RateMe study: AI search blocks and chatbots favor different clothing brands
RateMe's analysts ran identical clothing and footwear queries through Google's and Yandex's AI search blocks and seven LLM-based chatbots, collecting more than 50,000 responses. Informational queries such as "how to choose a coat" triggered AI blocks in about 70% of Google searches and 72% of Yandex searches, while chatbots answered almost every time; O'stin led search results with 10.3% of mentions, and Zara led chatbot answers with 2.7%. Commercial queries reversed the pattern: AI search blocks rarely appeared, but chatbots consistently answered and put marketplaces Wildberries (38.7%), Ozon (35%) and Lamoda (30.1%) at the top. Reputational queries produced a similar split, with 12storeez leading search blocks at 27.1% and Zara leading chatbots at 41.1%, each brand also appearing in the other channel at a lower share. Footwear queries showed AI blocks appearing even more often, in 83% of Google answers and 87% of Yandex answers, with Rendez-Vous leading search and Nike leading chatbots, which answered 100% of these queries.
Optimizing for one AI channel offers no guarantee of visibility in another: 12storeez's 31.2% chatbot share and Zara's 19.3% search-block share show that leadership in reputational search does not carry over to chat, and vice versa. Position matters more than raw mention counts once a query returns many brands. 12storeez appeared 130 times in search AI blocks and ranked first in 41% of those appearances, while Zarina appeared 103 times but ranked first only 7% of the time, a gap that determines which brand actually captures user attention. Marketplaces complicate the picture further: Wildberries, Ozon and Lamoda account for 33.5% of all chatbot mentions on commercial queries and 29.3% of search-block mentions on informational queries, meaning brand teams compete against retail platforms as well as each other. Because AI recommendations draw on ratings, reviews and marketplace data rather than a single ranking signal, managing visibility now sits as much with reputation management as with SEO.