Frontier AI models favor their own products in recommendations

Seven frontier models recommend their own products first, per the Frontier AEO Tracker.

Only 28 of 161 categories return the same first choice across all seven models. For the rest, which model a customer opens decides what product they hear about first.

The tracker ran six prompt variations per category and publishes every prompt-answer pair for inspection. Source counts per answer vary by model too: Astra pulls a median of 5 sources per query, Sol pulls 9, Opus 11, Fable 15.

Astra's answers are also the hardest to shift with light paraphrasing of the same question. That points to a narrower, more fixed set of go-to sources, not a model re-searching from scratch each time.

The tracker's operators found that markdown formatting and content negotiation change which sources get cited. Getting cited by a 5-source model like Astra likely takes a different fix than getting cited by a 15-source model like Fable. The tracker doesn't say which formatting changes worked for which model.