Markets ›noise cancelling headphones 18 brands
Sony is named most often — in 34 of 36 answers. 6 questions a buyer would type, asked of 2 assistants 3 times each.
3 brands in this market were named in none of the 36 answers: Samsung, Sonos, TaoTronics.
In this market the assistants mostly name the biggest sites: prominence and mentions move together closely.
↑how often assistants name it →how much traffic its website gets
Across is web prominence — the brand's domain in the Tranco ranking of the world's most-visited sites, on a logarithmic scale, so each step is roughly ten times more prominent. Up is how many of the 36 answers named it.
Every brand with a ranked domain is plotted, including the 1 whose domain is an imperfect stand-in — shared with sibling products, a subdomain, or registered abroad, drawn hollow — because a domain carrying a whole company still plausibly helps that company's products get named.
Rank correlation +0.64 across 12 brands — a description of this picture, not a claim about the market as a whole.
The questions
These belong to the market, not to any brand in it. Each was asked 6 times across two assistants. Questions naming a brand are excluded, since they hand that brand a free mention.
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Method
market noise cancelling headphones
brands measured 18
run as subjects 1
questions 6
answers per brand 36
brand list version 7cb58c37546a
Questions went to the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs with web search off, each in a fresh context with no history. That measures what the models already know about these brands rather than what they would find on the web today, so it is a floor on visibility rather than a replica of any one person's chat.
Repeated measurements of the same brand move within about 12 points, so a difference smaller than that is not meaningful. Brands closer together than that are shown tied rather than ordered.
Sub-brands are counted with their parent: Apple (AirPods Pro, AirPods Max).
How the table is ordered. By how many of the 36 answers named each brand. Brands on the same count share a rank and are shown in the order the assistants tended to list them. A brand counts once per answer, however many times it is named in it.
How close is close. Two brands share a rank only when their counts are identical. Beyond that, a gap smaller than about four answers is inside what this measurement moves between runs — so read near-neighbours as close rather than settled, which is why every row keeps its interval.