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ChatGPT · measured July 2026

The ChatGPT Shelf for Protein Powder

Two points separate first and second

Dymatize 48%, Optimum Nutrition 46% across 616 questions. Two points apart is a tie. The retail mix is the strange part — Walmart doesn't appear here at all. Dick's Sporting Goods supplies half the offers and iHerb another third, so ChatGPT is shopping this category at sporting goods and supplement shops instead of the grocery aisle.

Questions asked
616
Brands seen
86
Offers recorded
2,256
Through a feed
73%

Who ChatGPT names

Share of shelf is the percentage of answers a brand appeared in. It is not a rank of quality or sales — it is how often the model brought the brand up when someone asked about protein powder.

  1. 1 Dymatize 48%
  2. 2 Optimum Nutrition 46%
  3. 3 ISOPURE 21%
  4. 4 Orgain 20%
  5. 5 NOW 17%
  6. 6 Myprotein 12%
  7. 7 Nutricost 8%
  8. 8 Garden of Life 6%
  9. 9 NutraBio 5%
  10. 10 Vital Proteins 3%

Where the offers come from

Every product ChatGPT showed came from somewhere. Brand-direct means the offer pointed at the brand's own store rather than a retailer.

  • Dick's Sporting Goods 49% · 726 offers
  • iHerb 35% · 517 offers
  • Instacart 10% · 144 offers
  • Brand-direct 2% · 34 offers
  • Target 1% · 19 offers
  • Academy Sports 1% · 17 offers

How the shelf gets built

73% of the offers here arrived through a product feed rather than a page crawl, and 34 of them came direct from a brand.

Shelf position Offers Through a feed Brand named
Top of shelf 1,564 78% 76%
Positions 2–3 641 65% 63%
Position 4 and below 51 12% 12%

Who writes this shelf

Before ChatGPT names a protein powder brand, it reads. These are the sources it cited most when building this shelf.

See every source that writes the shelf →

How we measured this

  • We asked ChatGPT 616 shopping questions about protein powder in July 2026. The questions never named a brand, so nothing here was prompted into the answer.
  • Questions were repeated. ChatGPT does not answer the same way twice, so a single ask tells you nothing — share of shelf is the pattern across all 616 of them.
  • We recorded every brand mentioned and every product offer shown, 2,256 offers across 86 brands.
  • This is one engine, one country, one point in time. It is a snapshot of a shelf that moves.

Questions about the method, or think a number is wrong? Tell us — we will check it against the raw data and correct the page.

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Other shelves we measured