What Evertune's Pet Industry Data Says About AI Search

If you run a vet clinic, a pet brand or a pet service business, you have probably wondered who AI tools like ChatGPT actually recommend in your category, and whether you should be paying to show up. This fall I got an inside look at real data on both questions.

Evertune is a platform that tracks how AI tools answer questions about brands, both in regular answers and in the new ads appearing inside ChatGPT. After I attended one of their webinars, their team ran pet food and pet supplies reports and walked me through the results. Here is what the data showed, and what it means for animal wellness businesses. All credit for the numbers goes to Evertune; the takeaways are mine.

Reviewed for accuracy by Evertune's team, October 2026.

What Did Evertune's Pet Industry Data Show?

Evertune's reports covered June through August 2026. Their team told me each question is asked of the AI tools about 100 times a month, so the scores reflect a pattern, not a single answer. A visibility score of 100 means the brand showed up essentially every time.

Category	Who AI recommends	AI ads activity	What it means
Pet food	Purina dominates: about 88 on average, 100 by August	Purina had about 80% of ad appearances; FreshPet tested ads in July and stopped in August; Spot & Tango started in mid-July	A crowded, expensive category where the leader is very hard to unseat
Pet supplies	No brand above 40; Chewy leads and gained 19 points in one month	PetSmart ran ads briefly and dropped them in July; a few others tested lightly	Lots of white space for brands that work on their organic visibility
Local services (vets, groomers, boarding)	Varies by town and question	Likely near zero today, per Evertune's team	Organic visibility is the whole game for now

One more detail stood out: in pet food, nearly every brand trended upward organically over the summer. More brands are being named in AI answers, which means the competition to be named is growing too.

Are Pet Brands Buying Ads Inside ChatGPT?

Some are testing it, and not all of them are sticking with it. In Evertune's data, FreshPet scaled up ChatGPT ads in July and shut them off completely in August. PetSmart ran ads briefly and dropped them in July. Most other brands were organic only.

Evertune's team was clear that ChatGPT ads show up much more for consumer products than for services. A pet owner asking "what's the best senior dog food" may see an ad. A pet owner asking "who's the best vet near me" almost certainly won't, at least not yet. (More on how AI is changing the way pet owners find veterinary care.)

What to do: If you run a local service business, don't worry about AI ads right now. If you sell a pet product, watch this space, but notice that even big brands are still testing. Paying to appear doesn't replace being the brand AI recommends on its own.

Why Your Website Isn't the Main Source

At their webinar, Evertune's team shared that a brand's own website shows up as a source in AI answers less than 5% of the time. Their public GEO FAQ says the same thing in plainer terms: content that lives only on your own site carries less weight than the same claims showing up across review sites, publications and partner blogs. In their research, list-style articles ("best of" lists and roundups) made up 63% of citations by volume.

Your website still matters, because AI checks it to confirm what others say. But the recommendation usually starts somewhere else.

Evertune's team also pointed out that the AI tools don't all read the same sources. In the past couple of months, Google's AI Overviews started citing Facebook near the top of its sources, with Reddit and YouTube rising, while Facebook didn't appear in ChatGPT's sources at all. A business that only shows up in one place is betting on one tool.

What Should Vets and Pet Businesses Do With This?

1. Clean up your listings. Same name, address, phone, hours and services on Google, Yelp, Facebook, your Chamber page and any pet directories. Mixed signals make AI less confident about naming you. (Here is a step-by-step Google Business Profile guide for vet clinics.)
2. Get on the lists. Local "best of" awards, community roundups and news features are the kind of sources AI likes to cite. (See what AI looks at before it recommends a vet for real examples.)
3. Ask partners to mention you. The rescue you support, the trainer you refer to, the pantry you donate to. A line on their website is a third-party vote AI can see.
4. Answer real questions on your site. Specific pages about the services and problems your clients ask about give AI something accurate to confirm.
5. Check what AI says about you. Ask ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity the questions your clients ask, in a fresh chat, every few months.

For product brands, the pet supplies data is the encouraging part: with no brand above 40, the category is far from settled. If you sell pet products, my SEO and AI visibility work for pet brands starts with finding where you're missing. For clinics, see SEO and AI visibility for veterinary clinics, and for groomers, trainers and boarding, SEO and AI visibility for pet services.

Curious Where You Show Up?

I check what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI say about animal wellness businesses, where the details are off and what to fix first. Request your free AI visibility audit.

About this data: The pet food and pet supplies figures come from Evertune's category reports (June to August 2026, three-month averages), which Evertune's team shared and walked me through on October 2, 2026. The under-5% website figure was shared by Evertune's team on their September 2026 webinar; the 63% list-article figure is from Evertune's public GEO FAQ. Methods and sampling are as Evertune describes them; I have not independently verified them. Thank you to the Evertune team for sharing their data.