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Claude’s Consideration score among U.S. Gen Z adults nearly doubled in the second quarter of 2026, climbing from 14.2% to 28.1% and landing the highest score of any brand in YouGov’s newest ranking. OpenAI more than doubled its own score too, jumping from 10.1% to 22.1%. If you check referral traffic and citation share every Monday and consider the AI question handled, this number measures something referral logs never will. Gen Z isn’t just using these products. A growing share of them is starting to think of Claude and OpenAI the way they think of a sneaker brand or a streaming service.
What YouGov Measured
That’s the finding at the center of “Brands Rising Among Gen Z in the U.S. in 2026,” a new analysis YouGov shared with me this week. The company tracks more than 2,000 brands daily through YouGov BrandIndex and ranked the 10 fastest quarter-over-quarter improvers in Consideration, meaning the share of people who say they’d consider buying from a brand the next time they’re in the market. Reuben Staines, YouGov America’s head of marketing, sent me the analysis directly and flagged what he called a few surprises in the ranking. Johnnie Walker topped the list, with Consideration among Gen Z of legal drinking age rising from 7.5% to 20.0% behind a refreshed “Keep Walking” campaign running across streaming, social, and out-of-home media. But OpenAI and Claude landed in the top 10 alongside it, and ChatGPT, tracked separately in BrandIndex, grew more than 50%, from 16.3% to 25.4%.
Marketers love to reach for “Gen Z” the way they used to reach for “Millennials,” as though a birth year range tells you something a behavioral segment wouldn’t tell you better. Michael Dimock, Pew Research’s president, has said as much about generational labels, and I’ve made this argument before about other surveys that lean too hard on age cohorts. The number worth attention here isn’t that Gen Z specifically warmed up to Claude and OpenAI. It’s that two AI companies climbed into the same quarterly ranking as Johnnie Walker, REI, and Dove Baby at all. A year ago, that would have been a strange sentence to write, and now it’s a brand-tracking dataset.
Google Assistant Is A Warning About Reading This Chart
Google Assistant’s rise complicates the picture further. Its Consideration score climbed from 8.1% to 15.8% during a quarter when Google was actively steering people away from Assistant and toward Gemini, following Google I/O’s wave of Gemini announcements in May and the launch of the company’s first new smart speaker in six years. That’s not a brand winning on the strength of a campaign; it’s closer to residual name recognition catching a lift from adjacent news. Worth remembering the next time a Consideration chart gets treated as a clean signal of deliberate strategy.
REI Proves The Ranking Isn’t Secretly An AI Story
REI belongs in this conversation too, if only to prove the ranking isn’t secretly an AI story wearing a Gen Z costume. Its Consideration score rose from 9.0% to 17.2% behind a spring sale that discounted more than 6,000 products and picked up coverage across lifestyle and outdoor press. Stacy’s, Philips, Bridgestone, Dove Baby, and Bumble Bee all posted real gains too. None of that has anything to do with GEO, AI Overviews, or a chatbot. It’s seasonal timing, promotional spend, and category demand doing what they’ve always done. That’s the part of the ranking I’d want a client to ground-truth before they conclude that Gen Z Consideration is now an AI category.
How Anthropic And OpenAI Got Here
Anthropic and OpenAI didn’t get here the same way. Anthropic used its first Super Bowl spot to make a single point, that Claude would stay free of advertising, and backed it up during the quarter by shipping Claude Cowork, Claude Design, and new models, while loosening usage limits. OpenAI leaned on a high-profile Super Bowl campaign built around Codex and kept iterating on ChatGPT’s default model through the spring.
In a different YouGov study I wrote about last month, a 19-market survey on search behavior put U.S. trust in AI assistants at just 28%, a full 42 points behind the trust searchers place in a traditional search engine and even further behind maps and navigation apps. Put those two studies side by side and you get a genuinely uncomfortable gap for anyone building a GEO strategy around AI platforms. Gen Z will apparently consider buying from Claude or OpenAI. A much smaller share of Americans overall are ready to trust either one to hand them a factual answer. Consideration and trust are not the same currency.
That gap is the whole opportunity for SEO practitioners right now, which is more actionable than the brand ranking by itself.
3 Ways To Work The Gap
To leverage this gap, stop treating “AI visibility” as one metric. Track brand Consideration and awareness for the AI platforms your audience uses as a separate signal from whether your content actually gets trusted enough to be cited in an AI answer. They move on different timelines and respond to different inputs, one to advertising and product news, the other to source credibility and accuracy.
Second, look at what actually moved the Consideration needle this quarter. It wasn’t GEO tactics. Johnnie Walker used paid media across streaming and out-of-home. REI used a seasonal sale that earned lifestyle press coverage. If your 2026 plan is entirely weighted toward earning AI citations, this ranking is a reminder that broad-channel brand building still moves consumer consideration, often faster than content optimization does.
Third, build your content and PR strategy around closing the trust gap specifically, not the awareness gap. Named sources, verifiable data, and transparent methodology are what YouGov’s own trust research says will move that 28% number. Chasing Consideration numbers without addressing why people don’t trust AI answers gets you a browsing habit, not a citation.
Consideration is a starting gate, not a finish line. Claude and OpenAI have shown they can win a quarter’s worth of Gen Z attention. What happens with that attention, whether it turns into a trusted source people actually cite and act on, is still very much unwritten. I’d rather build a strategy for that second question than celebrate the first one.
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