Research · Category cut · UK pet retail
Five platforms, one blind spot
UK pet retailers are spread across more e-commerce platforms than any category we measured. It made no difference to whether an AI assistant mentions them.
The most fragmented category we measured
Nine retailers, running on five different platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Wix and one custom build. Most categories in the study were dominated by Shopify — natural beauty was seven out of nine. Pet retail is not.
That fragmentation makes this category unusually useful, because it separates two things that are normally tangled together: how good the merchant is, and how good the platform is.
is the median AI readability score here — lower than natural beauty's 100, but achieved without a single platform doing the work. Four retailers still scored a perfect 100.
The four that scored 100:
- proflax.co.uk 100 / 100
- herbaldogco.com 100 / 100
- aniforte.co.uk 100 / 100
- thepetslarder.co.uk 100 / 100
Scores ranged from 57 to 100, with a mean of 84.7. One of the ten retailers we tried returned nothing at all to our crawler.
And again, nobody appeared
We measured three of the nine for appearance: how often each shows up when an assistant is asked six real buying questions in this category.
| Retailer | Readability score | Questions | Appeared in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Store A | 100 | 6 | 0% |
| Store B | 79 | 6 | 0% |
| Store C | 78 | 6 | 0% |
Eighteen questions, zero mentions — the same result as natural beauty, in a category with a completely different platform mix. Whatever is keeping these retailers out of AI answers, it is not their platform and it is not their markup.
What the assistant read instead
- uk.trustpilot.com cited 2×
- quora.com cited 1×
No pet retailer's own site. No specialist pet publication. A review aggregator and a general question-and-answer site.
The one thing that repeats across categories
Trustpilot was the most-cited source in both of the categories we have measured so far — pet retail and natural beauty. Two categories is not a pattern and we are not going to call it one. But if you are deciding where to spend effort before we publish more, that is the only source that has shown up twice.
And who appeared in the answers
- u7buy.com 3 answers
- thevetdesk.com 3 answers
- newsweek.com 3 answers
- krawlo.com 3 answers
- zooplus.co.uk 1 answer
Worth noticing what that list is and is not. It includes a general news publisher and several sites that are not UK pet retailers. Only one established pet retailer appears in it. We are reporting which domains came back, not judging them — but if you sell pet products in the UK and wondered who is taking the mentions you are not getting, this is the honest answer: largely not your competitors.
If you run a pet store in the UK
- Your platform is not the problem. Four retailers here hit 100 across four different setups. If you are on WooCommerce or Wix and assumed you were structurally behind Shopify, this category says otherwise.
- Trustpilot is the one repeated source. It was the most-cited in both categories measured so far.
- The answers are being filled by non-retailers. That is an opening, not just a loss: the pages winning these questions are beatable in a way that an established competitor would not be.
Method and limits
Ten retailers drawn from organic results of commercial searches in this category, marketplaces and large chains excluded; nine returned enough to score. Readability across 17 checks. Appearance measured on three, six questions each, on 7 August 2026.
- Three stores is a probe, not a sample, and this cut is thinner than our natural beauty one.
- One assistant, one day. Model answers vary between runs and change over time.
- We measure machine readability, not shop quality. Nothing here says anything about the products, prices, welfare standards or service of any business named.
- We do not name the three measured for appearance. Publishing "this named retailer is invisible to AI" would harm a business that has done nothing wrong. Retailers above are named for scoring 100, for being cited, or for appearing.