kbeautytmi › AI citations

When people ask AI about K-beauty,
whose name comes back?

Every week we ask 4 AI engines (Perplexity · Gemini · OpenAI · Claude) the same 60 K-beauty questions — best toner for sensitive skin, best Korean sunscreen, and so on — and count which brands the answers actually cite. Citations ≠ sales. This is the discovery layer forming before anyone reaches a shelf. Measured 2026-07-13

The leaderboard

1Anua 36
2COSRX 34
3Dr.Jart+ 25
4KLAIRS 23
5ETUDE 20
6ROUND LAB 15
7Torriden 15
8LANEIGE 15
🔒 52 more brands + all 60 query-level answers — free sign-up

Week over week

2026-07-06
№1 COSRX 40
2026-07-13
№1 Anua 36

The trend line is the product — the archive deepens every Monday and Thursday.

What Copilot cites on generic queries

From Bing's AI Performance data — non-brand queries only.

"calming cream" 42 citations · 17.95% share
"skincare brands sensitive redness-prone skin aftercare instructions" 10 citations · 21.74% share
"azulene vs centella sensitive combination skin benefits" 3 citations · 30% share

Why this matters

Shoppers increasingly ask AI before they search, and AI answers concentrate on a handful of names. A brand that dominates retail shelves but never gets cited is invisible in the next discovery channel — and a brand AI loves that hasn't hit mass retail is a signal buyers can act on. Cross-reading this leaderboard against our retail ladder is the whole point: in 2026-07, the top of the AI leaderboard and the top of the retail-reach ladder were the same brands — evidence the discovery layer and the shelf are moving together.

Method: identical prompts to 4 engines, brand mentions extracted from answers with token-boundary matching against our chart-brand dictionary. Reprocessed brand-neutrally by kbeautytmi. AI citation ≠ endorsement, quality, or sales.