Brandi AI’s first-ever AI Visibility Index for the fresh dog food market landed this week, and its headline finding is blunt: when consumers ask ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or other generative AI assistants which fresh dog food to buy, the answers favor a very small circle of brands—and that circle doesn’t always match what you see on a store shelf.

What Brandi’s Index Actually Measured—and Why It’s Different

Over the 31 days of January 2026, Brandi AI captured more than 17,500 AI-generated answers from seven major platforms—ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Google Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity—all responding to typical buyer questions about fresh dog food. The company then analyzed which brands were mentioned, how often, and what tone those mentions carried. The result is a snapshot of who gets a seat at the conversational-AI table and who gets left out.

Three numbers jump out:

  • The Farmer’s Dog is the most consistently surfaced brand. It appears unprompted across dozens of query types, often used as the comparison anchor for the whole category.
  • Hill’s Pet Nutrition saw AI citations soar more than 300% month-over-month, a spike Brandi links to the company’s strong medical and academic authority.
  • Spot & Tango, a direct-to-consumer player with a U.S. retail share Brandi pegs at under 5%, punches far above its weight: it holds 15% GEO Awareness and 5.2% GEO Share of Voice in AI answers, ranking as the second-most-cited domain overall.

Beyond the brand names, the index reveals which outside sources AI models lean on most heavily. Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, product-review pages like PetMD, and institutional authorities such as the American Kennel Club and Tufts University keep popping up as the citations underneath AI recommendations. Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, and Facebook groups also feed the output, giving user-generated chatter a surprisingly large role in shaping what the models say.

What This Means for Your Bottom Line—Whether You Sell Dog Food or Just Want to Feed Your Pet

If you’re a marketer or product manager in the pet-food space, Brandi’s index is a wake-up call. AI-driven discovery is not a future trend; it’s already changing which brands new customers see first. When a chatbot lists three options and omits yours, that omission can be as damaging as a page-two search ranking in the old SEO world—perhaps worse, because there’s no blue link to scroll down to.

The solution, Brandi argues, is Generative Engine Optimization: a discipline that prioritizes structured, machine-readable content and systematic third-party validation. That means your product pages need to be crystal clear and citeable, you need to earn mentions in the specific outlets AI models trust, and you need to monitor your visibility across not just Google but also ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and others. GEO is a marathon, not a one-and-done campaign; the index shows that brands like The Farmer’s Dog maintain their lead through continuous, consistent signals.

If you’re a pet owner, the practical takeaway is more cautionary. AI assistants can give you a useful starting shortlist, but their suggestions are not neutral. They inherit the biases and citation patterns of their training data. When Facebook groups and Reddit threads show up as frequent anchors alongside Forbes and university research, the mix can be unpredictable. Brandi’s own data shows that health-related prompts tilt toward Hill’s because of its institutional authority—but that doesn’t mean Hill’s is right for every dog. Always verify a chatbot’s reasoning, ask it to cite its sources, and, most critically, consult your veterinarian before making a dietary switch based on an AI suggestion.

How We Arrived at an AI-Driven Dog Food Aisle

The shift from clicking blue links to chatting with an assistant has been building for years, but 2025 was the year it became impossible to ignore. In October 2025, Brandi AI launched its platform explicitly to help brands “earn” mentions inside generative answers. Around the same time, multiple GEO-focused startups and incumbents began releasing vertical-specific visibility indexes. The fresh-pet-food category became a natural test case because it’s booming—General Mills is pushing Blue Buffalo into fresh, Freshpet’s retail footprint is expanding, and DTC players like The Farmer’s Dog and Spot & Tango are spending heavily on marketing.

When dozens of high-intent prompts about “best fresh dog food,” “healthiest fresh dog food for labs,” or “Farmer’s Dog vs. Spot & Tango” are fired into seven different AI engines daily, patterns quickly emerge. Brandi’s methodology—dozens of buyer-oriented queries, cross-platform daily captures, and aggregation into awareness and share-of-voice metrics—is not unique, but it’s one of the first to go public with brand-level rankings. The finding that traditional search visibility and market share don’t predict AI visibility perfectly mirrors earlier reports in CRM, travel, and other sectors: LLMs learn to cite what they’ve seen cited before, creating a flywheel that can lock in a handful of brands.

That’s why the Hill’s 300% spike is so instructive. Brandi attributes it to a month-over-month surge, not an instantaneous jump, which hints at a compounding effect: once a model begins associating a brand with high-authority health sources, the association feeds on itself. For Spot & Tango, the opposite dynamic may be at work—low retail share but strong earned media and a clean content architecture earn it a seat at the table far beyond its physical footprint.

What You Should Do Right Now—Two Checklists

For Marketers

  1. Audit your content for AI readiness. Are your product and category pages written in factual, unambiguous language that a machine can parse? Do you include nutritional data, feeding guidelines, and sourcing information in structured formats? Missing schema markup or vague marketing copy will get you skipped.
  2. Target the repeat-cited domains. Brandi’s list includes Forbes, Business Insider, PetMD, the American Kennel Club, and Tufts. If your brand isn’t cited in those outlets—whether through editorial coverage, guest expertise, or institutional partnerships—you’re invisible to the models that matter.
  3. Monitor across at least four AI engines. ChatGPT, Google Overviews, Copilot, and Perplexity often surface different sources. Set up a weekly capture of a fixed set of 10-15 high-intent queries and track which brands appear, in what order, and with what tone. Tools exist; manual spreadsheet checks can work for smaller teams.
  4. Build a continuous GEO cadence. AI visibility is sustained by ongoing signals. One press release won’t cut it. Plan a quarterly cycle of publishing research-backed content, earning media citations, and refreshing your owned pages. Treat GEO like SEO in its early days—an always-on discipline, not a project.

For Consumers

  1. Treat AI brand lists as a starting point, not a verdict. Before buying, ask the chatbot a follow-up: “Why did you recommend those three brands specifically? Show me your sources.” If it can’t produce credible links, downgrade that suggestion.
  2. Cross-shop answers. Try the same question in ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity. If you get the same brand in all three, confidence rises; if not, the models are uncertain or biased.
  3. Always loop in your vet. Fresh dog food intersects with canine health, and no LLM—no matter how authoritative its citations look—can replace a clinical evaluation. Use AI to build a conversation starter for your veterinary visit, not as a final decision maker.

What’s Next: The Transparency Question Moves to the Front Burner

Brandi’s index makes a compelling case, but it also leaves important doors unopened. The company hasn’t released its full prompt set, sampling logic, or the statistical confidence behind claims like the “300%” increase. Without those, the rankings are a powerful signal, not a peer-reviewed fact. We can expect regulators and independent researchers to push for greater transparency—not just from measurement firms but from the AI platforms themselves. When a chatbot’s answer can steer millions of dollars in sales, the provenance and fairness of those answers become consumer-protection issues. For now, the smartest move for brands is to start building AI readiness into their content strategy. For everyone else, a little healthy skepticism when the machine tells you what to feed your dog is still the best policy.