Which Chinese Brands Does ChatGPT Recommend?

Key findings

• In 21 of 24 buyer questions, the first product ChatGPT recommended came from a Chinese brand. Across all answers, Chinese brands made up 63% of the 81 brand mentions.
• In drones, robot vacuums, power stations, chargers and 3D printers, nearly every brand ChatGPT named was Chinese: DJI, Dreame, Roborock, Anker, Jackery, BLUETTI, EcoFlow, UGREEN, Bambu Lab and others.
• Chinese brands were weaker where Western brands are entrenched or the buyer question is about a store rather than a product: fast-fashion stores (21%), evs (europe / uk) (25%), mobile games (53%).
• ChatGPT builds its answer mostly from English review media. techradar.com was a source in 22 of 24 questions and tomsguide.com in 16. Reddit and Wikipedia also appeared often.
• Brand-owned English stores do get cited. Links to store.dji.com, us.anker.com, us.ugreen.com, bluettipower.com, us.roborock.com, us.ecoflow.com and others were shown to the user as citations, next to retailers such as bestbuy.com and walmart.com.
• Being a category leader is not enough. EcoFlow, one of the best-known power-station brands, was named in only one of the two power-station answers, and Xiaomi did not appear in any robot-vacuum or earbuds answer.

Results by category

Share of mentions counts each brand once per answer. “Chinese brand” means founded in mainland China or by a mainland-China team; it includes brands headquartered abroad today, such as SHEIN, and MG, a British-origin brand owned by SAIC.

Which websites ChatGPT relied on

“Source” means ChatGPT read the page while answering (shown in its search activity) or cited it. A brand that wants to appear in these answers needs to be reviewed, compared and discussed on these sites, in English.

What this means for brands going global

• Check your own category, not the average. Hardware leaders are well covered; apps, games, fashion and cars are not. Run the buyer questions your customers actually ask.
• Work on the sources, not only your site. Most answers rest on a few review publishers, Reddit threads and Wikipedia. Missing from those pages usually means missing from the answer.
• Keep your English store and spec pages crawlable. ChatGPT cited official brand stores in several answers; clear specs and comparisons make them easier to quote.
• Re-test regularly. Answers change with new reviews and new models. Our free AI visibility test runs five questions for your brand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Qwen, Doubao and DeepSeek.

Method

• Assistant: ChatGPT on the web (chatgpt.com), temporary chat, with web search on. One answer per question, run on 2026-10-19.
• 24 English buyer questions across 12 categories where Chinese brands sell overseas, two questions per category. The full list is below.
• For each answer we recorded the products and brands recommended, in order, plus the sites ChatGPT read and the links it cited.
• The brand origin label is ours. We count brands, not products; a brand named several times in one answer counts once.

Limits

• One run per question on one assistant. Answers vary between runs, accounts, locations and days, so treat the numbers as a snapshot, not a ranking of brand quality.
• Questions were written by us to resemble typical buyer searches. Different wording can produce different brands.
• Only ChatGPT was sampled for this report. Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews may recommend different brands.
• We have no commercial relationship with any brand named here.

All 24 questions and answers

FAQ