When AI is asked about supplements — who does it recommend?
We sent 26 real buying questions to ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews – the questions health-conscious consumers actually ask. Then we counted which providers get named, and how often. The result is a ranking built from real AI answers, not opinion.
Nearly half of all AI recommendations go to just 6 of 106 providers.
Doppelherz (8.3%) and Sunday Natural (6.8%) dominate the answers – the remaining 106 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.
Who does AI recommend for supplements?
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.
Five things the data reveals about this category
Behind the ranking — what the numbers actually mean for brands in this space.
106 providers named. The top 6 account for just 31.6% of all mentions.
Across 26 real buying prompts, AI systems named 106 distinct supplement brands — an unusually high number that signals deep category fragmentation. The total tally reached 206 brand mentions, yet even the single most-cited brand, Doppelherz, captured only 17 of those mentions, translating to an 8.3% Share of Voice. In most categories studied by BuzzView, the leading brand tends to dominate with 15 to 25% SOV. In supplements, the top slot is far thinner.
When you add up the top 6 providers — Doppelherz, Sunday Natural, Orthomol, Natural Elements, Pure Encapsulations and Mivolis — they account for 65 mentions combined, which is only 31.6% of all 206 mentions. The remaining 68.4% of AI attention is scattered across 100 other brands, including 94 providers outside the tracked set who together generated 118 mentions. This is a strikingly flat distribution for a consumer-facing category.
The pattern reflects a fundamental structural split in the German supplement market. On one side sit pharmacy-heritage brands like Doppelherz, Orthomol, Abtei and Mivolis — names that have built decades of shelf presence, doctor endorsements and mass-market trust signals. On the other side, a wave of premium direct-to-consumer brands — Sunday Natural, Natural Elements, Biogena, Pure Encapsulations, Ogaenics — has entered the market with high-transparency labeling, third-party testing certificates and content-heavy websites. AI models are drawing from both pools simultaneously, which produces the wide spread seen here.
For any brand operating in this category, the concentration pattern has a clear implication: there is no single incumbent that has locked up AI mindshare. The leaderboard is genuinely contestable. A brand that invests deliberately in the signals AI systems use to evaluate supplement quality — clinical study references, ingredient transparency pages, independent test reports, expert editorial coverage — can climb the ranking faster than in a category where one or two giants already dominate 60 or 70 percent of mentions.
No brand dominates AI-driven supplement recommendations — the top player holds just 8.3% SOV across 106 named providers, making this one of the most open competitive landscapes in BuzzView's dataset. Brands that act now can secure a disproportionate share before the field consolidates.
Doppelherz shows up in 34.6% of prompts. Six tracked brands appear in fewer than 8%.
Among the 16 tracked providers, visibility scores — measured as the percentage of the 26 prompts in which a brand received at least one mention — range from a high of 34.6% for Doppelherz down to 7.7% for six brands: mybacs, tetesept, Naturtreu, FormMed, ESN and Verbraucherzentrale. That is a gap of nearly 27 percentage points between the most visible and least visible tracked brands. Sunday Natural follows closely behind at 30.8%, with Natural Elements at 26.9% and Orthomol at 23.1%.
What separates the high-visibility brands from those stuck at 7.7%? In the supplement category, visibility is shaped primarily by three factors: breadth of product range, editorial footprint and authority signal density. Doppelherz benefits from all three — it covers virtually every supplement sub-category from omega-3 and magnesium to hair vitamins and joint support, meaning it surfaces across prompt types regardless of the specific health goal a consumer is researching. Sunday Natural and Natural Elements have built authority through dense ingredient transparency pages, third-party lab reports and extensive health editorial content that AI systems treat as credibility signals.
Brands sitting at 7.7% visibility share a common weakness: narrow surface area. ESN, for example, is strongly associated with sports nutrition and protein supplementation, which means it surfaces in a limited subset of prompts. tetesept has strong pharmacy distribution but a thin editorial presence compared to the premium DTC brands. Naturtreu has invested in content but has not yet built the cross-category breadth that triggers mentions across diverse prompt types. mybacs is essentially a single-product brand (probiotics), which limits the range of queries where it is considered relevant by AI models.
The practical lesson from this visibility gap is that AI recommendation is not simply a function of market share or distribution. Verbraucherzentrale — the German consumer advice organisation, not a supplement brand at all — still manages to appear in 7.7% of prompts because it produces authoritative third-party assessments of supplements that AI systems quote. This shows that the content and authority signals around a brand matter as much as, or more than, the brand's commercial footprint in driving AI-visible presence.
Visibility in supplements is driven by product breadth, editorial authority and transparent ingredient documentation — not distribution alone. Brands with narrow category focus or thin content infrastructure are structurally capped at low visibility scores regardless of their retail presence.
Best-of prompts surface legacy brands. Alternative-seeking prompts surface premium DTC players.
Not all prompts are equal, and the supplement data illustrates this clearly. Best-of queries — prompts like "What are the best supplements for the immune system?" or "Best vitamin D product?" — tend to surface established mass-market brands with long histories and broad name recognition. Doppelherz and Orthomol perform most strongly in this prompt type because AI models associate them with mainstream authority: pharmacy distribution, decades of television advertising and a presence in virtually every German drugstore. These brands have the kind of broad-surface web mentions that best-of queries reward.
Comparison prompts — "Doppelherz vs Sunday Natural, which is better?" — shift the competitive dynamic by forcing AI to evaluate quality attributes rather than simply recall popular names. In this prompt type, Sunday Natural and Pure Encapsulations gain ground because they have invested in detailed quality narratives: third-party testing documentation, bioavailability explanations and ingredient sourcing transparency. AI systems referencing these comparisons tend to draw on content that explicitly benchmarks one brand against another, which rewards the brands that have published that kind of comparative material.
Alternative-seeking prompts — "What is a good alternative to Doppelherz?" — are where the premium DTC segment has its clearest advantage. Natural Elements, Biogena and Ogaenics appear more prominently in this prompt type, positioned as the quality-conscious upgrade. These brands have built their content strategy precisely around the idea of being a better alternative to pharmacy staples — more bioavailable forms, cleaner additives lists, higher-dose formulations — and that positioning is absorbed by AI models and reflected in their responses to alternative queries.
Use-case and vertical prompts — "Best supplements during pregnancy", "Which vitamins are good for hair?", "Recommended supplements for athletes?" — produce the most fragmented results of all. Here, specialist brands like ESN (sports), mybacs (gut health), Biogena (medical-grade formulations) and tetesept (hair and beauty) each have moments of relevance that they do not achieve in broader best-of queries. However, because these prompts are narrower, the mention counts are lower. The strategic implication is that brands without a broad best-of presence should prioritise owning one or two vertical use-case queries deeply rather than trying to compete across all prompt types simultaneously.
Content strategy for AI visibility must be built around prompt type, not just keyword volume. Best-of queries reward broad authority, comparison queries reward quality documentation, alternative queries reward clear positioning, and use-case queries reward vertical specialisation — each requires a different content investment.
Sunday Natural earns positive sentiment in 71% of its mentions. Doppelherz earns it in 18%.
The sentiment breakdown across the leaderboard reveals a striking divide between brands that AI systems merely name and brands that AI systems actively recommend with enthusiasm. Sunday Natural leads the sentiment ranking by a significant margin: 10 of its 14 mentions carried positive framing, with the remaining 4 neutral and zero negative. This means that when AI mentions Sunday Natural, it does so approvingly roughly 71% of the time — describing it as high-quality, transparent or a strong choice for quality-conscious consumers. Ogaenics, another premium DTC brand, achieves a similar ratio with 3 positive and 1 neutral mention out of 4 total.
Doppelherz tells a different story. It has the highest mention count (17) but only 3 positive mentions alongside 14 neutral ones — a positive rate of just 18%. Orthomol is even lower at 1 positive out of 11 mentions (9%). Abtei, AOK and Verbraucherzentrale register zero positive mentions across all their appearances. This pattern is consistent with what BuzzView observes in other mature pharmacy-heritage categories: high-frequency brands accumulate many neutral "also-worth-knowing" mentions without generating the kind of enthusiastic, qualitative endorsement that signals genuine AI preference.
What drives positive sentiment specifically in supplements? The data points to three mechanisms. First, third-party quality certification: Sunday Natural, Pure Encapsulations and Natural Elements all publish independent laboratory test results and hold quality seals that AI systems quote as proof of trustworthiness. Second, ingredient form specificity: brands that distinguish themselves by explaining why they use Magnesium Glycinate instead of Magnesium Oxide, or methylated B12 instead of cyanocobalamin, generate more qualitatively positive editorial coverage that AI absorbs. Third, consumer review signal density: premium DTC brands with thousands of detailed, substantive product reviews on their own platforms tend to produce a richer positive signal cloud.
The practical value of positive sentiment extends beyond brand image. When AI systems recommend a supplement with positive framing — "Sunday Natural is particularly valued for its high-quality ingredients and transparent manufacturing" — the conversion intent of a user who follows that recommendation is significantly higher than for a neutral citation. Brands optimising purely for mention count without considering sentiment quality may be building share of voice that does not translate into downstream purchasing behaviour. The mention-to-sentiment ratio is therefore one of the most strategically important metrics in this category.
Mention count and sentiment quality are separate metrics that often diverge: Doppelherz leads in total mentions but earns positive framing only 18% of the time, while Sunday Natural is positive in 71% of mentions. Brands in the supplement space should invest in the specific credibility signals — certifications, ingredient transparency, expert editorial — that shift AI sentiment from neutral to positive.
106 providers across 26 prompts. The German supplement category is still in the fragmentation phase of AI search.
BuzzView categorises categories into three phases of AI search maturity: emerging (high fragmentation, shifting positions, no dominant brand), consolidating (a few brands pulling ahead, the rest falling behind) and mature (1-3 brands holding structural advantages that are difficult to displace). By every metric in this dataset, the German supplement market is firmly in the emerging phase. 106 distinct providers named across 26 prompts is an extremely high diversity figure. No brand exceeds 8.3% SOV. The top 3 collectively hold only 20.4% of all mentions.
Several structural forces are keeping this category fragmented. The supplement market itself is unusually heterogeneous: health goals (immunity, sports, hair, pregnancy, joint health, gut health) each create distinct sub-communities with different trusted sources and preferred brands. AI models reflect this heterogeneity by drawing from different reference pools depending on the prompt. A model asked about pregnancy supplements will cite different sources than one asked about sports recovery, and those sources point to different brands. This prompt-driven sub-category variation means no single brand can achieve dominance across all prompt types simultaneously.
There are however early signs that the market will consolidate. Sunday Natural has built the highest sentiment ratio among high-visibility brands, suggesting it is building the quality of AI endorsement rather than just volume. Pure Encapsulations and Natural Elements are both gaining traction in quality-seeking prompts. If these brands continue investing in the right content and credibility signals over the next 12 to 18 months, they are well-positioned to break into a 15 to 20% SOV range that would represent the beginning of category consolidation. Doppelherz, despite leading in mention count and visibility, has a sentiment profile that may limit its ability to build a qualitatively dominant position.
For brands with little or no current AI visibility — including well-distributed pharmacy brands that do not appear in this dataset at all — the emerging phase is the best possible moment to act. In BuzzView's experience across multiple categories, brands that build deliberate AI visibility programmes during the fragmentation phase typically achieve 2 to 4 times the return on content investment compared to those that wait until the category has consolidated and competition for AI mentions is already fierce. The window in supplements is open, but the consolidation signals are beginning to appear, which means the time to build AI presence in this category is now rather than later.
The German supplement market is in the fragmentation phase of AI search development — no dominant player, 106 brands competing, positions still highly fluid. This is the highest-leverage moment to build AI visibility: the investment required to move from 0% to 15% SOV will never be lower than it is today.
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Real questions health-conscious consumers ask AI
No wishful thinking: the ranking comes from exactly these prompt types – best-of questions, comparisons, alternatives and use cases.
AI visibility of the tested providers
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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