5W AI Communications this month released the first grocery-focused AI visibility study — the Grocery edition of The Private Label AI Advantage — and the finding will land inside every CPG communications team in the country: the AI engines are recommending store brands nearly two to one over the national brands that built the modern grocery aisle.

The Findings

5W modeled the Citation Share of 25 grocery brands — 13 retailer-owned store brands and 12 national CPG brands — across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, using 64 consumer-intent prompts spanning six sub-categories.

• Store brands averaged a Citation Share of 44. National brands averaged 23. A 1.9× gap.
• Eight of the ten most-cited grocery brands are store brands.
• Trader Joe’s (78) and Kirkland Signature (74) lead the entire index.
• Good & Gather — launched by Target in 2019 — already out-cites Cheerios.
• Tyson, Philadelphia, Frosted Flakes, Hellmann’s and Campbell’s all land in the bottom third.

The gap is platform-dependent but consistent in direction. Perplexity — which leans hardest on Reddit and editorial content — shows the widest gap, plus 32 points in favor of store brands. Google AI Overviews, which inherits national-brand SEO authority, is the narrowest, plus 10. Every engine is moving toward the first model.

Why It Matters for Communications Practitioners

This is not a marketing story. It is a communications story — and specifically a corpus story. The reason store brands are winning inside AI answer engines has almost nothing to do with product and almost everything to do with what the open web has written about them.

Trader Joe’s has a decade of editorial coverage from The Kitchn, Bon Appétit, Serious Eats and Eater. It has Reddit and forum threads by the thousands. It has structured comparison content published by third parties, category-level authority, and community-generated reviews that read as recommendations. Kirkland has the same footprint, weighted toward value and volume. Good & Gather has been built with that model in mind from day one.

The national CPG brands, by contrast, have brand.com, television, and paid search. That footprint was optimized for the memory era — the decisive second in front of the shelf. It is not the footprint the AI engines read from.

When the engines are asked what to buy, they cite what has been written about — in named publications, with specifics, third-party voice, and structured category context. Brand-owned assertions carry almost no weight in that retrieval.

The Market Was Already Moving

U.S. private labels hit a record $282.8 billion in 2025 — a 21.3% dollar share, growing nearly three times as fast as national brands. AI is not creating the private label surge. It is compounding it. Every AI answer that recommends the store brand becomes a discovery moment that the national brand does not get to counter with a display ad.

The Communications Playbook

The takeaways translate directly into work communications teams control:

1. Measure Citation Share. Unaided awareness has been the flagship CPG communications metric for fifty years. It measures memory. It does not measure retrieval. Citation Share — the share of AI-engine answers in your category that name your brand — measures where the buyer conversation is actually happening now.
2. Rebuild the earned-media program around retrieval-eligible outlets. The engines cite named publications with editorial voice and category authority. That reshapes the pitch list. It also reshapes what a placement is worth. A comparison feature in a category outlet is now worth more than a mention in a broad consumer title, because the first is retrievable in an answer and the second largely is not.
3. Get inside the comparison content. Store brands are winning “Trader Joe’s vs. Heinz” threads because they show up. National brands often refuse to engage. Refusing to be compared is refusing to be cited.
4. Take community platforms seriously. Reddit and forum content is retrieval fuel. It is being read, weighted, and quoted by the engines. Legal and brand teams that have blocked participation for years are now blocking Citation Share.
5. Add Generative Engine Optimization to the discipline. GEO is not SEO for chatbots. It is a distinct practice — structuring the entity, the third-party corpus, and the citation graph so the engines produce the brand as the answer. Communications teams are the natural owners.

What Comes Next

For CPG communications leaders, the read is clear. The earned-only AI visibility play is over. So is the paid-only one. The brands that win are the ones that treat the whole corpus around them as the media plan — trade press, editorial, comparison content, community — and measure success on the metric that matches the medium: Citation Share.

Trader Joe’s did not out-spend Cheerios. It out-showed-up. Every communications team in the CPG world should be asking, this week, whether it is set up to do the same.

Full study: 5wpr.com/ai-visibility-index/private-label-ai-advantage/grocery

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Ronn Torossian

Ronn Torossian is shaping AI — and the answers inside the chatbox. Founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. Founded in 2003, 5W combines earned media, digital marketing, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to build brand authority inside the AI engines — a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's and Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards. Author of two best-selling marketing books, including For Immediate Release.