How often does Claude's web-search answer skip naming any brand?
More than a quarter of all paired answers include at least one response that names no brand, a category distinct from brand switching and worth separating out before reading the other findings.
26.9%
Before a brand can be compared across two answers, both answers have to actually name a brand. This study found that was not always true. Across 7,996 pairs of Claude Sonnet 5 answers to the same buyer question, one answer naming no brand while the other did happened in 26.9% of pairs, the second-largest of the four outcome classes tracked, behind only the case where the first brand goes missing from an otherwise brand-naming answer.
This class matters because it is easy to conflate with brand instability, but it is a different phenomenon. A pair lands in this bucket when one of the two answers, whether from memory or from search, does not commit to naming any specific brand at all, perhaps answering the buyer question with general advice, a list of considerations, or a refusal to recommend without more context. When that happens, there is no possible comparison to make between the two answers' brand choices, because one side of the comparison is empty. These pairs cannot be
Other findings
If you ask Claude the same buyer question twice, does it recommend the same brand first both times?
Does Claude keep its first pick when you ask it twice?
Across thousands of paired answers, the brand named first rarely survives a second asking, and the most common outcome is that it disappears from the second answer altogether.
Does Claude's first-named brand survive less often when one answer comes from web search instead of memory?
Does turning on web search make Claude's brand picks less stable?
Pairing a memory-only answer against a web-search answer to the same question cuts the chance the original brand survives roughly by more than half compared to asking twice from memory alone.
When Claude answers the same buyer question twice, how often does the brand it named first in one answer not appear at all in the other?
How often does the first-named brand disappear entirely from the second answer?
The single most common outcome, ahead of repeating, switching, or going brandless, is that the first brand simply vanishes from the paired answer, and this happens most when the two answers come from different sources.
Want to know how AI answers describe you?
We run the same measurement on your category. Fifteen minutes with founder Omar Jenblat, your own numbers, no deck.
- Your category measured the same way
- Your own numbers, not a sample deck
- Fifteen minutes, no obligation