US Fresh & Raw Cat Food Brands – Organic Search Benchmark Report 2026

The US fresh and raw cat food market continues to expand as owners look for higher-quality, less processed alternatives to traditional wet and dry diets. As demand grows, organic search has become one of the most competitive battlegrounds for brands seeking to capture awareness, educate buyers and convert intent.

At Bubblegum Search, we analysed the organic performance of 20 leading US fresh and raw cat food brands to uncover who is winning and why.

Executive Summary

• A specialist-led but fragmented market: The US fresh and raw cat food landscape is led by premium and specialist brands, with some ‘overlap’ brands performing well, rather than dominant marketplaces. Freshpet, Open Farm and Stella & Chewy’s are the largest organic visibility leaders, but no single brand controls the category.
• Traffic concentration without outright dominance: The top five brands capture around 59 percent of total organic traffic, indicating meaningful concentration while leaving a long tail of smaller specialists competing for the remaining demand.
• Clear separation in acquisition strategy: Brand-led players such as Nulo, Smalls and Stella & Chewy’s rely heavily on branded demand, while discovery-led brands like Untamed and Oma’s Pride generate most visibility through non-branded, informational queries.
• AI Overviews favour content depth over scale: AI-driven visibility does not simply mirror traffic or brand size. Untamed leads AI citations by a wide margin, demonstrating how discovery-led brands with strong educational content can dominate this emerging layer of search.

Strategic Takeaway:
In the US cat food market, organic visibility is shaped less by scale and more by content breadth, discovery coverage and AI-ready authority. Brands that balance branded demand with structured educational content are best positioned to grow as AI-driven search accelerates.

Methodology

• Scope: 20 prominent US domains competing for fresh and raw cat food search intent, including specialists, retailers and overlapping premium brands.
• Market: Google US organic search, Q4 2025 snapshot. *NOTE – Untamed is a UK brand, but appears in the US SERPs 
• Data sources: Organic visibility and link authority data, plus AI Overview citation monitoring.
• Metrics analysed:
  • Monthly organic traffic (US)
  • Ranking keyword count
  • Branded search share
  • Domain Rating and referring domains
  • AI Overview citations

Key Findings

Organic Traffic Leaders in the US Cat Food Market

Observations:

• Freshpet (118k monthly visits) and Open Farm (117k) sit at the top of the market, followed by Stella & Chewy’s (77k), forming a clear leading tier of premium brands.
• No single brand dominates outright. Traffic drops sharply beyond the top group, creating a long tail of specialist brands competing for smaller shares of demand.
• The top five brands account for roughly 59 percent of total organic traffic, indicating concentration without the extreme dominance seen in retailer-led dog food categories.
• The fragmented nature of the category creates opportunity for specialists to grow without needing marketplace-level scale.

Branded vs Non-Branded Visibility in the US

Positioning rule:

• Discovery-led: <10% branded
• Balanced: 10–50% branded
• Brand-led: >50% branded

• Brand-led strategies dominate at the top end, with Nulo (82 percent branded), Smalls (69 percent) and Stella & Chewy’s (55 percent) relying heavily on existing brand demand.
• Discovery-led brands such as Untamed (0.1 percent branded), Oma’s Pride (6 percent) and Portland Pet Food Company generate most visibility through non-branded, informational queries.
• Balanced brands like Freshpet (34 percent branded) combine brand demand with meaningful discovery reach, reducing reliance on a single acquisition channel.
• Discovery-led brands gain reach efficiently but must invest further in brand-building to support retention and repeat demand.

Domain & Backlink Authority Across US Brands

Observations:

• Higher DR and broader link profiles generally align with greater organic traffic scale in this category. Leaders like Freshpet (DR 68, 118,200 visits) and Stella and Chewy’s (DR 68, 77,100 visits) operate at materially higher volume than lower-authority brands such as Rebel Raw (DR 30, 3,400 visits) and Savage Cat Food (DR 39, 1,800 visits).
• Authority does not guarantee outcomes on its own, for example, Only Natural Pet (DR 65, 46,400 visits) trails openfarmpet.com (DR 64, 116,900 visits), and Primal (DR 63, 20,700 visits) trails Chuck and Don’s (DR 63, 52,400 visits).
• Content breadth and relevance consistently outweigh authority alone as the primary driver of organic reach in this category.

AI Overview Presence in US Search

Observations:

• AI Overviews strongly reward informational depth rather than traffic size. Untamed leads the category with 4,500 citations, a surprise given it is a UK based brand who don’t serve the US.
• Stella & Chewy’s and Oma’s Pride also achieve strong AI visibility, reflecting clear topical relevance and well-structured content.
• Balanced brands such as Open Farm and Freshpet translate broader keyword coverage into steady AI citation presence.
• Several high-traffic brands show relatively modest AI visibility, confirming that AI Overviews represent a distinct competitive layer rather than a reflection of rankings alone.

Specialist Fresh & Raw Brands vs Retail & Overlapping Brands

This section reflects a core reality of US fresh and raw cat food SERPs: brands competing for “fresh” and “raw” cat food visibility are not limited to direct format specialists. Instead, organic search demand is shared across three distinct competitive groups.

Competitive segments represented in this benchmark

Table: Competitive overlap by segment

Overlapping brands rank for fresh and raw cat food intent through semantic proximity (“fresh ingredients”, “premium nutrition”), content breadth, or strong brand authority, despite not always offering strictly fresh or raw formats.

Organic traffic share by segment

Table: Organic traffic share by segment (within the 20-domain set)

AI Overview citation share by segment

Table: AI Overview citation share by segment (within total AI citations for all 20 brands)

What this means for interpretation (and strategy)

• Specialists are not only competing with specialists. In the US cat food landscape, overlapping premium brands capture a larger share of organic demand and dominate AI visibility, even when product formats differ.
  
• Overlapping brands benefit disproportionately from AI Overviews. Their strong informational coverage and broader brand authority translate into outsized citation visibility relative to traffic share.
  
• The opportunity for specialists lies in education and definition. Brands focused on fresh and raw formats can close the gap by owning category explanations (“fresh vs wet vs raw”, feeding transitions, safety, storage) and structuring content for both rankings and AI citation.

Correlation Analysis: What Separates Leaders from Laggards

Observations:

• Keyword breadth is the strongest separator, with leading brands ranking for many multiples more keywords than the long tail.
• Authority and link diversity reinforce performance but do not independently determine outcomes.
• Branded demand supports scale but is not required for visibility, as discovery-led brands can compete meaningfully on non-branded terms.
• AI Overview visibility amplifies existing advantages, accelerating the gap between content-rich leaders and narrower specialists.

Implications

• Visibility consolidates around brands with broader keyword coverage and stronger informational ecosystems.
• The category remains semantically fluid, with fresh, raw and premium nutrition queries overlapping heavily.
• AI Overviews introduce a new layer of competition that increasingly shapes top-of-funnel discovery.

Recommendations

• Prioritise keyword breadth across feeding formats, life stages and health-related queries.
• Balance brand-building with discovery-led content to avoid over-reliance on a single traffic source.
• Invest in citation-ready educational content to increase AI Overview inclusion.
• Focus digital PR on topical relevance and trusted pet publications rather than link volume alone.
• Maintain strong technical foundations to support scale and crawl efficiency.

Conclusion

The US fresh and raw cat food category shows that organic search success is driven by strategy rather than scale.

Brands such as Freshpet, Open Farm and Stella & Chewy’s lead by combining broad keyword coverage, brand authority and strong informational content.

Brands that expand discovery coverage, invest in educational ecosystems and build AI-visible authority will be best positioned to secure long-term visibility as AI-driven search continues to evolve.

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