Does AI still name Microsoft?
Microsoft was number 2 on Interbrand's Best Global Brands list in 2006. Asked for the leading brands in computer operating systems and office software on 2026-11-01, an AI assistant was named every time. Interbrand still ranks it, at number 2 in 2025.
Who AI named instead
- Microsoft
- Apple
- Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu)
- Zoho
- LibreOffice
- Adobe
- Canonical
- Notion
- Dropbox
For the CMO who has to explain this upstairs. The Marketing Helix wrote a one-page memo on why brand decides whether AI names a company, built to be forwarded to a CEO. Read the CEO memo.
Read why excellent brands fade: Relevance Decay.
How the test was run
The 2006 list is Interbrand's Best Global Brands 2006 (archived Interbrand ranking, with names from the BusinessWeek scoreboard of August 7, 2006). For each brand we wrote the everyday category a shopper would ask about. On 2026-11-01 an AI assistant, Claude (Anthropic), Opus, no web search, via Claude Code, was asked "What are the leading brands in <category> right now?" for every category, 3 separate times, answering from its own knowledge. A brand counts as not named only if it was missing from its own category every time. Sub-brands are not counted as the parent (Merrill Edge is not Merrill Lynch). One assistant, one day: the test is repeated, and every run is kept.