Who wins Christmas when AI does the shopping list?

The way people search is changing. Is your brand showing up?

AI search is becoming the new storefront, and Christmas is its busiest season. People are already asking what to buy, gift, cook, trust and try. AI is recommending brands in answers you probably haven’t seen.

So we tested it. 20 high-intent Christmas questions, across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini, on the major UK supermarkets.

What we found

Tesco wins Christmas overall without winning a single moment. It appeared in 74% of answers across the full prompt set. Rarely the number one answer. Consistently in the top four.

Aldi owns the moments that matter most. For “cheapest full Christmas dinner,” it held 100% visibility, position 1, and a third of the entire answer.

Being loved is not the same as being cited. M&S ranked first for sentiment. Sentiment alone didn’t make it the most visible brand.

The lesson is bigger than supermarkets. AI doesn’t reward the loudest campaign or the neatest keyword strategy. It rewards brands that are understandable, retrievable and trustworthy, across the editorial, owned and specialist sources it trusts.

The job isn’t to win the algorithm. It’s to win the sources.

Get your copy of the report

Our new report unpacks the full findings and gives FMCG, consumer and gifting brands ten practical GEO moves to make before Christmas – from mapping the customer questions worth owning, to turning your newsroom into an AI-ready source of proof.

The searches are happening. Make sure you’re in them.

If you’d like to talk through what this means for your brand, get in touch at hello@boldspace.com.

Lou Kelly
Head of Consumer, Boldspace