The State of the ChatGPT Shelf: Dog Supplements

Ask ChatGPT for the best joint chew for your dog and it hands you a few product cards, each with a price and a store. Ask again tomorrow and the cards move. Run that question five times and you’ll form a theory about how it picks. Run it a few thousand times and you find out your theory was noise.

That’s the problem with how people talk about AI shopping right now. Everyone’s working off a handful of searches. So we ran a whole category flat-out — 97 brand-free questions the way a real owner types them, repeated across roughly a month — and kept everything ChatGPT returned. Not the one price you see. Every seller offer behind every card. More than 50,000 of them.

Dog supplements is the category we pulled apart. But almost nothing below is really about dogs. It’s about how the shelf gets built, and it holds anywhere ChatGPT sells.

Two brands run the category

Start with the question every brand wants answered: when a shopper asks a brand-free question, which names come back? Here’s the shelf, ranked by how often each brand shows up across 5,453 category questions.

Zesty Paws shows up on nearly half of every shelf ChatGPT builds here; Native Pet on more than a third. After that it falls off fast, and 327 brands appeared at least once — most flickering in on a single question and vanishing. Presence is concentrated at the very top and thin everywhere else.

Notice who’s not at the top. Purina outspends everyone in the category by orders of magnitude and sits at #5, behind two DTC brands most people outside the category haven’t heard of. Being big in the store doesn’t make you big on the AI shelf. Something else decides it. So we went looking for what.

Six retailers own the shelf

Count up all fifty-thousand-plus offers behind those product cards and six stores account for about 61% of them.

Then a long tail of 800-plus other sellers splitting the rest. When ChatGPT shows you a “brand,” what you’re really looking at is a product some big retailer carries and feeds onto the web. The brand isn’t in the room. Its distribution is.

Look at the very top card, the first product ChatGPT puts in front of you. It’s a Chewy offer about 18% of the time and a Petco offer about 14% of the time. The top slot is a big-box retailer’s slot before it’s anybody’s brand. That’s most of why two DTC brands beat Purina to the top — they’re everywhere in the feeds ChatGPT reads.

In this category, the feed lane is wide open — that’s the opening

Everyone’s talking about getting products into ChatGPT’s feed. So we checked how much of this shelf actually comes through one versus ChatGPT just crawling a web page.

In dog supplements, about 97% of offers were crawled off web pages. Under 3% came through a feed — and almost all of that thin feed slice is Chewy, not brands. Brands feeding ChatGPT directly through their own store: four offers out of more than 50,000.

Don’t read that as “feeds don’t matter.” Two things. Feed share swings hard by category — broader, cross-category measurements run far higher than dog supplements, and the feed layer is growing everywhere as ChatGPT builds out shopping. And the fact that the brand-direct lane is nearly empty here is the opportunity, not the verdict. This category is early. The shelf is being rebuilt around feeds, and the brands that get their feed right before the rest of their category wakes up are the ones who own the lane when it fills in. Here, that’s a land grab with almost no one else in the race.

And then price does the opposite of what you’d expect

Here’s the belief worth killing: that AI shopping is a race to the lowest price. It isn’t. We confirmed ChatGPT’s “Best price” badge is honest — it lands on the genuine cheapest offer every time. So if cheap won, that badge would cluster at the top of the shelf.

It does the opposite. The cheapest offers drift down the shelf, not up. Which means fighting a price war to climb the AI shelf is fighting the wrong war — and that’s before you get to what happens to your discounts.

That’s where the full teardown goes deeper: the exact price mechanics, what happens to your “was / now” promo pricing, the one inventory rule that decides whether you appear at all, and the complete methodology behind every number here.

See the full numbers on the dog supplements shelf page, or browse every category we have measured in The AI Shelf Index.