When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini about refillable candles, one brand gets quoted more than anyone else. Not Reddit. Not Ideal Home. A candle company called ReCandle Co.
They are not outspending us and they are not even a UK brand. They have simply written the answers, and we have been writing our newsletter. The good news is we proved the fix works in July.
Every time an AI answers one of the 20 tracked candle questions, it pulls from source websites. Here is who it pulls from most.
That last number is the important one. There are 850 AI answers that quote ReCandle. Pott appears in seven of them. We are not losing a head to head fight with this brand. We are absent from the conversation entirely, because we are not in the kind of answer they are winning.
Here is what that looks like question by question.
| The question asked | ReCandle | Pott |
|---|---|---|
| Are refillable candles more cost effective over time? | 554 | 10 |
| Why do people switch to refillable candles? | 401 | 43 |
| What is a refillable candle and how does it work? | 279 | 2 |
| Are refillable candles actually more sustainable? | 270 | 13 |
| Refillable vs regular candles: which is better? | 265 | 6 |
| Best refillable candle brands in the UK right now? | 29 | 290 |
Read the last row differently to the rest. That is the one question where Pott wins, and wins comfortably. When AI is asked to name brands, it names us. When AI is asked to explain the category, it quotes them. The explaining questions carry roughly five times more volume, and they are where the AI decides which brands are worth naming later.
We read their site. There are three things going on, and none of them are expensive.
ReCandle has about 137 blog posts. Roughly half are named after an actual question a customer would type: are candles toxic, how to refill candles, candle tunneling, candles vs diffusers, how long do candles last. Their page titles line up almost one to one with the questions AI is being asked. That is not luck, it is a deliberate content plan.
Pott has 59 posts. Around 39% are scent of the month, collaborations, artist features, team profiles and event pieces like Wimbledon and bank holiday hosting. Those are lovely brand pieces and they earn their place in email and social. But roughly five of our posts answer a category question, and AI has almost nothing of ours to quote.
Their single best page is about the cost savings of refilling. It pulls 348 citations on its own. It runs three worked examples (occasional burner, regular burner, multi room), a break even timeline, a cost per burn calculation and a ten question FAQ.
We can see the exact sentences AI lifts from it. They are always the arithmetic and the verdicts:
"Jars accumulated: 72 ... preventing 66 jars from landfills"
"Light users (4-6 per year) ... substantial savings year 2 onward"
"Bottom Line: Savings That Compound"
Our equivalent guide has no numbers in it at all. No cost comparison, no break even point, no summary verdict. AI quotes maths and conclusions, and we have not given it either.
Almost two thirds of our citations (385 of 605) are the homepage, and the lines being quoted are navigation: "Choose your Pott Colour", "Scent of the Month: July", "Handcrafted in the UK". AI treats ReCandle as a source to learn from and Pott as a shop to link to. That is the whole difference in one sentence.
Worth knowing: ReCandle is a United States brand selling in dollars. They are the most cited source on a set of UK buyer questions despite that. This is not being won on being British, being bigger, or having better PR. It is being won on having written the answer.
We are not starting from theory. We already ran this experiment once, by accident, and it worked.
On 9 July we published one guide called Refillable Candles: The Complete Guide. It was the first thing we had written that answered a category question rather than announcing something.
It went straight to being our second most cited page. And here is how often AI mentioned Pott by name, month by month:
One page, published once, roughly tripled how often our site gets quoted and preceded the jump in how often we get named. August held at 4.4% across a nearly complete month, so this is a real trend and not a blip.
We also already own the most commercially valuable question in the set. When AI is asked to recommend UK refillable candle brands, Pott is cited ten times more than ReCandle. That position is an asset and part of the plan below is protecting it.
Five moves, in priority order. All of them are content we write ourselves, so there is no media cost attached.
are-refillable-candles-cheaper
what-is-a-refillable-candle
are-refillable-candles-more-sustainable
refillable-vs-regular-candles
why-switch-to-refillable-candles
One thing to keep in mind on the reporting. We currently track 20 questions across two AI engines, and none of them cover gifting, subscriptions or Christmas. That means Pott's biggest season is not being measured yet. Widening the tracked question set before Q4 is worth doing so we can see whether this work lands where the revenue actually is.