We sent 26 real buying questions to ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews – the questions cat owners actually ask. Then we counted which providers get named, and how often. The result is a ranking built from real AI answers, not opinion.
Animonda (8.9%) and Mjamjam (7.8%) dominate the answers – the remaining 81 named providers split what's left. If you're not here, you simply don't exist to AI users. That's exactly the gap BuzzView makes visible.
Share of all brand mentions across 26 prompts (Share of Voice). The longer the bar, the more often AI names the provider – across every question tested.
Behind the ranking — what the numbers actually mean for brands in the cat food space.
Across 26 prompts sent to ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, AI systems surfaced 81 distinct cat food brands — a striking number that reflects just how fragmented the German cat food market really is. Of the 370 total brand mentions recorded, a full 160 belong to what the data labels as "andere" — other brands outside the tracked set. That means 69 brands that AI mentioned at least once are not even household names in conventional retail rankings. The market AI perceives is far wider than the one pet retailers typically spotlight.
Despite this breadth, the distribution is far from flat. Animonda leads with 33 mentions and an 8.9% share of voice, followed closely by Mjamjam at 29 mentions (7.8%). Together, just these two brands account for more than 16% of every brand reference AI made across the full prompt set. The third-place holder, Royal Canin, adds another 7.0%, and by the time you include Whiskas, MAC's, and Anifit, the top 6 have claimed 37.3% of the total mention landscape.
This is a classic long-tail power law, but with a twist specific to cat food: the dominant players span both premium natural/raw segments (Mjamjam, Animonda) and mainstream mass-market products (Whiskas). Unlike categories such as enterprise software — where incumbents dominate AI responses almost entirely — cat food sees the AI models balancing genuine editorial variety. Premium and mass-market brands coexist in the top tier because the underlying training data reflects consumer review sites, pet forums, and veterinary resources that are themselves pluralistic.
For brands sitting in positions 7 through 81, the competitive picture is demanding. Happy Cat, Real Nature, Strayz, Sanabelle, and Lucky Lou all sit below 2.5% share of voice despite being recognized names in Germany. Their challenge is not brand awareness in the traditional sense — it is the absence of the kind of structured, review-rich, recommendation-dense content that AI models use to decide which brands to cite. In a market where 81 competitors are theoretically in the running, the real race is for relevance within the specific content signals AI chooses to trust.
AI mentions 81 cat food brands — but the top 6 take 37% of all mentions. The field is open, but the reward goes disproportionately to brands that have already built a dense content footprint across review platforms, pet communities, and veterinary resources.
Visibility score measures how consistently a brand appears across the full set of 26 prompts — not just how many total mentions it accumulates. Animonda and Mjamjam both achieved a visibility score of 65.4, meaning they were cited in responses to roughly two-thirds of all test questions. This is a meaningful threshold: it indicates that no matter what type of cat food question a user asks, these two brands have nearly a two-in-three chance of being recommended by AI. For any brand, reaching this level of cross-prompt consistency is the true measure of AI authority in a category.
At the other end of the tracked set, Sanabelle and Lucky Lou sit at 19.2% visibility — appearing in fewer than one in five prompts. This is not a marginal difference in performance; it represents a structural absence from the AI conversation across broad swaths of the query landscape. A cat owner asking about grain-free options, senior nutrition, sensitive digestion, or best-of rankings in 2026 encounters Sanabelle and Lucky Lou only occasionally, in highly specific scenarios where their positioning happens to match the AI's training signals.
In cat food specifically, the content signals that drive high cross-prompt visibility are distinct from other consumer goods categories. Unlike fashion or electronics, where brand mentions concentrate in media coverage and influencer content, cat food visibility is heavily shaped by three source types: structured comparison articles on pet-specialist sites (like Zooplus guides, Futterberatung.de, and Katzenkram), veterinary-adjacent recommendation pages that name specific brands for health conditions, and user-review aggregators where owners write extended, brand-specific assessments. Animonda and Mjamjam perform well across all three.
For brands in the 19–42% visibility band — including Josera, Hill's, Real Nature, and Strayz — the path to improvement is identifiable. These brands are not unknown to AI; they surface in some prompt types. What they lack is the breadth of relevant content that would make them reliable recommendations across every question type. A brand that appears only in "best dry food" prompts but not in "sensitive digestion" or "senior cat nutrition" prompts has a content gap, not a brand reputation gap. Closing that gap with targeted, specific content is the clearest route to closing the 46-point visibility range.
The 46-point gap between Animonda/Mjamjam (65.4%) and the bottom tier (19.2%) is driven by content breadth, not just brand size. Brands that cover more use cases — life stage, dietary need, wet vs. dry — appear consistently across more prompt types and compound their visibility lead over time.
Not all prompts are equal, and the cat food data makes this visible. When AI is asked broad best-of questions — "What is the best cat food?" or "Which cat food is healthiest?" — it defaults to brands with the longest and most diverse presence in its training data. Animonda and Whiskas benefit from decades of brand history and appear prominently in these wide-net queries. Royal Canin, with its veterinary distribution history and clinical product lines, also benefits from best-of framing because AI associates it with authority and professional endorsement.
Comparison prompts — the "Animonda vs Mjamjam" type — generate a different winner profile. Here, Mjamjam competes at the top not just because it is widely mentioned, but because a substantial body of comparison content exists online that frames it as the premium raw-food challenger to established brands. MAC's and Catz Finefood also appear more frequently in head-to-head comparisons because the natural and grain-free pet food community produces review content that explicitly positions these brands against each other. The comparison prompt format rewards brands that have been discussed in relation to their competitors, not just in isolation.
Alternative-seeking prompts — "What is a good alternative to Animonda?" — reveal a third pattern. These prompts surface Anifit, Wildes Land, and Josera more reliably, because AI draws on recommendation threads and forum discussions where pet owners describe switching from one brand to another and explain their reasoning. These are the prompt types that give mid-tier brands their best opening: if a brand appears repeatedly in "I switched from X to Y because…" content, it builds genuine AI recall for alternative-seeking queries.
Use-case and vertical prompts — "best cat food for senior cats," "best cat food for sensitive digestion," "best grain-free cat food" — create the most differentiated outcomes. Hill's dominates veterinary-condition framing because its clinical nutrition positioning is well-documented. Royal Canin similarly owns specific life-stage and breed-specific responses. Meanwhile, Mjamjam, MAC's, and Catz Finefood surface strongly in grain-free and natural-diet queries. Brands that have not invested in use-case-specific content — product pages, guides, and landing pages targeting specific dietary concerns — essentially forfeit entire prompt categories to better-positioned competitors.
Your prompt-type exposure tells you exactly where your content gaps are. If you appear in best-of queries but not in use-case prompts, you are missing condition-specific and life-stage content. If you show up in comparisons but not alternatives, you need more community-driven recommendation presence. Each prompt type requires a different content strategy.
Sentiment in AI responses is not about star ratings or Net Promoter Scores — it is about how AI frames a brand when it mentions it. A positive mention means the AI actively endorsed the brand with qualifying language: words like "hochwertig," "empfehlenswert," "ideal für," or "besonders gut geeignet." A neutral mention is a factual citation without evaluative framing. A negative mention includes hedging, warning language, or explicit caveats — the kind of framing a user would internalize as a reason to reconsider.
Mjamjam stands out with the highest ratio of positive-to-total mentions in the entire dataset: 23 positive out of 29 total mentions, with zero negatives. This is not accidental. Mjamjam has cultivated a content ecosystem built around raw and natural feeding communities — pet blogs, Facebook groups, and dedicated raw-feeding forums — where the language used to describe it is consistently enthusiastic and specific. AI models absorb this enthusiasm and reproduce it. The brand is not just mentioned; it is advocated for.
Whiskas presents the starkest contrast: 4 negative mentions out of 18 total, representing a 22% negative rate — the highest in the tracked set. This reflects a persistent thread in German-language pet content that questions the ingredient quality of mass-market wet food, specifically citing artificial additives, high cereal content in older recipes, and palatability concerns for cats with selective eating habits. Whiskas has the brand awareness, but the sentiment signal it generates in AI responses carries a meaningful caveat burden that more premium brands do not face. Royal Canin, with 1 negative out of 26 mentions, fares better — its clinical positioning partly insulates it from ingredient-quality criticism.
For brands like MAC's, Anifit, and Catz Finefood — all at zero negative mentions — the sentiment profile suggests these brands operate in a content environment that is largely praise-driven. This is characteristic of premium natural food brands: their customer base is self-selected, vocal, and tends to produce highly positive user-generated content that AI absorbs as signal. The risk for these brands is different: with relatively small mention volumes (all at 16), their positive sentiment is not yet compounding into the kind of high-frequency positive recall that Mjamjam has achieved. They are well-liked but not yet widely cited.
Sentiment in AI mentions is shaped by the content ecosystem around your brand, not your ad spend. Brands with engaged communities producing specific, enthusiastic content — like Mjamjam's raw-feeding advocates — earn positive framing. Brands carrying ingredient-quality criticism in online discourse will see that criticism reproduced in AI responses regardless of their marketing message.
Measured against other consumer product categories tracked by BuzzView, cat food sits at an early-to-intermediate stage of AI maturity. A mature AI category — think CRM software, cloud hosting, or password managers — shows extreme concentration: three to five brands absorbing 60–80% of all AI mentions, with a single dominant player that appears in nearly every response regardless of prompt type. Cat food does not look like that. The highest single-brand share of voice is Animonda at 8.9%, and the top 12 tracked brands together account for less than half of total mentions.
This fragmentation is partly structural. Cat food is a category with genuine functional differentiation — raw, wet, dry, grain-free, life-stage-specific, veterinary therapeutic — and AI models reflect this diversity rather than collapsing it into a single winner. Unlike a category such as project management software, where "best tool" prompts reliably produce the same three names, "best cat food" prompts generate meaningfully different responses depending on whether the question specifies a kitten, a senior cat, a cat with kidney disease, or simply any cat. The category's inherent complexity keeps the playing field more open than AI-mature categories typically allow.
The presence of 69 "other" brands — brands with at least one mention across 26 prompts that are not among the tracked 16 — signals that AI is still in a discovery phase for this category. It has not yet settled on a canonical shortlist the way it has in more mature verticals. This creates a significant opportunity: brands that invest now in building structured, specific, credibly sourced content around their positioning can still influence which names AI consolidates around as the category matures. The window for establishing AI authority in cat food is open but will not stay open indefinitely.
The practical implication for brand managers is this: in an immature AI category, market share of voice is not yet locked in. Animonda and Mjamjam lead today, but their 65.4% visibility scores — while strong — are not the insurmountable 85–90% scores that true AI category leaders in mature markets achieve. Brands like Josera, Hill's, and Wildes Land — all sitting in the 23–30% visibility range — are close enough to the leaders that a sustained content and PR effort specifically designed for AI retrieval could move them meaningfully within 12 to 18 months. The cat food AI rankings are descriptive of today's content landscape, not predictive of a permanent hierarchy.
Cat food is an AI-immature category — no single brand is dominant, and 81 different providers were named across just 26 prompts. Brands that build credible, specific, use-case-rich content now can still shape which names AI consolidates around as this category's AI visibility landscape matures over the next one to two years.
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Visibility score = share of prompts where the provider appears in the AI answer at all. 100% means: present for every relevant question.
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