The short version. Kaiser Permanente Medicare Advantage holds a modest 2.47% of the 59,055-row commercial baseline — ninth of ten among the brands profiled on the main leaderboard, and 0.63% of the full 229,372-row extraction universe. But where it is named, it performs well: a QVI™ of 32.28 (ahead of Cigna, Wellcare, Anthem, and Devoted Health, all larger by mention volume), a 64.3% top-3 rate, and an 85.0% scored win rate in head-to-head comparisons against other carriers — third-best of the ten brands in the published matchup table. Its own-domain citation rate is 0.1%, among the lowest of any brand with comparable reach. That is the analysis in two sentences.
Everything below is derived from the published Q3 2026 dataset. No proprietary instrumentation, no private access, no relationship with the company. The point of a public analysis is that a reader can check it, so every number here is reproducible from the open methodology linked at the end of the page.
Key takeaways
- Kaiser Permanente Medicare Advantage recorded 1,456 scored commercial mentions — 2.47% commercial share, 0.63% of the total 229,372-row extraction universe.
- Its QVI™ is 32.28, ahead of five brands with larger mention volume, including Cigna Healthcare Medicare (21.56) and Wellcare (27.02).
- It wins 17 of 20 head-to-head comparison appearances (85.0%) — third-best of the ten brands in the published matchup table, behind only Alignment Health and Devoted Health.
- Its own-domain citation rate is 0.1% and its citation-corpus share is 0.01% of all 62,484 citation rows — an authority ratio of 0.00, among the lowest reported for any brand with comparable reach.
1. The matchup record
The benchmark identifies 208 direct-comparison responses, where two or more carriers are weighed against each other in a single answer; 186 contain exactly two carrier brands. The higher Visibility Points total (the sum of position, recommendation, and citation scores) defines the scored winner within each pair. Kaiser Permanente appears in 20 such pairings and wins 17 — an 85.0% rate, third-highest of the ten brands reported.
| Brand | Pair appearances | Scored wins | Scored win rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alignment Health | 16 | 15 | 93.8% |
| Devoted Health | 21 | 18 | 85.7% |
| Kaiser Permanente Medicare Advantage | 20 | 17 | 85.0% |
| Blue Cross Blue Shield Medicare | 17 | 12 | 70.6% |
| Wellcare | 17 | 9 | 52.9% |
| Humana Medicare | 114 | 55 | 48.2% |
| Aetna Medicare / CVS Health | 55 | 24 | 43.6% |
| Cigna Healthcare Medicare | 18 | 7 | 38.9% |
| UnitedHealthcare / AARP Medicare | 78 | 28 | 35.9% |
| SCAN Health Plan | 16 | 1 | 6.2% |
A 20-appearance sample is small enough that 85.0% should be read with caution — it is a smaller base than Humana's 114 or UnitedHealthcare's 78 — but it is consistent with Kaiser Permanente's broader profile below: when it is named, it tends to be named well, even though it is not named often.
2. What we measured, and what we did not
This section is deliberately placed before the analysis rather than after it.
- Public model outputs only. Every figure comes from scored commercial-brand mentions in responses generated by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing Copilot. No advertising data, no analytics access, no internal reporting from Kaiser Permanente.
- No client relationship. Brainpan.AI has no commercial relationship with Kaiser Permanente. The company was not contacted, did not participate, and did not review this page. It appears here because its profile — strong per-mention quality against thin reach — is one of the clearest in the Q3 2026 study, not because of any dispute or engagement.
- Row-based, not response-based. QVI™ and position scores are computed per scored row. Kaiser Permanente's QVI™, mean recommendation score, own-domain citation rate, top-3 rate, and mean position score are computed on the scored subset of its rows (marked † on the full leaderboard); its mention count and commercial share reflect the complete dataset.
- A sample, not a census. One collection window, 2026-06-29 to 2026-07-03. Query sets, model versions, and retrieval behavior all move between quarters. Treat quarter-over-quarter movement as directional until a second cycle confirms it.
- Open methodology. The benchmark's scoring rules, study design, and correction policy are published and versioned. Reuse the findings, check them, disagree with them in public.
3. Quality without evidence
Kaiser Permanente's QVI™ of 32.28 sits above Cigna Healthcare Medicare (21.56), Wellcare (27.02), Anthem Blue Cross / Elevance Health (28.00), and Devoted Health (29.57) — all four with more mentions than Kaiser Permanente's 1,456. Its mean position score is 3.35, the best of any brand in the top ten by commercial share, and its top-3 rate is 64.3%, second only to UnitedHealthcare's 66.9%.
Its own-domain citation rate is 0.1%.
| Brand | Mention share | Own-domain citation share† | Authority ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kaiser Permanente Medicare Advantage | 2.47% | 0.01% | 0.00 |
| eHealth Medicare | 0.91% | 0.01% | 0.01 |
| Cigna Healthcare Medicare | 6.01% | 0.14% | 0.02 |
| Blue Cross Blue Shield Medicare | 6.46% | 1.51% | 0.23 |
| UnitedHealthcare / AARP Medicare | 18.35% | 7.7% | 0.42 |
| Medicare.org | 1.64% | 29.04% | 17.7 |
† Own-domain citation share is citation-corpus-based (share of 62,484 total citation rows); mention share and authority ratio are computed against the 59,055-row commercial baseline. A ratio of 1 is proportional.
At a 0.00 authority ratio, Kaiser Permanente is effectively invisible as a self-cited source in this panel — its 2.47% mention share converts to essentially none of the citation corpus. This sits alongside strong position, recommendation, and head-to-head performance, which means the gap is specific to citation, not a general quality problem. Low owned citations do not prove the absence of third-party evidence supporting the brand; this is a single, specific lens on self-sourced authority, and kaiserpermanente.org does not appear among the top captured citation domains in this panel.
4. Where the reach is thin
Kaiser Permanente ranks ninth of the ten brands shown on the main commercial-share leaderboard, and ninth of 115 visible brands overall. Its 1,456 mentions sit well below the three national carriers (10,838, 9,865, and 9,104 respectively) and below the regional-scale players ranked 4 through 8. Its total entity share — mentions as a fraction of all 229,372 extracted rows — is 0.63%.
Read together with Sections 1 and 3, the profile is legible: Kaiser Permanente is retrieved comparatively rarely relative to the three national carriers, but when it is retrieved, it tends to be positioned well, recommended at a reasonable rate, and favored in direct comparisons — without the self-sourced citation evidence that UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and Aetna carry at proportionally higher (though still sub-1.0) rates.
5. Strategic diagnostic priorities
Three moves follow from the data above, stated as diagnostic direction rather than an execution plan — sequencing, prompt targets, and content specification depend on inputs no public dataset contains. The operating frameworks that carry that work are published in full at Brainpan.AI frameworks.
Treat reach as the primary constraint, not quality
Kaiser Permanente's QVI™, top-3 rate, and head-to-head win rate are already strong relative to brands with far more mentions. The lower-leverage move is optimizing quality further; the higher-leverage move is increasing the number of queries where Kaiser Permanente is retrieved at all, since the data suggest it performs well whenever it is.
Build a citation footprint from close to zero
A 0.1% own-domain citation rate and a 0.00 authority ratio represent the furthest gap from proportional of any major carrier profiled in this study. Because position and recommendation performance are already solid, the specific target is getting kaiserpermanente.org cited as a source — structured, citable content addressing the comparison and eligibility queries where Kaiser Permanente already wins the underlying matchup, formatted so an answer engine can lift and attribute a passage.
Investigate whether thin reach is retrieval or content availability
Low mention volume with strong per-mention performance is consistent with a retrieval gap rather than a quality gap — the content or entity signals that would surface Kaiser Permanente for a broader set of the 150 stratified queries may not be reaching the surfaces at the same rate as the national carriers. That is a different diagnostic from a content-quality audit, and the data here identify the pattern without establishing its cause.
6. Data, method, and corrections
All figures are drawn from the Q3 2026 Medicare AIVI™ Benchmark, a study of 121 tracked Medicare brands (115 with recorded visibility) across 150 stratified queries and 14,405 populated responses on seven AI surfaces, producing 59,055 scored commercial mentions and 229,372 total extraction rows.
QVI™ (Quality Visibility Index) = 8 × mean Position Score + 7 × mean Recommendation Score + 25 × own-domain citation rate, scaled 0–100, computed on the subset of rows that received full per-mention scoring. The controlling rules behind every number above — study design, attribution, the QVI™ formula, and the known limitations — are published in the versioned Medicare AIVI™ methodology and correction policy.
If any figure on this page is wrong, we would like to know. Corrections go to kwalsh@brainpan.ai and are handled under the published correction policy — acknowledged in two business days, determined in ten, and applied to the page with a dated note rather than silently.
See all 115 visible brands, not just the top ten
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Kevin Walsh
Kevin Walsh is the founder of Brainpan.AI, where he builds the AI Visibility Engine, GEO/AEO strategy, schema systems, and citation optimization programs for brands that need to be retrieved, cited, and trusted by AI answer engines.