TL;DR
- In the AI search battle for Memorial Day product categories, Weber Grills, Ford and Saatva have strong leads in their categories, while Hyundai and Tesla are in tight competition for electric vehicles.
- Home Depot and Lowe’s are models’ favorite retailers to send shoppers looking for holiday sales.
- Models’ recommendations differ for many reasons, including whether they incorporate search results in their responses, the domains they cite most and other factors.
If you’ve been hankering for a new mattress, grill, patio set or SUV, you likely have been counting down the days until the sales extravaganza that is Memorial Day, which falls on May 25 this year.
At Evertune Research, we used our AI marketing platform to track which brands and retailers large language models (LLMs) recommend for six popular Memorial Day savings categories: gas grills, dishwashers, refrigerators, off-road SUVs, electric vehicles and mattresses.
Home Depot and Lowe’s dominated in responses to prompts about where to find Memorial Day sales and discounts. Across our six categories, the duo tallied six of the 10 highest AI Brand Scores, the Evertune metric that considers both the percentage of responses in which a brand is present and its average position in responses, a key signal for marketers to understand models’ awareness of their brand.
The top 10 brands by AI Brand Score varied more by model and topic than the top retailers did, and more brands had high AI Brand Scores than retailers. Models opinions' on some brands varied quite strongly. Napoleon, for example, boasted an AI Brand Score of 83 on Gemini but only 38 on Perplexity. Similarly, Miele scored 78-79 across Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity but only 57 on ChatGPT.
Top Brands by Memorial Day Product Category
LLMs are probabilistic, so they never give the exact same answer twice even if the prompt remains the same. Understanding what LLMs typically tell users, then, is a matter of sampling a meaningful number of times on prompts that are worded carefully to avoid biasing LLMs’ responses.
For this analysis, we asked 40,200 prompts spread across six LLMs. LLMs can respond based only on their foundational knowledge (what they learned during training) or with supplemental information retrieved from internet searches. We prompted two model versions that use only their foundational knowledge (ChatGPT and Gemini) and four model versions that incorporate search (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity).
The winners by AI Brand Score for the search-assisted models were:
- Dishwashers: Bosch
- Electric Vehicles: Tesla
- Gas grills: Weber Grills
- Mattresses: Saatva
- Off-road SUVs: Ford
- Refrigerators: LG
Weber Grills, Ford and Saatva had strong leads in their categories, while Hyundai and Tesla were neck-and-neck for EVs. Check out the top five brands for each category and view the leaders for each model in the visualization below.
Models’ search-assisted opinions can be quite different from the opinions based on their training materials. For example, Whirlpool’s AI Brand Score on Gemini with search was less than half of its score on Gemini without search.
AI Brand Score:
This poses a challenge for marketers, who can see big changes in their brands’ AI visibility when models are retrained. We track new model releases for each model maker here. But since months pass between model retrainings, the fastest way for marketers to affect what models say about their brands is to affect the sources LLMs retrieve from searches.
LLMs’ Top Memorial Day Sources
LLMs vacuum up a wide array of sources for any given prompt, with no one domain taking a dominant share. For the more than 15,000 prompts in which we asked specifically about Memorial Day savings, the four search-assisted LLMs drew from more than 7,500 unique URLs across more than 2,600 domains. Forbes.com was the most-cited domain with an almost 5% share of citations.
Each model differs on its most-cited domains based on its training, sites’ crawling permissions and other factors. For example, Sleepfoundation.org was ChatGPT’s most-cited domain for our Memorial Day prompts, but it ranked 98th on Perplexity. Conversely, Perplexity’s most-cited domain was CNET.com, which ChatGPT never cited.
| Domain Rank | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain | % of Citations | ChatGPT | Gemini | Google AI Mode | Perplexity |
| forbes.com | 4.77% | 2 | 14 | 2 | 3 |
| techradar.com | 3.78% | 4 | 1 | 5 | 6 |
| carsdirect.com | 3.15% | 3 | 10 | 3 | 15 |
| sleepfoundation.org | 3.14% | 1 | 5 | 10 | 98 |
| youtube.com | 2.88% | 141 | 74 | 1 | 10 |
| cnet.com | 2.74% | — | 50 | 8 | 1 |
| bestbuy.com | 2.46% | 12 | 13 | 4 | 8 |
| caredge.com | 2.10% | 23 | 55 | 12 | 2 |
| homedepot.com | 1.80% | 16 | 9 | 6 | 47 |
| t3.com | 1.71% | 154 | 20 | 9 | 14 |
The four LLMs also diverged in their reliance on different types of domains, a meaningful difference for marketers deciding which levers to pull in their Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategy.
Across all prompts for this analysis, earned media (like media outlets and user reviews) accounted for more than 40% of Perplexity’s citations, its top domain category. Gemini, by contrast, cited earned media about 25% of the time, making it its 3rd most-cited domain category. One point of similarity, however, is that social media domains were not cited heavily by any model.
Share:
Winning Shoppers from AI Search
When it comes to AI search, owning any product category, especially within the context of a shopping-heavy holiday like Memorial Day, is no mean feat. Marketers must stay attuned of their brand’s standing across models relative to their competitors, models’ most-cited sources and domain types and changes in model behaviors when new model versions are released.
The data from 40,200 prompts shows that for Memorial Day 2026, Home Depot and Lowe’s are likely to benefit from AI search visibility, as are Weber Grills, Ford and Saatva. But strong GEO strategies over the next year could substantially change those results for Memorial Day 2027.
Methodology
At Evertune Research, we track hundreds of brands across 250 categories. For this analysis, we ran 40,200 prompts about Memorial Day product categories and Memorial Day sales across ChatGPT (with and without search), Gemini (with and without search), Google AI Mode and Perplexity.
Evertune is the AI marketing platform for brands that want to own the AI customer journey. Evertune analyzes prompt responses at scale across all major LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI Overviews and more, to deliver statistically significant visibility data, then closes the loop with tools to act on it: website optimization, data-driven content creation, most influential sources, and paid activation through affiliate and programmatic AI retargeting partners. Where most tools tell you where you stand, Evertune tells you what to do about it. Founded by early executives of The Trade Desk and backed by $20M from leading investors.
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