The petcare AI visibility report
Who leads petcare in AI answers?
We analyzed 150 AI answers across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, identifying 242 brand groups. Explore the category leaders and see where your brand stands.
TropiClean
01 / The competitive picture
See who gets named. Find where you stand.
TropiClean leads with 33 mentions. Burt’s Bees for Pets and Virbac tie next with 27 each. The petcare leaderboard includes all 242 brand groups observed in the answers. Product-category views compare only the brands mentioned in the relevant question set.
All petcare: 242 observed brand groups, 150 answers, 730 brand mentions. Equal mention counts share rank.
| Overall rank | Brand / family | Mentions | Answer rate | Share of mentions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | TropiClean | 33 / 150 | 22.0% | 4.52% |
| 2 | Burt’s Bees for Pets | 27 / 150 | 18.0% | 3.70% |
| 2 | Virbac | 27 / 150 | 18.0% | 3.70% |
| 4 | VetriScience | 17 / 150 | 11.3% | 2.33% |
| 4 | Wahl USA | 17 / 150 | 11.3% | 2.33% |
| 6 | earthbath | 16 / 150 | 10.7% | 2.19% |
| 6 | Zesty Paws | 16 / 150 | 10.7% | 2.19% |
| 8 | Nutramax | 15 / 150 | 10.0% | 2.05% |
| 9 | Vet's Best | 13 / 150 | 8.7% | 1.78% |
| 10 | Arm & Hammer | 11 / 150 | 7.3% | 1.51% |
| 10 | Pet Honesty | 11 / 150 | 7.3% | 1.51% |
| 10 | Purina | 11 / 150 | 7.3% | 1.51% |
Answer rate is the share of answers that name a brand. Share of mentions is its share of all brand mentions in the selected question set. Neither is market share.
Download overall rankings02 / Leaders in your category
Your most useful comparison is closer to home.
A dental brand and a grooming brand serve different questions. Each category leaderboard includes every brand group observed in that category’s answers, using that question set’s answer total.
TropiClean
TropiClean appears across shampoo, conditioner and other grooming questions. Burt’s Bees follows with 19 mentions; Wahl has 17.
Virbac
Virbac is the most-mentioned dental brand family. TropiClean follows with 11 mentions, then Petsmile with 10.
Zesty Paws
Zesty Paws appears in 16 supplement answers. Nutramax follows with 15, and VetriScience with 13.
A closer look / Petsmile
The same brand. A more relevant denominator.
Petsmile’s overall answer rate is 6.7%. Inside the dental question set, it rises to 41.7%: 10 mentions across 24 answers. That places it third in dental, behind Virbac and TropiClean.
A low overall percentage can hide a strong specialist position. Start with the questions your products can genuinely answer, then compare your presence with the brands that lead those questions.
Petsmile’s dental visibility
10 / 150 answers
10 / 24 answers
These are two views of the same snapshot, not a before-and-after result. Petsmile is a measured brand in the study, not presented as an AppearIn client.
03 / From rank to action
A gap worth investigating.
Wahl USA appeared in 3 of 50 ChatGPT answers, compared with 7 of 50 on both Google AI Mode and Perplexity. The combined 11.3% score hides an eight-percentage-point platform difference.
One concrete example is “What are the best dog shampoos for sensitive skin?” Wahl appeared in Google AI Mode and Perplexity, but not ChatGPT. The next step is to inspect that buyer question, the competing recommendations and the relevant product page.
A useful content brief specifies the buyer’s need, the evidence your brand can support, the page to improve and the questions to rerun. Publishing the page becomes a hypothesis to test; this snapshot does not establish why a platform included or omitted a brand.
The reported sources
Where to start your research.
The platforms returned one source label per answer. After consolidating equivalent labels, PetMD appeared most often, followed by AKC, groomboard.com and VOHC.
- 17petmd.com
- 12akc.org
- 10groomboard.com
- 6vohc.org
Counts are out of 150 answers. These are reported source labels, not proof that a source caused a recommendation. Exact article URLs were not captured. Inspect source quality and relevance before choosing an outreach opportunity.
Your brand’s next step
Turn your place in the leaderboard into a plan.
Request a brand-specific visibility report. We’ll start with your category and the questions your products are built to answer.
- 01Your relevant competitive position
Where your brand appears, which category leaders to compare with and how results differ by platform.
- 02The buyer questions you’re missing
Specific prompts where relevant competitors appear, with the underlying answer context.
- 03A focused content action plan
Priority pages, evidence to develop and a repeatable prompt set to evaluate what changes.
04 / Make the numbers inspectable
Methodology and source data
Collected September 5, 2026. Fifty US-focused, purchase-intent questions were asked across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. Each prompt requested up to five recommended brands and one source. We recorded the first rendered response to each question.
What do the totals and ranks mean?
The 150 answers contain 746 filled recommendation slots. Removing two generic “Snuffle Mat” entries and 14 repeated brand-family slots within the same answer leaves 730 brand mentions across 242 observed groups. The public leaderboard ranks those 242 observed groups. Product-category rankings include only groups mentioned in that category. A brand missing from the leaderboard was not observed in the selected answers; this does not establish its visibility outside the sample.
Brand names, product variants and documented family aliases are consolidated; these are brand/family entries, not independently verified legal companies. Distinct marketed brands can remain separate even when ownership overlaps. The downloadable alias map makes the grouping decisions inspectable.
How are category and platform comparisons calculated?
Grooming contains 14 questions, dental 8, supplements 8, skin and wound care 5, and home hygiene 5. Ten other themes contain one question each. Each question has three platform answers. Category rankings use all brand groups’ mentions within that category; platform rates use 50 answers per platform. Broader product coverage and the uneven question mix can affect overall rank.
ChatGPT used a logged-out consumer session; Google AI Mode used a signed-in consumer session with US buyer framing; Perplexity used signed-in Pro. This is a single collection, not repeated-run evidence or a platform-wide census.
What can this study establish—and what needs a follow-up?
The study shows which names appeared in the recorded answers. It does not establish permanent market leadership, product quality, sales impact or the cause of a mention. AI answers can change with wording, time, location, model and account state. A focused brand report should validate product relevance and rerun the same prompts to assess subsequent changes.
We found 71 consolidated source labels: 68 domains and three name-only sources. Source downloads link to reconstructed domain homepages, not exact captured articles. Company website URLs are a separate field in the original workbook and are not counted as AI citations.
Research by AppearIn. Collection: September 5, 2026. Published: September 8, 2026.