Consumer Staples Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks

*This data comes from the 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks Report. To explore insights across all 10 industries, access the full report here.

Executive summary

There’s a new search experience for brands to prioritize: AI answer engines.

The rise of AI answer engines and Google’s integration of AI Overview (AIO) results directly onto traditional SERPs means users are increasingly getting answers from AI-generated summaries directly rather than clicking a link, leading to a surge in zero-click searches.

While organic search still fuels the majority of discovery, AI has introduced what we’re calling a parallel surface of visibility—an invisible layer that determines which brands are seen before anyone clicks.

The data shows that AI referral traffic currently represents just over 1% of total web visits and is growing by roughly 1% each month, on average. It will never rival traditional organic search traffic—but that’s not the point. In this new model, visibility no longer begins on your website; it starts within the AI experiences that answer questions, guide intent, and shape perception in real time. If your brand isn’t cited, mentioned, or referenced in these AI answers, it’s effectively absent from the modern customer journey.

AI visibility is becoming its own performance channel, one that signals which brands are trusted enough to enter the answer. Winning in this space isn’t about clicks; it’s about credibility.

The following findings provide the first layer of industry-specific benchmark data essential for navigating the new search landscape and ensuring credibility (and visibility) of your brand. It moves beyond traditional website analytics to provide key context for evaluating your total search performance, identifying accurate KPIs for both organic and AIO, and implementing the right strategies to drive results.

Top takeaways for Consumer Staples

• AEO, GEO & AI Search benchmarks:
  • The Consumer Staples industry receives 1.91% of its total traffic from AI referrals, the second-highest amount of AI referral traffic among our 10 industries.
  • The food, beverage, and tobacco (0.59%) and household & personal products (1.01%) subindustries see far less referral traffic than the distribution & retail subindustry (2.49%).
  • The industry as a whole saw one of the largest overall increases in AI referral traffic from May to September 2025 (1.81%).
  • ChatGPT accounts for 95.3% of all AI referral traffic for this sector, showing near-total dominance among AI answer engines. Perplexity drives the second largest amount of AI referral traffic, with 2.6%.
• AIO benchmarks:
  • Among queries analyzed, only 6.8% generated an AIO result in the Consumer Staples industry.
  • Household & personal products (27.9%) searches trigger an AIO result, the highest out of all Consumer Staples subindustries searches.
  • Blog content was by far the most cited page source in AI Overviews for Consumer Staples, with over 41,000 pages being cited in the result.

Methodology

Using Conductor, we analyzed 13,770 domains from leading brands. Each domain was categorized into 10 industries and then further segmented into 22 subindustries to provide additional insights, which map directly to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) framework. This research identifies emerging traffic trends, separating traditional organic traffic from new AI referral patterns and zero-click visibility at a granular level.

For the purposes of this industry-specific report, the Consumer Staples industry was split into three subindustries:

• Consumer staples distribution & retail
• Food, beverage, & tobacco
• Household & personal products

AI search methodology

The AI search market share and brand leaders are sourced from our analysis of 13,770 domains being cited against our index of 3.5 million unique prompts between May and September 2025. We focused on these domains as they aligned with the 10 GICS industry categories we are reporting on. The analysis included 17 million AI-generated responses and over 100 million citations sourced from our AI Search Performance (AISP) and AIO reporting index.

The findings on AI search traffic, organic Google traffic, and referral traffic by answer engine type were sourced by analyzing anonymized and aggregated traffic patterns across 1,215 of our enterprise customer domains to assess how users of answer engines are reaching websites.

Ultimately, we analyzed more than 3.3 billion sessions across all of our data sources. Of that traffic, AI traffic from LLMs and chatbots accounted for more than 35.7 million sessions across the 10 industries analyzed.

The following benchmarks are averages sourced from an analysis of monthly AI search traffic data in the U.S. over a five-month period (May 2025-September 2025) in Conductor.

AI Overview methodology

We analyzed AI Overview data in the U.S. over a four-week period from September 15 to October 12, 2025, to gain insight into how AI-powered search is affecting Google’s traditional search experience. To do so, we analyzed approximately 21.9 million unique Google searches from Conductor’s traditional search index. Of those Google searches, nearly 5.5 million generated an AIO result.

AEO & AI search visibility analysis for Consumer Staples

This analysis provides a granular, data-driven benchmark for true visibility in the AI search landscape.

This section focuses on:

• AI referral traffic by subindustry
• Month-over-month (MoM) growth
• AI referral traffic by answer engine
• AI vs. Traditional channels
• AI market share

AI referral traffic for the Consumer Staples industry

The results:

• AI referral traffic accounts for 1.91% of all website traffic for the Consumer Staples industry.
  • AI referral traffic usually has high intent and is more likely to convert than traffic from traditional channels. That shift means that AI search visibility is becoming the new key currency for enterprise AEO.
• The Consumer Staples (1.91%) industry had the second largest amount of AI referral traffic out of our 10 industries.

While AI referral traffic remains small in volume, its impact on visibility is outsized. That 1.91% of AI referral traffic represents millions of interactions happening before a user visits a website. These moments decide which Consumer Staples brands show up in the new customer journey—and which are invisible.

AI referral traffic by Consumer Staples subindustries

The results:

• 2.49% of traffic from queries related to consumer staples distribution & retail comes from AI.
• The household & personal products (1.01%) and food, beverage, & tobacco (.59%) subindustries received much lower AI traffic than distribution & retail.

This could be due to the fact that the food, beverage, & tobacco and household & personal products subindustries are dominated by informational, how-to, and brand-specific queries that AI is particularly good at summarizing. The search intent for consumer staples distribution & retail queries is different. An AI can summarize which store is cheaper, but the user's next logical step is to visit that store's website to make a purchase.

Month-over-month growth in AI referral traffic change

The results:

• AI referral traffic in the Consumer Staples industry rose .16% from May to September 2025.
• Month-over-month growth decreased over the last month after more significant growth earlier in the summer.
  • August to September 2025 (-.23%) saw decreases in referral traffic compared to significant increases in May to June 2025 (+.39%).

AI referral traffic vs. Traditional SEO traffic benchmarks for Consumer S

The results:

• Established channels like organic search, paid, direct, social, and any other referral traffic aside from AI still drive the vast majority of website visits across all industries.
  • AI traffic made up a substantial 1.91% of all traffic in the Consumer Staples industry.
• Google makes up 4%, and other traffic sources contribute over 94%.

This data underscores the increased adoption of AI search in some industries and highlights the need to expand your search strategies to include AI. The data also illustrates the continued importance of a strong traditional SEO strategy. Even as AI search emerges, optimizing for visibility in standard Google results is essential for improving brand visibility and relevance. This potential overlap reinforces the need for a dual approach of traditional SEO and AEO / GEO strategies.

AI referral traffic by answer engine source: Consumer Staples industry

The results

• On average, ChatGPT drives 95.3% of all AI referral traffic in the Consumer Staples industry.
• Perplexity drove 2.6% of AI traffic to the Consumer Staples industry.

That said, while ChatGPT is the engine you should prioritize, it’s not the only answer engine you should pay attention to. Prepare for future volatility by tracking your brand presence across all of these answer engines and then optimizing as needed if your mentions and citations drop.

Consumer Staples market share: Domain citations and brand mention leaders

This section is an analysis of the brands and domains that won the most market share in the Consumer Staples industry. Our analysis was based on AI citations and brand mentions for May through September 2025. The results are split across three key Consumer Staples subindustries:

• Consumer staples distribution & retail
• Food, beverage, & tobacco
• Household & personal products

Consumer Staples industry: Top 5 domains by AI citation market share

1. amazon.com
2. walmart.com
3. chewy.com
4. bestbuy.com
5. mattressfirm.com

This list makes it clear that amazon.com and walmart.com are the undisputed leaders, as their massive product catalogs and high domain authority make them the most logical and authoritative sources for AI to cite for product information and availability. The strong presence of category-specific leaders, such as chewy.com and mattressfirm.com, also highlights that AI is fielding a high volume of specialized, high-intent consumer queries.

Consumer Staples industry: Top 5 brand leaders by AI brand mention market share

1. Amazon
2. Walmart
3. Best Buy
4. Mattress Firm
5. Chewy

Unsurprisingly, the list of top-mentioned brands is almost an exact copy of the top-cited domains. This reinforces the immense market power of Amazon and Walmart. AI models are not only citing these domains as sources but are also mentioning them by name when users ask questions like "where to buy" or "what is the best value," thereby solidifying their brand authority in the new "age of answers."

Consumer staples distribution & retail subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

Below, we have the top five domains in the consumer staples distribution & retail subindustry based on their share of domain citations in AI search.

This subindustry list is identical to the overall Consumer Staples industry leaders, with amazon.com (22.87%) and walmart.com (7.95%) holding the top spots in both. This confirms that the distribution & retail subindustry is the primary driver of AI citations for the entire category. AI models are clearly prioritizing these massive, high-authority e-commerce domains for product-related queries.

Food, beverage, & tobacco subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

This list highlights a complete divergence from the overall industry leaders, as none of the top 5 (like amazon.com or walmart.com) are present. Instead, highly specialized B2B domains like richsusa.com (11.50%) and tysonfoodservice.com (10.23%) dominate. This signals that when queries become technical and focus on ingredients, food service, or niche products, AI models bypass general retailers and cite the manufacturers and specialized suppliers as the primary authorities.

Household & personal products subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

This subindustry also shows a complete split from the retail-dominated industry list. The leaders here are a mix of direct-to-consumer brands, led by elfcosmetics.com (17.44%), and a major publisher, byrdie.com (14.35%). This strongly suggests that for household and personal products queries, AI models prioritize content from either the brand's own domain or from trusted, expert-driven beauty publications over generalist retail sites.

AI Overview benchmarks for Consumer Staples

Despite the rise of AI answer engines, billions of searches still happen on Google, and every day, AI Overviews are appearing for more of those searches. That means it’s essential for brands to optimize their site to rank on page 1 in Google and increase their chances of winning an AIO result.

Below is our analysis of the AIO visibility in the Consumer Staples industry.

AIO visibility analysis: Consumer Staples industry

The results:

• AIO results appeared for 6.82% of the analyzed Google queries in the Consumer Staples industry.
• Consumer Staples had the second-lowest AI Overview visibility of all 10 industries, meaning fewer queries trigger AI Overview results.

AIO visibility analysis: Consumer Staples subindustries

The results:

• 27.9% of household & personal products searches trigger an AIO result, the highest out of all Consumer Staples subindustries searches.
• 19.7% of food, beverage, and tobacco searches trigger the second-highest number of AI overviews of the Consumer Staples subindustries.
• Consumer Staples distribution and retail (5.4%) had the lowest share of AI Overviews among all Consumer Staples subindustries.

Although the Consumer Staples industry may see fewer AIO results than some of the other industries, brands still need to prioritize appearing in and winning these results, as AIO continues to drive a significant amount of traffic away from the top organic results and towards a zero-click search experience.

Given that they have some of the highest percentages of queries triggering an AIO result, it’s specifically important for brands in the household & personal products and food, beverage, and tobacco subindustries to strategize ways to win AIO results.

Page types cited most often in AIO results for Consumer Staples

The results:

• Blog content was by far the most cited page source in AI Overviews for Consumer Staples, with over 41,000 pages being cited in the result.
• The next closest page type in AIO results was a product page with just over 29,000 citations.

The key takeaway here is that your content is much more likely to appear in AIO results for Consumer Staples queries if it’s a blog. Also, users with Consumer Staples queries usually want authentic answers from a person in a similar position to them, and blogs can often provide that more human, personable feel.

Consumer Staples AIO share of voice winners by subindustry

The following tables show the top 5 domains that were cited most often in an AI overview across the consumer staples distribution & retail, food, beverage, & tobacco, and household & personal products subindustries.

Consumer staples distribution & retail subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• Amazon.com (1.65%) accounts for the largest AIO share of voice in this subindustry.
• Carmax.com (.47%) and truecar.com (.45%) follow, with walmart.com (.39%) and chewy.com (.32%) rounding out the top 5.

Amazon.com is expected as the AIO share leader, as AIOs rely on its massive catalog and review data to answer "what" and "where to buy" questions. The high ranking of automotive sites like carmax.com and truecar.com is the key insight, suggesting that for high-value retail queries, AIOs are prioritizing large, specialized marketplaces with vast, structured dataStructured Data
Structured data is the term used to describe schema markup on websites. With the help of this code, search engines can understand the content of URLs more easily, resulting in enhanced results in the search engine results page known as rich results. Typical examples of this are ratings, events and much more. The Conductor glossary below contains everything you need to know about structured data.
Learn more over general-purpose sites.

Food, beverage, & tobacco subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• Purina.com (.15%) and hills.com (.08%) account for the top AIO share of voice.
• Royalcanin.com (.03%), thehonestkitchen.com (.03%), and myprotein.com (.03%) round out the top five.

This list is exclusively major pet food brands. This indicates that a high volume of complex, informational queries within this subindustry relates to pet nutrition. Similar to human health (a YMYL topic), AIOs are prioritizing the primary, authoritative brand domains (purina.com, hills.com) for these sensitive, pet-specific questions over general retailers.

Household & personal products subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• Byrdie.com (.21%) and loreal.com (.20%) are in a near-tie for the top AIO share of voice.
• Cerave.com (.15%) follows closely, with curology.com (.07%) and hair.com (.07%) rounding out the list.

This data shows AIOs are sourcing from two distinct types of authorities: high-trust publishers and major brands. Byrdie.com leads because its vast library of expert-driven reviews and best-of listicles perfectly match informational and comparative query intent. The strong showing of loreal.com and cerave.com confirms AIOs also cite primary brand sites directly for authoritative ingredient and product details.

Summary

The future of digital discovery belongs to the Consumer Staples brands that understand that AI visibility isn’t a nice-to-have metric—it’s the next frontier of search performance. Having informed, data-driven KPIs for both SEO and AEO / GEO enables digital teams to measure their total search visibility and adapt their strategies from clicks to zero-click citations.

Leverage the Consumer Staples industry benchmarks featured here to understand how your brand performs and where there are opportunities to improve.

Remember, the shift to AI is accelerating. While AI referral traffic is a small (but high-intent) channel today, now is the time to secure your market share in these new, answer-driven results to ensure you show up first—and keep showing up first.