The Lysol vs. Clorox Showdown: What 2 Legacy Brands Taught Us About Winning in the Age of AI Search

We ran a full-spectrum LLM visibility analysis on Lysol and The Clorox Company ; two legacy brands battling for dominance in the cleaning aisle.

What we found changes how we think about content, rankings, and AI relevance.

1. Presence isn’t dominance. Ranking is.

In ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Claude Gemini, and Perplexity:

Clorox appears in 59.7% of branded responses.
Lysol? Slightly higher at 60.5%.
But Lysol ranks #1 in 76.7% of its mentions; outperforming Clorox on positioning across high-intent prompts.

Implication: It’s not how often you’re seen; it’s where and how you show up. Authority and context relevance beat frequency.

This aligns with findings from OpenAI’s system card (2023): LLMs weight content quality and source reputation more heavily than simple occurrence volume.

2. Sentiment is the new domain authority.

76.7% of Lysol mentions across LLMs are positive.
Clorox sits flat at 50%.
And no; this isn’t just tone. Positive mentions correlated with higher rank and more citations.

See: Budzianowski & Vulić (ACL 2022) on how LLMs internalize and replicate evaluative sentiment across outputs.

3. You’re invisible in the places that matter.

Our study found 48 high-intent prompts (e.g., “What are the best disinfectant wipes?”) where Clorox shows up; and Lysol doesn’t.

Despite being a market leader.

This is the SEO equivalent of a brand blackout.

Takeaway: LLMs don’t crawl your sitemap. They synthesize based on the sources they trust. If you’re not there, you don’t exist.

4. 49% of LLM citations didn’t link to the brand at all.

They cited the product. The ingredient. The use case.

No URL. No domain. No visibility.

This “ghost visibility” creates brand lift with no traffic return.

Fix: LLM-optimized content must serve two masters; semantic relevance and verifiable authority.

5. The top LLM-cited sources for Lysol weren’t even brand-owned.

EPA.gov
Consumer Reports
Good Housekeeping
These three alone accounted for 80+ citations in AI-generated answers.

Lesson: If you’re not controlling the narrative, someone else is. And the AI is listening to them.

Three experiments to run now:

(1) Citation Hijack

→ Scrape the top 50 prompts in your category. Identify the top 10 non-owned citation sources. Partner, guest-post, or get reviewed.

(2) Prompt Coverage Mapping

→ Run a content audit. Identify your no-show prompts. Build content to directly answer the language users are using with AI.

(3) Sentiment Optimization

→ Fine-tune tone, structure, and authority signals. Use trusted studies, quote institutions, and eliminate hedging.

This is what LLM SEO looks like in practice:

Not pageviews.
Not backlinks.
Prompt-level perception management.

Want to see how your brand’s performing? We’ll build your AI Visibility Snapshot for free. No pitch. Just proof.

http://get-spotlight.com/free-report/

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