UK Fashion & Apparel AI Visibility Index — Marketing Signals
New Research — Spring 2026

Top UK Fashion & Apparel
AI Visibility Index

We tested 59 UK fashion & apparel retailers across ChatGPT and Google AI to find out who’s winning in AI search, and the results are not what you’d expect.

An increasing number of online shoppers are asking AI for outfit ideas, gift inspiration, or where to buy specific items. But which of the leading fashion and apparel brands are being recommended the most by platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini? We wanted to find out, which is why we built the UK Fashion and Apparel AI Visibility Index.

We pulled data on how often each retailer is mentioned and cited in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT and Google AI, layered in SEMrush citation data and then measured all of it relative to each retailer’s estimated UK organic traffic.

That last bit is the bit that matters. Why? Because the biggest fashion brands will naturally get more AI mentions than smaller rivals by dint of the fact that they’re more established. By dividing every signal by traffic, we strip out the “size effect” to get a much fairer picture of who’s actually visible in AI search relative to their audience. The retailers that came out on top in our study weren’t all household names, and the ones at the bottom might surprise you.

Some of the UK’s most popular fashion retailers are comparatively invisible when shoppers ask ChatGPT or Google AI for recommendations. Next attracts an estimated 21.6 million monthly visits yet scores just 1.6 in our index. Whistles, with a fraction of that audience, scores 24.8.
Full Rankings

All 59 Retailers, Ranked

The full ranking of all 59 UK fashion & apparel retailers, scored from most to least visible in AI answers relative to their UK traffic. Click any column header to re-sort.

← Swipe to see full table →
Rank ↕Domain ↕UK Traffic ↕ChatGPT ↕Google AI ↕SEMrush ↕AI Index ↕Tier ↕
1harrods.com1,151,4221.157.85100.036.33Top 10
2whistles.com217,27324.7615.1834.5724.84Top 10
3selfridges.com2,045,0370.626.1963.2923.37Top 10
4wallis.co.uk405,6031.839.5853.8921.77Top 10
5houseoffraser.co.uk1,440,2550.22.7957.5420.18Top 10
6freepeople.com218,0006.111.3352.419.95Top 10
7puma.com822,9397.4310.6840.5719.56Top 10
8anthropologie.com317,5199.396.9933.1416.51Top 10
9usc.co.uk236,1770.010.3149.0116.44Top 10
10boohooman.com437,2780.391.0345.6915.7Top 10
11monsoon.co.uk615,5815.5912.3828.1115.36Mid
12hobbs.com417,9933.4515.4223.8214.23Mid
13arket.com219,7611.4810.8628.213.51Mid
14very.co.uk3,338,16511.914.1219.6111.88Mid
15karenmillen.com477,9120.134.9129.9411.66Mid
16accessorize.com578,6736.0411.1217.6111.59Mid
17reiss.com606,3461.316.0525.0810.81Mid
18jojomamanbebe.co.uk310,4200.053.5626.369.99Mid
19debenhams.com2,559,1120.091.7228.119.97Mid
20joules.com517,2492.3811.2814.549.4Mid
21urbanoutfitters.com1,002,8894.451.8421.19.13Mid
22johnlewis.com11,089,9720.212.3323.618.72Mid
23dorothyperkins.com540,4130.092.1222.748.32Mid
24size.co.uk440,3290.542.1620.337.68Mid
25gooutdoors.co.uk1,607,3085.353.9113.237.5Mid
26coastfashion.com430,4641.390.520.457.45Mid
27nike.com10,876,1992.82.0516.767.2Mid
28cos.com511,0570.690.320.287.09Mid
29stradivarius.com328,1372.814.5413.016.79Mid
30massimodutti.com345,3582.63.613.726.64Mid
31boden.com582,5311.072.2716.276.53Mid
32homesense.com248,2364.163.7611.546.49Mid
33phase-eight.com691,4540.687.010.596.09Mid
34asos.com9,226,0120.331.515.95.91Mid
35boohoo.com3,238,0350.291.2515.585.71Mid
36abercrombie.com604,0264.012.0910.875.66Mid
37hm.com6,997,1201.736.847.525.36Mid
38adidas.co.uk6,929,4492.232.2510.515.0Mid
39zara.com5,048,0901.842.669.824.77Mid
40flannels.com2,407,6580.882.0911.234.74Bottom 20
41jdsports.co.uk4,471,9430.341.3812.094.6Bottom 20
42pullandbear.com504,7003.864.355.34.5Bottom 20
43footasylum.com842,8100.031.4911.914.48Bottom 20
44superdry.com1,018,2850.262.8310.234.44Bottom 20
45weekday.com263,7230.340.0812.774.4Bottom 20
46shein.co.uk3,859,8841.530.5410.344.14Bottom 20
47riverisland.com3,485,9522.295.024.84.04Bottom 20
48mandmdirect.com1,212,4830.01.1310.653.93Bottom 20
49marksandspencer.com21,129,9110.040.949.863.61Bottom 20
50primark.com6,654,7450.172.467.563.39Bottom 20
51matalan.co.uk3,537,2760.011.728.133.29Bottom 20
52bershka.com533,0252.61.145.953.23Bottom 20
53sportsdirect.com8,389,5691.11.846.433.13Bottom 20
54fatface.com813,7330.120.928.053.03Bottom 20
55hollisterco.com866,2553.851.253.82.97Bottom 20
56prettylittlething.com2,198,7770.271.217.382.95Bottom 20
57tkmaxx.com5,055,4330.071.377.412.95Bottom 20
58newlook.com4,402,4620.680.495.562.24Bottom 20
59next.co.uk21,577,9210.010.04.851.62Bottom 20
Key Finding

Search Engine Traffic Does Not
Guarantee AI Visibility.

The UK’s biggest fashion & apparel retailers as measured by organic traffic volume are some of the worst performers in AI search. The pattern repeats across the entire dataset.

History Is Hard to Replicate
Harrods and Selfridges likely lead because their history, heritage and cultural significance are deeply embedded in AI training data. Decades of journalism, editorial coverage and cultural references that newer retailers simply can’t replicate overnight. When AI platforms were trained on the web, Harrods and Selfridges already had a century’s worth of references to draw from.
Scale Without Story
Next, New Look, and M&S may do less well when it comes to AI visibility because LLMs favour brands that appear frequently in “best of” articles, recommendations, trend-led content, forums, and social discussions on platforms such as Reddit, while these retailers rely more on direct traffic, loyalty, and transactional searches.
A Different Search Game
Traditional SEO rewards pages that earn clicks, backlinks and on-site engagement. AI visibility works differently. What matters is how often a brand is mentioned, cited and referenced across trusted third-party sources, regardless of whether anyone clicked through. A brand can rank on page one of Google and still be almost absent from AI-generated answers if it hasn’t built the kind of web presence that AI models actually read and learn from.
Small Brand, Big Voice
Whistles attracts an estimated 217,273 monthly visits yet scores higher in our AI visibility index than retailers with much higher levels of organic traffic. Editorial presence, not audience size, is the differentiator. Whistles is likely referenced regularly in fashion journalism, style roundups and “what to wear” features, and that editorial footprint is what AI tools draw on when recommending brands, entirely separate from how many people visit the site each month.
Top Performers

Harrods, the AI visibility king

Harrods takes the top spot, and the likely reason comes down to history. It has been written about, cited and referenced across journalism, travel guides and cultural commentary for well over a century, and when AI platforms were trained on the web, that depth of reference was already baked in. With 18,300 SEMrush citations against 1,151,422 monthly UK visits, Harrods earned a perfect score on our citation sub-score.

Rank
#1
AI Index
36.3
ChatGPT
1,179
Google AI
7,809
Rank 2

Whistles, the small-but-mighty retailer

If anyone is genuinely punching above their weight, it’s Whistles. With just 217,273 monthly UK visits, a fraction of the top 10, Whistles racked up 9,269 ChatGPT mentions and 4,719 Google AI mentions.

Per visit, that’s the highest ChatGPT and Google AI footprint of any retailer in the index, and the reason for their composite score of 24.8.

Rank
#2
AI Index
24.8
ChatGPT
9,269
Google AI
4,719
Rank 3

Selfridges, a luxury mention magnet

Like Harrods, Selfridges likely benefits from more than a century of cultural presence. A store that has been covered, celebrated and cited across journalism, film, television and editorial for generations. That history is almost certainly embedded in AI training data. With 17,800 SEMrush citations against its traffic, it ranks third overall and second in citation strength.

Rank
#3
AI Index
23.4
ChatGPT
784
Google AI
8,459
The rest of the top 10 reads like a quiet challenge to the big-traffic giants: Wallis (4th), House of Fraser (5th), Free People (6th), Puma (7th), Anthropologie (8th), USC (9th) and BoohooMAN (10th). Notice what’s missing? The retailers with tens of millions in monthly traffic. Visibility, it turns out, doesn’t follow visit count.
Bottom Performers

Next, the giant nobody asks AI about

At the very bottom of the index sits Next.co.uk. With 21,577,921 monthly UK visits, by far the largest in the dataset, Next pulls in just 202 ChatGPT mentions and 5,149 Google AI mentions.

The AI Performance Score works out to just 1.6, the lowest in the entire ranking. A retailer of Next’s scale being comparatively invisible in AI search is the headline finding of this study.

Rank
#59
AI Index
1.6
UK Traffic
21.6M
Rank 54

Marks & Spencer, the biggest paradox

Sitting just outside the bottom 10 at #54, M&S is arguably the most striking case in the whole index. With 21.1 million monthly UK visits, the second-largest audience in the dataset, M&S scores just 5.0.

New Look (#58, score 2.2) and Pretty Little Thing (#56, score 3.0) sit even lower. Millions of shoppers know these brands, yet AI tools are routinely failing to surface them.

Rank
#54
AI Index
5.0
UK Traffic
21.1M
“
The findings here genuinely surprised us. We expected the biggest retailers, such as Next, M&S and Pretty Little Thing, to dominate AI visibility the way they dominate traditional search. Instead, brands a fraction of their size are showing up in AI answers far more often. AI tools don’t reward traffic. They reward being written about, cited and trusted as a source by the wider web. That’s a completely different game, and it means the retailers at the bottom of our index aren’t there because they’re irrelevant. They’re there because they haven’t yet built the editorial presence AI search relies on.
Gareth Hoyle · Managing Director and Founder, Marketing Signals
What To Do About It

How to Improve Your
AI Visibility

The retailers performing well in our index tend to share a few common patterns. Some benefit from a long-established cultural presence that is already embedded in AI training data. Others are likely earning citations from editorial sites, fashion press and roundup articles, and tend to have well-structured content that AI can parse cleanly. If you want to improve your ranking, four things matter most.

1
Get into listicles and “best of” articles
LLMs are trained heavily on editorial content, such as “best sustainable fashion brands UK”, “top rated workwear retailers” and “where to buy X” type articles. Being named in those pieces is one of the strongest signals you can build. Target the publishers that rank for those queries and make earning a spot in their roundups a core part of your PR strategy.
2
Build a presence on Reddit and forums
Reddit is one of the most heavily weighted sources in LLM training data. Authentic brand mentions in relevant subreddits, community discussions and Q&A threads carry significant weight. You can’t fake this, but you can earn it by being genuinely useful in the spaces where your customers already talk.
3
Earn editorial mentions across the web
Unlinked brand mentions matter as much as backlinks when it comes to AI visibility. Journalists, bloggers, trade press and review platforms all contribute to the web of references LLMs draw from. A digital PR strategy focused on consistent, credible brand mentions, not just links, is the fastest route to improving your AI presence.
4
Sort your structured data and About page
Schema markup for products, FAQs and your organisation helps AI tools understand exactly who you are and what you sell. A well-written About page also matters, as LLMs frequently pull brand descriptions and credibility signals from About pages when answering queries about who a brand is and what they stand for.

How Does Your Company Rank in AI-Search?

AI search is changing how shoppers find fashion brands faster than anything that’s come before it. If you’d like to know where your brand sits, what’s holding you back and what we’d do about it, get in touch.

Get in Touch →
We’ll take a look at your AI visibility and show you exactly where the opportunities are.
Methodology

About the index

The UK Fashion & Apparel AI Visibility Index ranks 59 UK fashion & apparel retailers on how prominent they are in AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and SEMrush citations) relative to their UK traffic. For each of seven AI metrics, we divided by traffic to get a “per million visits” figure, scored every retailer 0–100 on that metric, then averaged the scores within each of the three data sources to create sub-scores, and finally averaged those three sub-scores equally into one composite 0–100 index.

A note on our dataset: we initially looked at 60 UK fashion retailers, but excluded one (& Other Stories, which trades on stories.com) because the generic English word “stories” was inflating its mention counts with non-brand references. That left 59 retailers in the final ranking.

Data sources: DataForSEO (ChatGPT mentions and AI search volume; Google AI mentions and AI search volume), SEMrush (mentions, citations and cited pages), SEMrush UK traffic data. Study period: data pulled in spring 2026.

For press & journalists: For interviews, additional cuts of the data or the full ranking of all 59 retailers, please contact the Marketing Signals press team via our contact page.