Brainpan Medicare AIVI™ Q3 2026 Benchmark
The Brainpan AIVI™ (AI Visibility Index) measures how often and how favorably Medicare plans and carriers are retrieved, cited, and recommended by AI answer surfaces. UnitedHealthcare Medicare / AARP, Humana Medicare, and Aetna Medicare / CVS Health hold 50.5% of commercial mentions across a 121-brand study spanning ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing Copilot — but none of the three lead on per-mention quality (QVI™). See the full leaderboards, findings, and methodology below.
Methodology and analysis: Kevin Walsh
This is the AIVI™ series' second industry. The original Q2 2026 Insurance AI Visibility Benchmark is also live. View the Insurance study → See every industry the series covers on the Multi-Engine AIVI™ Benchmarks hub.
The Q3 2026 edition in six numbers.
- 121 named Medicare brands are tracked across 7 AI surfaces; 115 have any recorded visibility. Six — Premera Blue Cross Medicare, Johns Hopkins Advantage MD, Tufts Health Plan Medicare / Point32Health, Fallon Health Medicare, Dean Health Plan Medicare, and Trinity Health Plan of New York — have none in this panel.
- UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and Aetna hold 50.5% of the 59,055 scored commercial mentions between them.
- Blue Cross Blue Shield Medicare ranks 4th (3,816 mentions, 6.46% share) once state-affiliate name variants are attributed to the umbrella brand — ahead of Cigna Healthcare Medicare and Wellcare.
- Medicare.org leads the QVI™ (Quality Visibility Index) ranking among brands with at least 100 mentions, at 48.05, while holding just 1.64% of commercial mention share.
- Twenty-five domains supply 52.7% of 62,484 citation rows; Medicare.org holds 29.04% of brand-owned citation rows on 1.64% of mentions — a 17.7x authority ratio.
- Google AI Overviews records the highest brand-citation rate of the seven surfaces (39.5%) and rendered for 95.89% of its allocated prompts (1,985 of 2,070).
Commercial share, top 10 of 115 visible brands.
Rank is by scored-row volume against the 59,055-mention commercial baseline. UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and Aetna lead on reach by a wide margin — the top three combine for 50.5% of commercial mentions and 13.0% of all 229,372 extracted entity rows.
Reach and quality diverge.
The three reach leaders all rank outside the QVI™ top eight. Medicare.org leads QVI™ on a fraction of the mention volume. See the QVI™ leaderboard below.
Two brand analyses are live.
UnitedHealthcare and Kaiser Permanente get full worked breakdowns — reach, QVI™, citation authority, and direct comparisons.
Audit your own brand.
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QVI™ (Quality Visibility Index), top 10 eligible brands.
QVI™ = 8 × mean Position Score + 7 × mean Recommendation Score + 25 × own-domain citation rate, scaled 0–100 and computed on a scored subset of each brand's rows. Eligible brands have at least 100 mentions — a reporting rule, not a confidence guarantee. Medicare.org ranks first among the 36 eligible brands; Humana ranks eighth and UnitedHealthcare ninth.
229,372 source rows, two denominators, kept deliberately apart.
Full entity extraction on 14,405 populated responses produced 229,372 total extraction rows — the complete Total Visibility Universe. Commercial share and total entity share answer different questions; neither is a direct estimate of demand, attention, traffic, enrollment, or revenue.
| Layer | Rows | Share of source rows |
|---|---|---|
| Supplemental layer (Medicare Vocabulary) | 137,708 | 60.04% |
| Scored commercial rows (Commercial Medicare brands) | 59,055 | 25.75% |
| Other named-entity rows (residual layer) | 32,609 | 14.22% |
80.79% of populated responses name at least one scored commercial brand (11,638 of 14,405). Against the full 14,490-observation designed sample, including the 85 Google AI Overview non-renders folded in as zero-visibility, the figure is 80.32%.
32,609 residual rows across eleven categories.
Entities not classified as Medicare Vocabulary or a tracked commercial brand. Media, review, and trust publishers is the largest category; government & advocacy organizations is second, published with an approximate, pending-recheck caveat carried forward from the source workbook.
| Category | Rows | Share of residual | Share of all rows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Media, review & trust publishers | 8,059 | 24.7% | 3.51% |
| Government & advocacy organizations† | 5,040 | 15.5% | 2.20% |
| Specific plans & products | 4,193 | 12.9% | 1.83% |
| Third-party aggregators, brokers & local agencies | 3,340 | 10.2% | 1.46% |
| Healthcare providers & hospital networks | 2,948 | 9.0% | 1.29% |
| Wellness & supplemental benefit providers | 2,873 | 8.8% | 1.25% |
| Pharmacy & retail | 2,733 | 8.4% | 1.19% |
| Geographic reference | 1,771 | 5.4% | 0.77% |
| Named organization, unclassified | 1,320 | 4.0% | 0.58% |
| Drug / product mention | 251 | 0.8% | 0.11% |
| Uncategorized | 81 | 0.2% | 0.04% |
† The 5,040 government & advocacy total is reported with confidence. A more granular sub-breakdown (SHIP, CMS, Medicare.gov individually) is not yet recomputed against this corrected total and is not published here pending that recheck.
Five findings from the Q3 2026 edition.
Reach, quality, and evidence are three different advantages — a brand can lead one and trail the other two. Each finding below is computed against the 59,055 tracked-brand mention baseline unless stated otherwise.
01 · Concentration
UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and Aetna receive 50.5% of commercial mentions. Blue Cross Blue Shield Medicare ranks 4th (3,816 mentions, 6.46% share) once state-affiliate name variants are attributed to the umbrella brand — ahead of Cigna Healthcare Medicare and Wellcare.
02 · Per-mention quality
Medicare.org leads the QVI™ ranking among the 36 brands with at least 100 mentions, at 48.05, while holding just 1.64% of commercial mention share. Humana ranks eighth on QVI™ (36.62) and UnitedHealthcare ninth (34.91) — reach and per-mention quality should be tracked separately.
03 · Citation authority
Twenty-five domains provide 52.7% of 62,484 citation rows. Medicare.org holds 1.64% of commercial mentions but 29.04% of brand-owned citation rows — an authority ratio of 17.7x. Kaiser Permanente sits at the opposite extreme: 2.47% of mentions, essentially no owned citation share.
04 · Surface divergence
Google AI Overviews records a 39.5% brand-citation rate, the highest of seven surfaces, and rendered for 95.89% of its allocated prompts. Claude API points to Medicare.gov in 100% of eligible answers; Microsoft Copilot does so in just 5.6%. The surfaces do not behave alike.
05 · Next-action signals & intermediary placement
Across the source panel, 36.5% of answers suggest an agent or broker and 15.1% point to SHIP. Intermediaries displace the best-placed carrier in 48.2% of eligible mixed responses overall, falling to 17.8% once broker-intent queries are excluded.
Seven configurations, seven different visibility patterns.
| Surface | Mention rows | Top-3 rate | Brand cited | Official source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Copilot | 14,702 | 38.5% | 3.9% | 1.4% |
| Bing Copilot | 9,131 | 52.5% | 19.2% | 29.2% |
| Claude API | 8,171 | 63.3% | 0.1% | 83.6% |
| Google AI Overviews | 6,822 | 68.8% | 39.5% | 26.3% |
| Perplexity API | 6,378 | 64.6% | 27.3% | 67.4% |
| ChatGPT / OpenAI API | 5,982 | 78.9% | 0.0% | 17.9% |
| Gemini API | 3,184 | 68.8% | 0.0% | 3.7% |
Near-zero brand-citation rates on several API configurations describe this setup; they do not make citation strategy irrelevant to those platforms — Claude API points to an official source (predominantly Medicare.gov) in 83.6% of eligible answers despite citing the brand directly in just 0.1%.
Broker-intent queries explain part of the placement advantage.
| Metric | Reported result |
|---|---|
| Responses containing both a carrier and intermediary | 1,688 |
| Overall intermediary displacement rate | 48.2% |
| Displacement rate excluding broker-intent queries | 17.8% |
| Displacement in broker-present subgroup | 84.8% |
| Displacement in publisher / marketplace subgroup | 16.5% |
Most frequent displacing intermediaries: eHealth (390 responses), SelectQuote (211), Medicare.org (149), GoHealth (32), Connie Health (15). The 84.8% broker-present result is a subgroup rate and does not apply to all answers — earlier placement may reflect query intent, content relevance, or familiarity, and the report does not establish that intermediary content structure or schema causes the result.
Some smaller brands win selected score-based matchups.
Among 208 direct-comparison responses, the source reports 186 clean two-carrier pairs. The higher Visibility Points score defines the scored winner within each pair — these outcomes do not necessarily represent explicit AI choices or beneficiary preferences, and opponent mix and sample size differ sharply between rows.
| 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% |
Alignment Health's 93.8% is 15 wins from 16 appearances and should not be read as a robust leader; see the 100-mention reliability boundary on the full leaderboard.
One answer is not a stable visibility baseline.
Across 7,363 observed brand/query/surface combinations, 52.0% are not present in all three reported runs, and 40.6% show a rank swing of at least two positions when consistently present. All 14,490 execution keys reconcile — 690 query/geography combinations × three run slots × seven surfaces — but the source files do not provide confidence intervals, a minimum detectable change, or evidence that every capture is an independent generation. Repeated observations support a more useful descriptive baseline; precision depends on the sampling design and dependence between observations, not the record count alone.
Carriers hold 95.92% of tracked-brand mentions.
| Brand type | Brands | Mentions | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carrier | 105 | 56,647 | 95.92% |
| Broker / Marketplace | 9 | 1,441 | 2.44% |
| Publisher / Marketplace | 1 | 967 | 1.64% |
Intermediaries — brokers/marketplaces and the one publisher/marketplace brand, Medicare.org — hold the remaining 4.08% of mentions across ten brands.
The full Q3 2026 report
Start with the summary. The full index includes your brand.
The summary publishes the top-10 leaderboards and the headline findings. The Full Medicare AI Visibility Index is the complete Q3 2026 dataset — all 115 visible brands, every component (Commercial SOV, Total SOV, QVI™, citation rate, top-3 rate, average position), per-surface detail, the non-commercial layer, and the six zero-visibility tracked brands — so you can find your own position and the specific queries where you are absent.
Executive summary
Key Findings & Executive Implications- Top 10 of 115 brands, ranked by Commercial share and by QVI™
- All five headline findings, with surface and intermediary detail
- Citation authority and surface-level breakdowns
- Scoring methodology in full
Full Medicare AI Visibility Index — Q3 2026
Complete dataset- All 115 visible brands ranked, not just the top 10
- Every component, scored: Commercial SOV, Total SOV, QVI™, citation rate, top-3 rate, mean position
- Per-surface detail behind each score, across all seven AI surfaces
- The non-commercial residual layer and the six zero-visibility tracked brands
- Direct-comparison and repeatability detail at full resolution
$3,500Single-organization commercial license / One-time payment — delivered within one business day
Tracking this every quarter instead of once? The Quarterly Benchmark + Strategic Playbook is $12,500 per quarter — the full index each quarter plus a written playbook on what to change in your own content and schema. Ask about the quarterly program.
How this index is built, and how to challenge a figure.
QVI™ (Quality Visibility Index) = 8 × mean Position Score + 7 × mean Recommendation Score + 25 × own-domain citation rate, scaled 0–100. It is deliberately volume-neutral, unlike the Insurance AIVI™ score, so a brand's rate of being answered well can be read separately from how often it is answered at all. QVI™, mean recommendation score, own-domain citation rate, top-3 rate, and mean position score are computed on the subset of rows that received full per-mention scoring; commercial share and mention counts reflect the complete dataset. All 23,715 API-surface rows have Recommendation Score zero, so this component is not comparable as a uniformly measured cross-surface preference signal.
The controlling rules behind every number on this page — study design, attribution, scoring, and known limitations — are published in the Medicare AIVI™ methodology and correction policy. If any figure on this page is wrong, corrections go to kwalsh@brainpan.ai with the subject line AIVI correction request, handled under that published policy — acknowledged in two business days, determined in ten, and applied with a dated note rather than silently.
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.