AEO INDEX OCTOBER 2026 USA: Nike is the shoe brand AI names first most often, but seven different brands win the ten footwear questions
ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews put Nike first in 9 of 30 answers. Ask about a specific kind of shoe and the first name usually changes.
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In the October 2026 AEO Index for Footwear, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews named Nike first in 9 of 30 answers to non-branded “best shoe brands” questions. No other brand was first as often, and Nike also leads on AI Rank Score, at 43.7. That score runs from 0 to 100 and weights position, so a brand gets more credit the nearer the top it is named. A perfect 100 would mean first on all three engines for every question.
It’s a thin lead. Hoka (36.3), Adidas (31.7), New Balance (30.7) and Brooks (29.3) are all within 15 points of Nike, and seven different brands won at least one of the ten questions. The engines seem to treat footwear as ten separate markets, basketball at one end and sandals at the other, and winning one tells you little about the next.
The answers were collected on 21 October 2026 from one U.S. location, and markaeo.com ran the analysis. Question-by-question scores are in the full October 2026 report.
Who wins each kind of shoe?
Nike won three: basketball and gym shoes, both with a perfect 100, and lifestyle sneakers, where it ties Adidas at 87. Running brands and specialists took the other seven:
- Running and walking: Brooks, at 93 on both.
- Trail running and all-day standing at work: Hoka, at 93 and 100.
- Tennis: Asics, at 87.
- Men’s dress shoes: Allen Edmonds, ranked first by all three engines.
- Sandals and slides: Birkenstock, also first on all three.
Allen Edmonds and Birkenstock turn up in only 10% to 13% of footwear answers, and each still wins its question outright. Nike was not named by any engine for trail running. It was the one question where we expected to see Nike and didn’t.
Does being named often mean being named first?
Not for New Balance. It appears in 63% of answers, more than any other brand, and in 80% of ChatGPT’s, yet no engine ranked it first on a single question. Adidas has a smaller version of the same gap: 53% visibility and one first place.
The pages the engines cite offer a clue. We read 74 of those articles. New Balance comes up on 51% of them but is the most-mentioned brand on just 4, while Nike leads 17 pages and Hoka 16. That roughly fits the rankings. Whether page coverage is the reason an engine prefers one brand, the data can’t say.
Where do the engines get their shoe advice?
Mostly from third parties. Out of 145 citations across 81 websites, just 9 (6.2%) went to a brand’s own site. The most cited publisher was runrepeat.com (9), ahead of t3.com (6) and tomsguide.com (5).
Google AI Overviews took 22 of its 77 citations (28.6%) from Google Shopping product cards, and cited YouTube and Reddit too. ChatGPT cited neither YouTube nor Reddit for footwear and leaned on review sites and blogs instead. Gemini wrote the longest answers, around 1,239 words on average, yet cited sources in just 2 of its 10.
What should footwear brands take from this?
For a shoe brand, I’d argue the category ranking is the least useful number in this report. Look at Brooks. It wins running and walking while showing up in 40% of answers, so whatever the engines are reading, they tie Brooks to those two uses. A brand team doing AEO should start with the two or three uses where its product has a real case, then check which review sites rank it for them and whether its Google Shopping data is in order. (AI Overviews leans on those cards heavily.)
If your team reports mentions as its main AEO metric, put the 63% next to the zero.
What to watch in November
The three engines agreed on the top brand for 5 of the 10 questions. They split on tennis, running, walking, trail running and lifestyle sneakers. Trail running is the one I’d watch, because ChatGPT put Salomon first while Gemini and AI Overviews picked Hoka. The full October 2026 report has the baseline for every question, and November will show whether those splits hold.
How we measured: we asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews 10 non-branded footwear questions, for 30 answers in all, collected on 21 October 2026 from a single U.S. location. AI answers vary by time, place and user. The full method and notice are in the report.
Sources
- Answer Engine Daily AEO Index: Footwear, October 2026
