The Popular Get More Popular: Auditing Brand Bias in Generative Search

Abstract

The shift from traditional to generative search has fundamentally transformed online product discovery. Because conversational recommendations synthesize choices into a few direct answers, subtle systemic preferences toward specific providers can exert profound commercial impacts. In this work, we audit this phenomenon through two distinct dimensions: (i) brand popularity bias, the systematic preference for market-dominant entities over long-tail alternatives, and (ii) brand familiarity bias, the ranking advantage an entity encoded in an LLM's parametric memory holds over an unfamiliar competitor. First, evaluating commercial queries across major engines, we observe persistent brand popularity bias: dominant brands in the top quintile are cited 1.4x to 2.8x more frequently than the average brand within a sample of 1,176 top market players, already present in parametric memory that external web retrieval fails to mitigate. Second, through controlled in-context experiments holding product attributes constant, we find that substituting authentic brand signatures with unfamiliar ones significantly degrades recommendation rank. Conversely, fact-preserving content rewrites yield negligible ranking gains. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that generative search engines reinforce a ``rich-get-richer'' dynamic by favoring established market leaders and imposing a parametric barrier to entry that standard content optimization cannot overcome.