Minimalist widens its lead to 28 points as The Derma Co adds 9.3 on the back of a Gemini rank flip.

Building on day one's 25-point gap, Minimalist climbs to 76.7% (+3.4 pp) and now leads on every engine, with AI Mode finally crossing 64% (+4 pp).

The day's biggest mover is The Derma Co at +9.3 pp to 47.3%, driven by a rank 4 → 2 flip on Gemini where ThedermaCo's own snail peptide product page surfaced into citations.

Plum is essentially flat at 48.7% (+0.7) but its engine asymmetry has worsened: it sits at rank 3 on both ChatGPT and Gemini, holding rank 2 only on AI Mode where google.com search refinements grew from 17 to 27 citations.

Re'equil is the quiet story underneath, +7.3 pp and up two ranks to #6 on the back of an Elle India pharma-sunscreen feature.

Day two confirms what the inaugural reading hinted at: this is a citation-pool category, not a brand-awareness one.

Minimalist's lead is not about being louder; it is about appearing in every kind of source the engines consult — Nykaa listings, dermatologist blogs, Reddit threads, peer-reviewed PMC articles, and now a LinkedIn pulse piece on D2C beauty.

The Derma Co's 9-point jump came almost entirely from one Gemini-side flip, which is the structural risk for every challenger in this index: a single high-authority source moves the needle by points, not basis points.

For brand leaders outside the top three, the AEO playbook reads itself — get listed in the dermatologist-blog and pharmacy-aggregator pool (medstown, fixderma, mediu, dawaadost) before the engines settle on their preferred sources.