Retail and consumer goods: famous everywhere except the answer

The SetpointHQ Index · Retail and consumer goods

Everyone in Britain can name these 10 employer brands. The AI assistants candidates now ask first can name them too. What the assistants will not reliably do, on the evidence of the latest scoring run, is recommend them.

Each month The SetpointHQ Index scores 100 UK employer brands on how visible they are to AI assistants. We put real candidate questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and score 5 dimensions: citation (do the assistants name you), schema (does your site give machines structured data to read), knowledge graph (do the machines know who you are), crawlability (can AI crawlers get in) and social footprint. The figures below are from the 1 September 2026 run, compared with the first retail reading on 13 July. Both runs use the same methodology. We have published the same analysis for banking and social care. If the difference between ranking and being cited is new to you, start with SEO versus GEO.

The full table

Scores out of 100, The SetpointHQ Index, 1 September 2026 run. “Cited” is how many of 20 candidate research prompts named the brand. “Citation” is the weighted citation dimension score. Each brand name links to its full Index profile.

A healthy sector, until you look closer

On the headline numbers, retail and consumer goods is doing well. A median composite of 57.7 against 54.9 across the full Index places it 3rd of the 14 sectors we track, behind only professional services and law. Unilever leads at 65.3, John Lewis Partnership takes second at 61.8, and only 3 brands fall below the Index median.

The trouble sits in the one dimension that most directly produces applications. Citation measures whether the assistants actually name a brand when a candidate asks where to work. Half the sector is named in 5 of 20 prompts or fewer. Only Unilever and Tesco reach 10 of 20, and no retail brand gets past half.

Set that against the knowledge graph column, where 6 of the 10 brands score 97 or higher. The machines can recite these companies’ store counts, market share and corporate history in detail. Known and recommended are different things, and the distance between them is where this sector’s applications are quietly leaking.

The schema split

The strangest pattern in the data is in the schema column, the machine-readable layer that tells an assistant who you are and what roles you have open. The sector splits clean down the middle. John Lewis Partnership scores 80, ASDA and Morrisons 70. Then the floor drops: Tesco 25, Marks & Spencer 5, Sainsbury’s 0. None of those 3 has moved since July.

These brands compete for the same hourly workers, the same graduates and the same store managers, often on the same retail parks. Some publish structured, parseable role data. The others leave the machines to guess, and the bottom of the table shows how the machines respond to guesswork: Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury’s sit at ranks 73 and 77 of 100, well below brands with a fraction of their recognition.

The cost asymmetry makes the split stranger still. These are organisations that spend millions making candidates feel something about working there. The markup that lets a machine simply read the jobs costs almost nothing, and half the sector has not done it. If you have never had yours checked, the free careers site audit covers exactly this.

What moved since July

Diageo made the biggest move in the sector. It was named in 5 of 20 prompts in July and 9 of 20 in September, and its composite rose from 56.4 to 59.0, lifting it from 6th to 4th in the sector. Morrisons (3 to 5 prompts) and Boots (4 to 6) also gained.

The fall came at the top and the bottom. Tesco dropped from 13 prompts to 10, Marks & Spencer from 7 to 5 and a composite of 48.4 to 45.8, and Unilever’s citation score slipped from 42.5 to 35.0, taking it from rank 9 to rank 13 in the Index. Nobody’s schema score changed in either direction. Every significant movement in this sector since July has come from citation, which is the dimension a brand can least control directly and the one that shifts first when competitors improve.

One finding per brand

• Unilever UK (65.3, rank 13). Still the sector leader, with perfect knowledge graph and crawlability scores, but its citation score fell from 42.5 to 35.0 since July.
• John Lewis Partnership (61.8, rank 19). The sector’s best structured data (schema 80) lets it out-score rivals several times its size, despite being named in only 5 of 20 prompts.
• Tesco (60.5, rank 23). The sector’s highest citation score (47.1) on a schema score of just 25: fame is doing work the plumbing isn’t.
• Diageo (59.0, rank 30). The biggest mover in the sector, named in 9 of 20 prompts, up from 5 in July.
• ASDA (58.7, rank 32). Quietly solid and unchanged since July: schema 70 with no dimension below 30.
• Reckitt (56.7, rank 40). Perfect crawlability and the sector’s lowest citation score at 18.8: readable, but rarely recommended.
• Morrisons (55.2, rank 49). Schema at 70 and citation rising, from 3 to 5 prompts since July. Crawlability at 60 is its weakest technical score.
• Boots (52.4, rank 60). Mid-table on every dimension, and one of 3 retail brands below the Index median.
• Marks & Spencer (45.8, rank 73). 5 out of 100 on schema, and a composite down from 48.4 to 45.8 since July as it lost 2 prompt mentions.
• Sainsbury’s (44.4, rank 77). The sector’s cautionary tale: schema 0, bottom of the retail table in both runs, despite a 97.9 knowledge graph score.

What this means for a TA leader

First, nobody in UK retail owns the AI answer yet. No brand in the sector is named in more than half of candidate prompts. The seat at the top of the answer is empty, and the first mover takes it cheaply.

Second, the technical work is unevenly distributed in a way that has nothing to do with size. John Lewis Partnership is a fraction of Tesco’s scale and comfortably out-structures it. This is an attention problem, not a budget problem.

Third, recognition is a depreciating shield. Assistants are becoming the first place candidates ask, and every month a famous brand is absent from those answers, the habit of not seeing it hardens. To move your own scores, start with how to make your recruitment brand show up in AI answers.

Frequently asked questions

How visible are UK retail employer brands to AI assistants?

Across the 10 retail and consumer goods employer brands in The SetpointHQ Index, the median composite score is 57.7 out of 100 as of the 1 September 2026 run, 3rd of 14 sectors. The median brand is named in 5.5 of the 20 prompts candidates use to research employers, and no retail brand is named in more than 10.

Which UK retail employer brand is most visible to AI?

Unilever UK leads the sector at 65.3, rank 13 in the 100-brand Index. Tesco has the highest citation score in the sector at 47.1, and John Lewis Partnership has the strongest structured data, with a schema score of 80.

Why do famous retailers score low for AI visibility?

Recognition and machine-readability are different things. 6 of the 10 retail brands score 97 or higher on knowledge graph, so the assistants know who they are. But Tesco scores 25 on schema, Marks & Spencer 5 and Sainsbury’s 0, so their careers sites give the assistants little structured data to quote when candidates ask where to work.

How does The SetpointHQ Index measure employer brands?

The SetpointHQ Index scores 100 UK employer brands across five dimensions, citation, schema, knowledge graph, crawlability and social, by probing ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity with the questions candidates actually ask. It runs monthly on a published, versioned methodology.

Source: The SetpointHQ Index, 100 UK employer brands, scored monthly. Explore the full Index and the methodology at pro.setpointhq.com/the-index.