Introducing the Brainpan AIVI™ Insurance Benchmark

Why an insurance benchmark, and why now

Buyers no longer start with a search box. They ask ChatGPT which insurer to trust, ask Perplexity to compare coverage, and read the answer Gemini hands back inside Google. In that moment, ranking #1 on a results page is irrelevant — what matters is whether your brand is the one being retrieved, cited, and recommended inside the answer itself. Insurance is a high-stakes, heavily-researched category, which makes it an ideal place to measure that shift precisely.

What the AIVI™ score measures

The Brainpan AIVI™ (AI Visibility Index) scores each brand on organic AI placements only — paid placements are quarantined and disclosed separately, so the number reflects earned visibility, not ad spend. The score is a weighted composite of share of model (35%), recommendation strength (25%), position weighting (20%), citation influence (15%), and top-three rate (5%), normalized so the category leader scores 100 — the full scoring model is published in the versioned AIVI™ methodology document. Every insurer is measured the same way across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude, producing one comparable visibility score per quarter.

What the Q2 2026 benchmark includes

The full report publishes named insurer rankings, a model-by-model coverage map showing where each brand appears (and disappears), citation-share analysis, and the methodology notes needed to reproduce the result. Because the index is rebuilt every quarter on the same basis, brands can track whether they are gaining or losing ground as the engines evolve.

The leaderboard

State Farm leads the Q2 2026 leaderboard with a perfect index score of 100 — a nearly 30-point gap to runner-up Progressive (71.2). USAA (69.1), GEICO (65.6), and Nationwide (63.4) round out the top five, with Allstate, Travelers, The Hartford, Chubb, and Amica completing the top ten. The spread between the leaders and the middle of the pack is dramatic — several recognizable names are effectively invisible on at least one major engine. See the Top 10 named leaderboard and category-by-category winners.

Two findings worth flagging now

The study benchmarks AI visibility directly against real-world market share using NAIC data — and the gap is larger than most teams expect in either direction. One brand's AI visibility runs roughly 10x ahead of its actual market share; another, a top-6 national carrier by premium, is functionally invisible in AI answers despite its real-world scale. Both are independently verifiable against public NAIC figures, not a Brainpan.AI construct.

The study also separates being cited from being independently validated. Several of the most frequently-cited sources in the category turn out to be citing themselves — the AI linking back to their own page, not a third party backing their claim. Others are cited less often, but when they are, it's genuinely independent roughly 4 times in 10. That distinction — citation frequency versus citation authority — is one of the more actionable findings in the full report.

The scope, in numbers

134 tracked insurance brands, 300 stratified prompts, 5 AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot), 1,500 completed responses, and 4,328 organic brand mentions — with paid placements identified and excluded from every organic score. The full methodology, including exactly how each of those five engines behaves differently, publishes alongside the named leaderboard.

If you want to know where your own brand stands against these named competitors, you can explore the full Q2 edition or request an AI Visibility Audit.