ARA Non-Alcoholic Spirits Study — Q3 2026. Brand Intelligence for the non-alcoholic spirits category, using the four frontier AI models as the drinker.

261 placements · 4 models × 15 drinker questions · audited brands in colour, every other brand in a stepped grey · naming variants merged before counting, including eleven Lyre's product names resolved to the house.

Seedlip created this category. It was the first non-alcoholic spirit to be taken seriously behind a bar, and for most of a decade it was the answer to the question. Ask the four frontier AI models now and the brand that comes back most often is Lyre's.

In the third quarter of 2026 we put the drinker questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity — the best non-alcoholic spirit, what to serve guests who don't drink, which brand actually tastes like the real thing — then recorded every brand they named and where it ranked.

Lyre's holds 13.4% of the shelf. Seedlip holds 11.1%. That gap is real, but it only becomes visible once the counting is done properly: the models name Lyre's under eleven different product names — Dry London Spirit, Italian Spritz, Agave Blanco, Amalfi Spritz and so on — and counted as separate brands, each of those looks small. Resolved to the house that owns them, Lyre's leads the category.

That is worth pausing on, because it is a measurement trap rather than a marketing one. A brand with a broad product range fragments across an AI shelf and reads as weaker than it is. A brand with one hero product concentrates. Any tracking that counts strings rather than brands will get this backwards.

The eight brands we audited hold 23.4% of the shelf between them, and three of them — Lapo's, Little Saints and Pathfinder — were never named by any model, on any question. Aplós was named once. De Soi twice. This is a young category where most of the shelf still belongs to nobody: 48 of the 89 brands named appear exactly once.

The other thing the shelf shows is that the machines do not respect the category's own boundary. Asked for non-alcoholic spirits, the models return tonic water, sparkling water, non-alcoholic beer and energy drinks — Fever-Tree, Topo Chico, Athletic Brewing, Red Bull. For a category still explaining what it is, that is the competitive set as the customer's AI understands it, and it is wider than the category thinks.