← Who writes the AI shelf

Editorial source · measured July 2026

How ChatGPT uses elle.com to recommend products

elle.com is editorial — the kind of best-of article and buying guide ChatGPT leans on to build a shelf. We saw it cited 1,054 times across 12 of the 18 categories we measured.

Citations
1,054
Most-cited rank
#45
Categories
12 of 18
Cited mostly as
Best-of list

Which shelves cite elle.com

The categories where ChatGPT pulled from this source when building a shopping answer. Broad reach means the model trusts it across the store, not just one aisle.

What ChatGPT cites it for

The kind of page ChatGPT pulled from this domain. Best-of lists dominate the shelf across the board — the model reaches for a ranked list far more than a comparison or a product page.

  • Best-of list 95%
  • Other 5%

The pages ChatGPT pulls from

A few of the most-cited elle.com pages behind these answers.

How we measured this

  • We asked ChatGPT brand-free shopping questions across 18 product categories and recorded every source URL it cited — 293,240 citations in all.
  • This page counts how often elle.com showed up among them. Citation counts are for the public category studies only, not any private client work.
  • A citation is ChatGPT surfacing the source. It is not an endorsement, a link, or traffic.
  • One engine, one country, one point in time. The shelf, and who writes it, moves.

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Other sources that write the shelf