TL;DR

YouGov has published its first UK rankings of consumer AI brands, drawn from daily BrandIndex tracking between March and July 2026. ChatGPT is the tool most UK users say they prefer, on 30.0%, with a substantial gap to everything else. Alexa takes second on 12.7%. Copilot follows on 11.6%, Gemini on 11.3%, and Claude rounds out the top five with 4.3%.

The movement is more interesting than the standings. Gemini climbed 4.4 points over the period, starting at 7.0% and reaching 11.4% by July, during a period of heavy UK marketing including Pixel advertising fronted by Trent Alexander-Arnold. ChatGPT recorded the largest fall, from 35.8% to 30.7%. Claude dropped 4.4 points, Perplexity 3.7 and Copilot 2.6.

Awareness explains more than preference

Claude’s fifth place looks less like rejection once awareness is factored in. Only 36.6% of UK respondents have heard of it, against 92.7% for ChatGPT. Restricting the accuracy score to people who actually know the brand lifts Claude from 1.9 to 5.2 — a different picture entirely.

The split between knowledge workers and frontline staff is sharp. Copilot reaches 15.9% preference among knowledge workers but 8.6% among frontline workers, and Claude shows the same shape at 7.5% against 2.1%. Alexa runs the other way, at 14.4% among frontline workers versus 6.4%. Gemini also does better with frontline staff, plausibly through Android and Search rather than deliberate positioning.

On perceived accuracy the field is tight — ChatGPT 7.3, Gemini 5.6, Copilot 3.6 — but on personal impact ChatGPT pulls clear at 19.0 against Copilot’s 10.1.

Looking forward

This is BrandIndex marketing as much as research, and the promotional framing deserves noting, but the figures come from samples above 6,700 and there is little comparable UK-specific data available. For businesses choosing tools, the finding worth acting on is that preference tracks visibility rather than capability: Gemini’s rise coincided with an eight-week advertising campaign, not a model release.