In the exponentially expanding world of generative engine optimization, brands that position themselves as a solution to consumers’ needs are the ones that will increasingly show up in AI recommendations.
Within the beverage category, functional beverages continuously showed up as the top recommendation in AI answers, regardless of whether the product moves volumes or is cheaper, according to recent research from 5WPR AI Communications.
The AI communications firm looked across 60 prompts in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI for its 5W AI Visibility Index report and found that functional beverages surfaced more than brands positioned around flavor, taste or sales volume.
AI prompts from users are function-focused, according to Ronn Torossian, founder of 5WPR AI Communications.
Within energy drinks, AI recommendations consistently favored Celsius, Liquid Death, Olipop and Poppi, whereas category giants Red Bull and Monster, which have moved significant unit sales over the last several decades, ranked lower.
“What surprised me most was how completely uncorrelated sales and citation share turned out to be,” Torossian said. “Red Bull and Monster have owned the energy category for 20 years by unit sales. They’re the brands everyone thinks of first at the store, yet they’re sitting at second and seventh place in how often AI names them.”
Why?
AI rewards the brands that answer a question
With health as the main theme across consumer AI beverage prompts, AI agents are scraping the digital landscape and pulling up brands that tell a clear benefit narrative around their product, along with updated earned media and independent coverage, according to Torossian.
Traditionally brands relied on search engine optimization (SEO) to show higher in search engine rankings. Now, brands are competing in GEO to show up as the first answers in AI searches. Ultimately, a brand’s relevance, or citation share, in an AI recommendation is increasingly based on two factors: what a consumer is searching for and how a brand answers those questions across their media presence.
“Nobody asks a chatbot for the best-selling energy drink,” Torossian said. “They ask for the healthy one, the gut-healthy one, the clean one, the one with electrolytes. The brand that has clearly and repeatedly answered that specific question in the public record is the brand that gets named back.”
In Celsius’ case, the brand expanded its citation share into the female and fitness energy drink space when it acquired Alani Nu in February 2025.
“The Alani Nu acquisition matters more than people realize,” Torossian said. “It’s not just added revenue. It’s added citation surface.”
Another example is PepsiCo’s Poppi acquisition last year, where the CPG giant is playing in the prebiotic soda space – a category Poppi and Olipop created, Torossian says. Both Poppi and Olipop consistently show up as leading gut-health soda recommendations in AI search, according to 5WPR.
When it comes to AI, market leadership is not enough. Consumers are not searching for the best-selling energy drink, Torossian argues. They are looking for the one that supports a specific need, whether that’s energy, hydration or gut health.
“Market leadership built through decades of distribution deals and shelf placement doesn’t automatically transfer into that answer,” he said. “It’s an entirely different kind of leadership that AI is rewarding.”
Flavor wins at the shelf but function wins in AI
For flavor-forward brands, they may win on retail shelves because consumers build a relationship with the product over time, Torossian argues, whereas citation is earned through a public record.
“Loyalty and citation are earned in two completely different places, through two completely different mechanisms,” he said. “Flavor wins at the shelf, through taste, habit and repeat purchase.”
By contrast, AI recommendations are built on documented information.
“AI doesn’t experience taste. It reads,” Torossian said. “A brand can have won over thousands of loyal repeat customers on flavor alone and still be functionally invisible to an AI engine, simply because nobody’s written down what the product does beyond ‘tastes good.’”
He emphasized the contrast: “The two forms of success just don’t overlap the way people assume they would.”
One flavor-forward brand, Spindrift, which focuses on natural flavors, is still picked up by AI, but largely as a clean-label and low-sugar sparkling water.
“Even Spindrift’s citation success is quietly borrowing a small functional claim to get in the door,” Torossian said.
The window is narrowing for flavor-first brands
For AI visibility, flavor has a shrinking shelf life, Torossian said.
“Flavor is what turns that first-time buyer into a repeat customer once they’ve actually tried it,” he said. “Function is what gets a startup discovered in the first place.”
While flavor-centric brands can still compete today, Torossian says functional positioning will become increasingly important as AI-driven discovery grows.
“As more competitors attach a real function to their brand story, the AI engines will have more well-documented functional options to choose from for every query,” he said. “The purely flavor-driven brands will simply get crowded out of the answer.”
Torrossian adds: “It’s not that flavor becomes worthless. It stays essential for retention. But as a standalone strategy for AI visibility, it has a shrinking shelf life.”
