How Dove scores now
Eight signals across the three pillars, this month. Each bar shows how the brand compares with the category leader, which sits at 100. The dark bar marks a signal where this brand leads the set.
At a glance
The strategic read on the signals above — where Dove sits, what is holding it back, and where the openings are. Who else is moving in the set is broken out under the trajectory chart on the next tab.
Dove sits third behind L'Oréal Paris (75) and Nivea (74), but its Chosen score of 75 is the highest of any brand tracked — the largest brand-search demand in the set and full coverage across all six UK press titles tracked this run. Understood, at 57, is the drag: topic footprint and category-term capture both trail the two category leaders by a wide margin.
Category-term invisibility. Only 65.7% of Dove's traffic comes from non-brand/category search, the lowest share of any brand in this set (90–99% for Nivea, Garnier and L'Oréal Paris) — and AI Overviews on condition terms like "eczema cream" name rivals, not Dove.
AI mentions that don't convert. Dove's AI Share of Voice leads the set (~31.7%, verified live this run), but only ~14% of those mentions become an actual site citation, against ~99% for Nivea.
Topic footprint. Dove ranks in the top 10 for 1,646 non-brand keywords — a fraction of Nivea's 7,062 or L'Oréal Paris's 5,324.
Link-profile noise. A large share of Dove's raw referring-domain count is non-editorial spam rather than genuine coverage; Domain Rating (62, the highest in the set) is the steadier read.
Dove already has two of the harder things to earn: the highest AI mention rate of any brand in this category, and a topic-footprint decline that was the smallest in the set while every rival lost meaningful ground this year. The attention is there on both counts — AI already reaches for Dove's name, and the brand held up better than most through a tough six months. What's less clear is why that attention routes around dove.com rather than through it on the terms that aren't Dove's own name, and whether the same resilience could extend to the category reach Dove is currently missing.
Organic Discovery Score over time
Overall score by month across the set. Where is the field tightening or splitting apart?
Who is moving, and why
Every brand in this set lost organic traffic, topic footprint and top-3 rankings over the six months tracked — a category-wide pattern. What varies sharply is how much each brand lost, and that difference is most of what is moving the scores above.
Dove's topic-footprint decline was the smallest of the six brands tracked. Traffic fell 9.8%, behind only Aveeno, and well ahead of the two category leaders. The relative resilience is what is lifting Dove's score.
The sharpest traffic decline in the set, but its scale and near-total category-term traffic (98.9% non-brand) keep it the overall leader. Its brand-demand figure carries a data-quality flag this run (see Method) and should be read with caution.
A steep decline on both signals, but Nivea still pulls more category-term traffic than anyone else tracked (97.4% non-brand) and holds second place overall.
The sharpest topic-footprint decline tracked, on top of a 34.5% traffic fall. Garnier is the only brand in this set whose overall score fell rather than held or rose.
The smallest traffic decline of any brand tracked, even though its topic footprint fell further. Also the only brand in this set that Google's AI Overview names directly on "eczema cream" — Dove doesn't appear on that query.
The smallest brand in the set, and the only one gaining top-3 keyword rankings this window, even as its traffic fell 18.7% in line with the category.
Signal by signal, against the leader
Eight signals side by side. Now is where we sit against the top rival this month. 6m indexed move is how our position against the set has shifted over the tracked window — positive when we gain relative ground, even if raw values slide.
Why raw and indexed can disagree. Every signal is indexed to the leader each month (leader = 100). If rivals decline harder than we do, our indexed position rises even when the raw number falls. The pillar scores are indexed; the raw column shows the absolute change over the same window.
Non-brand keyword coverage
Ranking positions across a curated non-brand keyword set, grouped by buyer intent. Which brand owns which corner of the category.
Signals moving the wrong way
The tracked signals whose raw values have slid over the six months tracked. Even where the indexed position holds against the field, a falling raw number is still a real decline.
Category context
SERP pattern · AIOs · Trustpilot floor · non-scored competitors
The structural shape of UK skincare & personal care — who owns the SERP, where AI Overviews show up, which brand names inflate raw AI SoV, and the aggregators that sit outside the scored set but capture most of the demand.
How AI sees us
How AI sees Dove
What we could verify live, this run, via Ahrefs Brand Radar (UK): how often Dove is named by AI models, and how often that naming turns into an actual link to Dove's own site. A full six-brand re-score across every model wasn't possible in the time available, so only Dove's figures and one direct comparison point (Nivea) are shown as measured — the rest are marked accordingly rather than guessed.
AI Share of Voice & citation conversion
Three AI Overviews, live-checked this run
Real Google AI Overview results for three UK skincare searches, checked directly rather than estimated. Dove's own name in teal, rival brands in charcoal.
Named, but not always cited
The clearest single illustration of the citation gap above: two near-identical searches for the same Dove product, one with Dove's name in the query and one without.
Who the press recommends
Presence across the six UK mainstream beauty and lifestyle titles tracked this run (Daily Mail, Metro, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29, Glamour UK, Marie Claire UK). A further specialist tier (Byrdie, Get The Gloss, Who What Wear UK, Grazia) returned no indexed coverage for any brand in this set and isn't shown — treat that as "not captured by this index", not "no coverage".
Press endorsement
Where this audience actually is
SparkToro: Reddit communities · YouTube channels · what they search for
SparkToro audience data for UK women aged 25–45 buying skincare and beauty — where they spend time online and what they're searching for, shown as context rather than brand-specific AI-citation data.
Reddit communities
YouTube channels they watch
What they're searching for
Where Dove is losing ground
Three specific constraints behind the score, each named against a specific rival or a specific query.
How the score is built
How the Organic score is put together — the eight signals, the weights, and why the AI layer and Trustpilot are shown as evidence rather than scored this run.
The eight signals
Each signal is pulled from DataForSEO (UK), indexed against the leader in the set each month, then rolled into its pillar. Pillars combine into the headline score by the weights below. "Tracked" signals have monthly history over the six-month window; "point-in-time" ones are held at their latest reading.
| Pillar | Signal | What it reads | Basis |
|---|
Reading it: level, direction, consistency
Three properties, not one
Level is how good it is — read against 100, not only against rivals; leading a pillar the whole category is weak on signals an opening, not a solved problem. Direction is which way it is heading — treat the score as the lagging indicator and the trend as the leading one. Consistency is how steadily it holds — measured as variation around the brand's own six-month average.
Relative, and it moves under you
Each signal scores value ÷ category-best × 100 each month. Relative is the important word: if rivals decline harder than you do, your score can rise even though your own raw numbers are falling too — this is the exact mechanic behind Dove's score rising this window. The latest partial month is held out so the trend reads clean.
Weighting and why this run is 8 signals, not 12
Weights
Understood-led: Found 30 · Understood 45 · Chosen 25. Within Found, non-brand traffic and link authority carry 50% each; within Understood, anchor relevance 34%, topic footprint 33% and category capture 33%; within Chosen, brand demand 40%, top-3 rankings 33% and press endorsement 27%. Switch to "Even" in the control bar to test how the pillar weighting changes the picture.
Why AI Share of Voice, sentiment, clarity and Trustpilot aren't scored this run
A genuine six-brand AI Share-of-Voice/sentiment/clarity re-score, and a Trustpilot rating that clears a reliable sample size, weren't both available this run. Dove's own AI Share of Voice (~31.7%, #1 of 6) and mention-to-citation conversion (~14%, vs Nivea's ~99%) were verified live via Ahrefs Brand Radar and are shown as evidence on Tab 3 and the Summary — they are not folded into the pillar score, to avoid scoring five brands on a real data point and five guesses. Every brand in this set also sits below Trustpilot's 500-lifetime-review reliability floor (highest: Dove at 167), so ratings are shown for context only.
Brand vs non-brand traffic
Found counts these separately: being found for your own name is not the same as being found for the category. The split is measured from each brand's non-branded organic keywords. Category capture in Understood reads the same non-brand share as a percentage — absolute reach in Found, mix in Understood.
Anchor relevance, measured
Each brand's top-50 backlink anchors (by referring domains, via DataForSEO) were classified as clean/on-brand, spam/link-farm text, no anchor text, or generic filler. Clean-anchor share ranged from 68.8% (Aveeno) to 43.4% (Garnier); Telegram/PBN link-selling spam showed up at 12–37% of the top-50 anchors for every brand in the set, a category-wide pattern rather than a single brand's problem.
Held at their latest reading
- Anchor relevance, press endorsement, Domain Rating and referring-domain count are shown at their most recent reading rather than as a monthly trend this run — DataForSEO's UK ranking history only extends 6 months back for this market, shorter than the usual 13-month window, so a longer trend on these specific signals wasn't available.
- Press endorsement is measured as presence across the six tracked UK titles this run, not DR-weighted article volume.
Floors, data-quality flags and category scoping
Common-word brand name
Dove is also a common English noun (the bird). This run read one live, aggregate AI Share-of-Voice figure for Dove rather than a raw-vs-category-scoped comparison, so common-word inflation on that ~31.7% figure was not independently tested — treat it as directional evidence, not a precisely scored input.
Trustpilot volume floor
A rating is only scored when a brand carries at least 500 lifetime reviews. Every brand in this six-brand set falls below that floor (Dove 167, Nivea 35, Olay 66, Aveeno 2, Garnier 72, L'Oréal Paris 13) — a category pattern (FMCG skincare is reviewed on retailer sites, not brand-direct), not a Dove-specific weakness. Ratings are shown for context only and do not drive the Chosen pillar.
Data-quality flag: L'Oréal Paris brand demand
The "loreal paris" (no accent/apostrophe) keyword-demand series returned a suspiciously flat 5,400/month across the whole window and a shorter history than every other brand tracked — likely an incomplete keyword-variant match. L'Oréal Paris's brand-demand figure should be read as approximate; its traffic, link and press figures come from separate, unaffected sources.