| Decathlon UAE | 3.8 | 3.2 |
| Haute Hijab | 1.7 | 6.8 |
| Asiya | 1.3 | 7.7 |
| Athleta | 0.8 | 3.5 |
| Sweaty Betty | 0.4 | 8.0 |
| Veiled Collection | 0.4 | 4.0 |
| Aab Collection | 0.4 | 4.0 |
| Bandier | 0 | — |
| Beyond Yoga | 0 | — |
| Outdoor Voices | 0 | — |
| Inayah | 0 | — |
| Sun and Sand Sports | 0 | — |
| Sports Direct UAE | 0 | — |
| Nass Sports | 0 | — |
| Splash Fashions | 0 | — |
| Zara Athleticz | 0 | — |
The 38.8-point gap between first and second place is larger than the gap between second and twentieth. The data is more consistent with strong category association than with a simple paid-media explanation, though paid spend was not measured here. The Giving Movement is the Dubai-founded brand AI engines associate with the intersection of modesty and athletic performance within this prompt set, which means it gets cited on modest queries and on generic Gulf activewear queries. Its average position of 1.5 indicates it is usually named first or second when it appears.
Gymshark is the clearest example of a brand punching above its weight. With 26.7% SoV and an average position of 2.4 — the best average position among brands in the 10% to 30% SoV band — it is being cited more prominently than larger incumbents like Nike and Adidas. This is consistent with Gymshark's aggressive Gulf push: a flagship store in Dubai Mall, extensive sponsorship of UAE-based fitness creators, and a deep library of third-party fitness content globally. Citation-source analysis would be needed to attribute precisely. Vuori, meanwhile, is a rounding-error brand by volume (3.8%) but earns a 1.8 average position when cited, suggesting strong but narrow citation quality. Sun and Sand Sports is a notable case: it has meaningful Gulf retail presence but registered zero mentions in this test. Other zero-mention retailers with physical Gulf footprint, including Sports Direct UAE and Splash Fashions, should likewise investigate why they are absent from AI-mediated discovery when marketplace peers such as Namshi (27.9%), Ounass (26.3%), and noon (25.4%) are cited at scale.
The Giving Movement is named in 78.3% of prompts, followed by Nike and Adidas tied at 51.7%, and Namshi at 46.7%. ChatGPT favors global sportswear giants alongside the category leader, and — summing mention rates across all tracked brands — returns the highest overall citation density of the four engines tested. A reasonable hypothesis is that strong Wikipedia presence, press coverage, and structured web content drive this pattern, though citation-source analysis would be required to confirm.
The leader holds 55.0%, with Gymshark second at 36.7% and Ounass third at 26.7%. Perplexity's live-web retrieval appears to weight editorial and listicle content, which would favor brands with curated "best of" inclusions on sites like Vogue Arabia, Harper's Bazaar Arabia, and Gulf News — but this is a directional hypothesis rather than a proven mechanism in this dataset.
Gemini is the strongest engine for the category leader specifically, with The Giving Movement cited at 86.7%. It also provides meaningful visibility to several mid-tier brands: Namshi and Ounass at 41.7%, Nike at 36.7%, noon at 31.7%, Adidas and Lululemon at 28.3%, Gymshark at 25.0%, and Puma at 23.3%. ChatGPT, however, has the highest overall mention density across tracked brands in this test set; Gemini sits second.
The Giving Movement leads at 46.7%, followed by Gymshark at 30.0%, Ounass at 11.7%, and Lululemon at 11.7%. Notably, AIO under-cites several brands with strong classical domain authority — Nike and Adidas sit at 10.0% and 6.7%, and Namshi at 3.3%. The behavior of AIO in this category does not map cleanly onto classical SERP authority, and attribution to domain authority, schema, or other SEO factors would require side-by-side SERP and citation-source analysis before any causal claim is warranted.
Five distinct clusters can be hypothesized from the structure of the 60-prompt set. We present these as interpretive frames only; the dataset underpinning this report contains aggregate brand- and engine-level SoV, not prompt-level outputs. The claims below should be read as hypotheses to test against a prompt-level slice, not findings.
Premium modest cluster. Prompts like "premium modest athleisure brands in Dubai 2026" and "best sustainable athleisure sets in Dubai for hijabi women" are the most plausible locus of The Giving Movement's dominance. The brand sits in the accessible premium / sustainable streetwear tier rather than true luxury, and this is likely its narrative core and deepest moat — but confirmation requires prompt-level cuts.
Value and marketplace cluster. Prompts such as "modest gym sets on sale in UAE 2026" and "best value athleisure under SAR 400 Riyadh" would, on priors, favor marketplaces such as Namshi, noon, and Ounass, since AI engines tend to cite aggregators on price-indexed queries. This is a hypothesis to test, not a finding in the current data.
Performance and climate cluster. Prompts around "activewear that does not show sweat in UAE humidity" and "best activewear for Dubai hot and humid weather" might plausibly pull from global performance-apparel authority — Nike, Adidas, Under Armour — rather than from Gulf-specific positioning. Again, a hypothesis requiring prompt-level validation.
Comparison cluster. Prompts of the form "The Giving Movement vs Nike modest activewear" surface both brands by construction — this is a defensive cluster for the leader and an offensive opportunity for any brand that invests in explicit comparison content.
KSA-specific fit cluster. Prompts like "non see through leggings for modest women KSA" and "modest gym wear that is not tight for Saudi women" are a reasonable candidate for the most contested and most winnable cluster for a challenger, given that no pure-play KSA brand appears in the top tier of overall SoV. Whether the split among named brands there is even remains to be tested.
The empty-prompt sample in this dataset is not populated, and prompt-level cuts are outside the scope of this analysis. The candidate whitespace areas below are inferred from the aggregate structural pattern — a leader with a 38.8-point gap, a fragmented middle, and nine zero-mention brands — and are offered as hypotheses to test with prompt-level data and a separate content audit, not as findings from the current aggregate dataset.
The strategic logic is straightforward. Displacing The Giving Movement on "premium modest athleisure Dubai" requires competing against years of compounded editorial inclusion. Capturing a currently under-cited query — "modest postpartum activewear UAE," "prayer-compatible gym outfits Riyadh," "breathable abaya-style workout cover-ups" — plausibly requires far less third-party content volume, though the exact cost and impact would need to be measured. We did not audit whether brands are currently seeding comparison-format or fabric-science content; that audit is a logical next step.
The five most strategically valuable candidate adjacent prompt territories:
For a brand in the 10% to 30% SoV band — the contested middle — three 90-day moves are disproportionately efficient.
Move 1: Commission independent performance testing by credible regional reviewers. Performance prompts (humidity, sweat-wicking, fabric science) may favor Nike and Adidas by default; this hypothesis should be validated with prompt-level cluster cuts, but the defensive logic for challengers is sound either way. Commission product testing by regional commerce editors, UAE-based performance coaches, endurance athletes, or textile reviewers, placed on Gulf-credible publications — Gulf News lifestyle, The National, Cosmopolitan Middle East, Men's Health Middle East — covering three to five products tested in UAE summer conditions. Established regional publishers should be prioritized; individual Substack newsletters can play a secondary, experimental role. Reserve clinician-led review (postnatal physiotherapists, pelvic-floor specialists) for the postpartum and recovery sub-vertical, where it is category-appropriate. Third-party performance reviews are a plausible mechanism for improving retrieval visibility, particularly in engines that cite live web sources, but the effect should be tested and monitored rather than assumed.
Move 2: Seed the comparison cluster through disclosed affiliate and editorial channels. Work with affiliate publishers, commerce editors, and review sites — with clear disclosure — to produce "The Giving Movement vs [your brand]" comparison content. Monitor authentic discussion in mainstream Gulf communities such as r/dubai and r/UAE for social listening, but treat Reddit as a signal source rather than a placement channel; moderator policies and platform dynamics make deliberate seeding unreliable and reputationally risky. The leader cannot prevent independent comparison content from existing; a challenger that invests in disclosed comparison content shapes the framing. Gymshark's disproportionately high Perplexity citation rate in our data (36.7%) is consistent with a brand that benefits from abundant third-party review content, though the exact causal chain is not measurable here.
Move 3: Claim one unclaimed sub-vertical with a dedicated content hub. Select one of the five candidate territories above — postpartum, prayer-compatible, or teen modest activewear — and build a 12-article content hub on your own domain with matching schema markup, plus three guest placements on neutral regional lifestyle titles (Cosmopolitan Middle East, Emirates Woman, Harper's Bazaar Arabia), independent fashion and wellness publishers, or non-competing adjacent businesses such as boutique UAE gyms, physiotherapy clinics, or maternity-care practices. The goal is not organic traffic; it is becoming the entity AI engines associate with that sub-vertical. A concentrated 90-day content push can begin to influence retrieval-based surfaces such as Perplexity and Google AIO within the quarter; impact on ChatGPT and Gemini base-model behavior is less predictable and should be treated as a longer-horizon outcome.
This analysis is based on 240 engine calls executed across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AIO, using 60 shopper prompts designed to mirror real D2C query distributions in the UAE and KSA modest athleisure category. Prompts span discovery, comparison, price-indexed, performance-indexed, and use-case-specific queries. Share of voice is computed as the average mention rate across the four engines — the percentage of engine responses in which a given brand was named, averaged across engines. Average position is computed across mentions only, excluding responses where the brand was absent. Thirty brands were tracked, covering regional specialists, global athleisure incumbents, marketplaces, and modest-wear pure-plays. Prompt-level cluster performance, country-level cuts (UAE vs KSA), citation-source attribution, web-content and comparison-content audits, paid-media spend, and cost-of-placement data are outside the scope of this dataset; claims in those areas should be treated as hypotheses pending further analysis.
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