Speedo vs Arena: who wins in AI search?

We ran 377 queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to find out which swimwear brand AI recommends when it matters most. The results are not what you would expect.

Ivan Miragaya Mendez

Founder, LLM Monitor

March 23, 2026

Competitive swimmers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for gear recommendations before buying. If your brand is invisible in those answers, you are losing customers before they ever reach your website.

We tracked Speedo and Arena across 377 queries, 12 prompt categories, and three platforms. Here is what the data shows.

That is the number that should worry Speedo's marketing team. On ChatGPT and Gemini, Speedo dominates. On Perplexity — the platform most heavily influenced by recent editorial coverage — Arena has quietly taken the lead.

01Overall scores

Across all 377 scans, Speedo's mention rates and average sentiment scores were:

On technical queries — performance suits, goggles, competitive caps — both ChatGPT and Gemini return Speedo in near-100% of runs. The brand has built a strong, stable AI presence in its core category.

Gemini is Speedo's strongest platform. On the direct brand authority query "Which brand leads competitive swimwear?", Speedo scored 100% on both ChatGPT and Gemini, and 91.7% on Perplexity.

02Speedo's blind spot

The gaps show up clearly on broader, top-of-funnel queries. On "Best swimwear brands for men?":

This matters because Perplexity weights recent editorial citations more heavily than the other two platforms. It is a content gap, not a brand awareness problem. The fix is targetable.

03The Arena question

Arena appears as a co-mentioned competitor in 72.1% of all Speedo brand mentions — by far the highest of any competitor. TYR follows at a significant distance, typically appearing alongside Arena rather than independently.

We ran the direct query "Arena or Speedo to compete?" 35 times across all three platforms. Since it is a two-brand query, what matters is who gets the primary recommendation:

On Perplexity, Arena wins 58% of those direct comparisons (7 of 12 runs). The model cites Arena's compression technology and suit fit as reasons to prefer it for elite competition. Gemini shows the highest engagement with this query — Speedo's sentiment score peaks at 12.14 on this specific prompt, the highest single figure in the entire dataset.

What this means

The broader takeaway: AI platforms do not all work the same way. A brand can dominate on two platforms and be invisible on a third — with the same products, the same marketing budget, and the same real-world reputation. That is the GEO gap.