In the age of AI, more and more UK shoppers are skipping the Google search bar and using ChatGPT, AI Overviews or Gemini when they need outfit ideas, gift inspiration or suggestions for where to buy from. But AI isn’t giving the whole picture of what’s available on the market, and it has real consequences for what shoppers are seeing and what they are missing out on.
So if you have ever asked AI to recommend an outfit for an upcoming holiday or a gift for a best friend’s birthday, the list you got back was probably missing several of the UK’s biggest high street retailers and favouring a much smaller circle of brands.
Marketing Signals’ new study, the UK Fashion AI Visibility Index, analysed over 50 UK retailers across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Gemini citations to find out which brands shoppers are actually being told about. To account for each retailer’s UK traffic, so audience size would not skew the results, the scoring was adjusted by website visitor numbers, and the results are not what you would expect:
- Next, the UK’s most-visited fashion retailer (with over 21.6M monthly UK visitors) came last as the least visible in AI, with an AI visibility score of just 1.6 out of 100.
- Marks & Spencer’s, one of the UK’s most recognisable brands with the second largest number of visitors (21.1M monthly UK visits), just escaped the bottom 10, scoring 5.0 out of 100.
- New Look (#58) and Pretty Little Thing (#56) both are in the bottom 10 despite multi-million monthly traffic figures to their websites.
- Whistles came second overall with just 217K monthly visits, a fraction of the well-known high street brands like New Look and Sports Direct.
- Harrods came out on top as the most visible in AI (36.3/100). This is due to the large amounts of editorial coverage that AI tools have learned to trust.
These results show how AI tools have been trained to make recommendations, not by how big or popular they are, but by how much they are being talked about and written about across the internet. Many years of editorial coverage about Harrods or Selfridges has helped these brands be more visible in AI. Whereas value-driven brands like Next or Sports Direct, where shoppers tend to go directly when they already know what they want, generate far less editorial coverage that AI tools draw from, despite dominating on the high street.
Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director and Founder of Marketing Signals, comments:
“The findings surprised us. We expected the biggest retailers like Next and M&S and to dominate AI visibility the way they dominate the high street. Instead, brands a fraction of their size are showing up in AI answers far more often. AI tools don’t reward traffic, they reward being written about and recommended across the internet, which means the brands AI suggests don’t always reflect what is actually popular with shoppers.”
There is a useful takeaway for shoppers. If you rely on AI for your fashion inspiration, it’s worth knowing that it’s giving you a skewed view of what’s out there rather than a representative one, based on what’s been written about over the years, not necessarily what shoppers are buying the most. Therefore, asking AI more specifically to include brands you like or lesser-known brands, rather than being generic, will give you a much better result.
Photo by Tim Douglas : https://www.pexels.com/photo/women-with-shopping-bags-standing-near-counter-of-shop-6567204/
