2026 AI Search & AI Overview Benchmarks: Insurance
Our 2026 Insurance AI search benchmarks analysis makes it clear: the AI answer is the new first impression, and Google AI Mode outpaces every other engine with the highest total number of citations.
The engines: AI Mode drove 43.9% of the Insurance citations we analyzed, with Perplexity close behind at 33.6% and ChatGPT further back.
The AI Overviews: An AI Overview appeared on 40.7% of Insurance searches, and 53.3% of those citations went to pages that never cracked Google's organic top 10.
Who won: No single brand owned the field. AI leaned on a tight pack of brokers and carriers, led by Insureon, Progressive, and The Hartford. Educational questions drove most of the citations, and pricing was the industry tell, what it costs and how to get a quote.
Two patterns stood out: Being a household name helped less than you'd think, the biggest consumer brands got named far more than they got cited, so brand equity is an opening, not a lock. And the AI Overviews looked like a different game on each side of the industry, wide open for carriers and locked down by a few marketplaces for brokers.
The brands cited in these answers capture the visibility that used to come from SERP ranking. Getting into the AI answer is the next frontier for Insurance brands, and it rewards clear, structured cost and coverage content.
Search discovery used to be simple for insurers. Rank on page one of Google, earn the click, win the quote conversionConversion
Conversions are processes in online marketing that lead to a defined conclusion.
Learn More. Until AI changed the question.
Answer engines and Google AI Overviews now sit in front of your site, handing shoppers a finished answer with sources built in. What decides whether your brand gets found is no longer where you rank in SERPs. It's whether AI puts you in the answer, and whether it recommends you in the shortlist a shopper sees when they ask which carrier to trust or what a policy costs.
This is the trap most teams fall into. In our 2026 AEO Benchmarks Report, AI engines drove around 1.08% of all website visits. The volume is small, but don't write it off: getting into the answer is often where a shopper first meets your brand. The mistake is chasing AI for traffic volume in the first place. The real prize is being the source AI treats as credible, and that's an authority game.
So this report sets referral traffic aside and measures what actually moves for the Insurance sector in AI search: which engines do the citing, which domains and brands win the most citations and mentions, the intents behind those prompts, and where Google AI Overviews show up across carriers and brokers. It closes with a playbook of the specific moves that earn citations, so it's worth reading to the end.
Key takeaways for Insurance AEO and AI Overviews
AEO & AI search findings
- Google AI Mode was the top source of citations for Insurance at 43.9%, with Perplexity a strong second at 33.6%. Most teams don't have an AI Mode strategy yet. The data says you need one.
- No insurer actually owns the citation market share. Insureon (2.9%), Progressive (2.8%), The Hartford, New York Life, and Chubb (all 2.7%) all sat within two-tenths of a point. No brand owns this space yet, it's still up for the taking.
- Citations and brand mentions split cleanly. Comparison and advisory sites won the citations. Household carriers won the mentions.
- Pricing was the leading intent at 17.6% of Insurance citations.
Google AI Overview findings
- Google AI Overview results appeared for 40.7% of searches in Insurance in this study. 53.3% of those citations came from pages outside Google's organic top 10.
Methodology
We built this report on Conductor data covering two parts of AI search: the answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI ModeAI Mode
AI mode is a search feature using AI to provide comprehensive answers by synthesizing information from multiple sources into direct responses.
Learn More, Gemini, and others) and Google AI Overviews. The answer engine and AIO analyses draw on the same set of 445 Insurance domains, so both describe the exact same brands.
Every metric anchors to the cited domain. A citation counts toward Insurance based on the industry of the domain that got cited, not the topic of the question. We classified the question separately, and only to read intent.
We also built our own industry framework for this report. It doesn't use the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), the standard financial classification behind our 2026 benchmarks report. GICS is designed for public companies and capital markets, and it has no clean slot for insurers or for the way this industry competes online. So we defined the Insurance industry that reflects how these brands actually show up in AI answers, then split each into subindustries as follows:
Industry | Subindustry | What it includes (examples) |
|---|---|---|
Insurance | Direct Carriers | Insurers that sell policies under their own brand, including digital-first carriers (Progressive, State Farm, The Hartford) |
Insurance | Brokers/Aggregators | Comparison and brokerage sites that sell across carriers (Insureon, The Zebra, Policygenius) |
For AEO and AI search, we analyzed more than 3.6 million Insurance brand citations, January 1 and May 31, 2026, in the U.S., across seven engines: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Mode, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Grok. The data covers more than 178,000 distinct prompts.
For Google AI Overviews, we looked into a rolling four-week snapshot, May 20 to June 20, 2026, covering 2.9 million U.S. Google searches. We measured how often those searches triggered an AIO, which domains got cited, what page types the AIO pulled from, and how AI Overviews citations compared against the organic top 10 in SERPs.
AI citation share by answer engine in Insurance
We measured AI citations directly and split them by engine. In Insurance, Google AI Mode drove more citations than any other engine.
Perplexity is the story here. It punched well above its reputation, taking 33.6% of Insurance citations, second only to AI Mode and far ahead of ChatGPT's 11.9%. What sets it apart is how much it cites, stacking many sources into a single answer, the kind of answer that's useful when you're weighing what a policy costs.
So why did AI Mode end up with the most Insurance citations if Perplexity cited more sources per answer? The total comes from two things:
- How many answers an engine shows up in.
- How many sources it cites inside each one.
AI Mode won the first. It returned citations on more than 220,000 distinct Insurance searches, well ahead of Perplexity's 147,000.
Perplexity won the second. It cited 8.4 sources per answer to AI Mode's 7.3, packing more sources into each response. Reach beat depth here. AI Mode showed up in so many more answers that its lower per-answer count still added up to the biggest citation share overall.
That's worth sitting with, because it changes what this data means. AI Mode's lead tells you where citations get handed out in Insurance, which is different from where people spend their time. Perplexity punched to a strong second on far less reach because its answers are denser, and that's why it's the one engine most teams underrate. If your AEO tracking stops at ChatGPT, you're missing the two engines that cited Insurance domains most. Weigh that against where your audience actually searches, and cover both.
Insurance AI visibility leaders in 2026
Market share in AI search comes down to two questions:
- Which domains get cited most?
- Which brands get mentioned most?
Citations are the links AI pulls into an answer; mentions are the times AI names a brand in the text, with or without a link. A brand can lead one and trail the other, so we tracked both.
This is the analysis of the domains and brands that won the most AI market share in Insurance, based on AI citations and brand mentions from January to May 2026. All leaders included had at least 1% market share.
Top 5 Insurance domains by AI citation market share: overall
- Insureon (2.9%), Progressive (2.8%), The Hartford (2.7%), New York Life (2.7%), and Chubb (2.7%) led.
Insurance had no runaway leader. Insureon, a small-business broker, edged a tight pack of carriers: Progressive, The Hartford, New York Life, and Chubb, all owning between 2.7% and 2.9% of AI search citation market share. Citations were spread thin across a crowded field of brokers and carriers, so no single domain owned the industry's answers.
Top 5 Insurance brands by AI brand mention market share: overall
- Progressive (6%), GEICO (4%), State Farm (4%), Nationwide (3.4%), and Travelers (2.9%) led.
Flip to brand mentions and the household names took over. Carriers led the mentions even though comparison and advisory sites led the citations. The two lists split cleanly. AI cited the sites that do the explaining, and it named the carriers people already know. Carriers win by getting named. Comparison and advisory sites win by getting cited.
Insurance AI visibility leaders by subindustry
The industry view shows who leads Insurance overall. The subindustry view shows who you actually compete with. We split Insurance into two subindustries, Direct Carriers and Brokers/Aggregators, so you can benchmark against the sites closest to yours. Spoiler alert: the two behave very differently, as you’ll see in the numbers below.
Direct Carriers: AEO market share leaders by domain citations
- Progressive (3.6%), The Hartford (3.5%), New York Life (3.5%), and Chubb (3.4%) led, with Guardian Life (2.6%) behind.
The Hartford, New York Life, Chubb, and Guardian Life are commercial and life insurers, not the consumer-auto insurance giants. The household auto names, GEICO and State Farm, drew far more brand mentions than citations. AI named them, but it reached elsewhere for the actual pages.
The carriers that got cited had deep, structured policy and coverage content, which skews commercial and life. For an auto carrier, the lesson is straightforward. Name recognition gets you mentioned. Optimized content gets you cited.
Brokers/Aggregators: AEO market share leaders by domain citations
- Insureon (13.2%) led by a wide margin, followed by The Zebra (7.5%), Insurify (7.2%), Policygenius (5.9%), and Squaremouth (4.8%).
The comparison marketplaces owned this subindustry. Insureon alone took more than 13%, and citations concentrated far more tightly here than in the Direct Carriers subindustry. A small set of shop-and-compare sites answered most of the brokerage queries.
Search intent in Insurance AI search: what content to create to get cited
Who gets cited is half the picture. What people asked when those citations happened completes the picture, and that tells you what content to build. For this study, we classified the prompts behind every Insurance citation into one of Conductor's seven search intents. That’s more than 178,000 distinct prompts in Insurance.
This analysis uses Conductor's Intent Taxonomy to categorize how AI engines respond to different user goals. The seven intent categories map to the universal stages of how we all use the internet today.
Intent | What it means | Sample prompts |
|---|---|---|
Education | Seeking to learn a new concept or solve a foundational problem | "how do donor advised funds work" "what are the scientific reasons why some people prefer spicy foods and others do not" |
Recommendations | Looking for suggestions or the best-rated options in a category | "best banks for online banking" "what do the american diabetes association, mayo clinic, and cdc recommend for a diabetic or prediabetic diet?" |
Comparison | Weighing two or more specific options against each other | "compare online free checking account offers" "burial insurance vs final expense insurance which is better" |
Navigational | Looking for a specific website, portal, or known brand service | "world vision donation portal" "where to get business insurance instantly" |
Pricing | Investigating specific costs, fees, or subscription tiers | "small business insurance instant quote" "banks offering competitive interest rates" |
Purchase | Ready to buy a product or take a direct transactional action | "buy small business insurance online instantly" "credit card offers for new customers with good terms" |
Support | Needing technical help, troubleshooting, or customer service | "the hartford cyber insurance claim process" "i need help setting up single sign-on (SSO) for our drupal digital experience platform" |
About a fifth of Insurance citations came from prompts our classifier couldn't sort into a named intent, so read these shares as the shape of demand, not the whole of it. Set the Unclassified bucket aside. What's left is your content brief.
Insurance is the pricing industry. Pricing questions accounted for 17.6% of citations. People turning to AI about insurance want to know what it costs. Answer that with real numbers and real quotes, and you win citations that generic explainers never see.
That's the answer engine side. Which engines cite, who they cite, and what they cite for. Google AI Overview results play by different rules, and they're up next.
Insurance AI Overviews benchmarks
Insurance splits cleanly in two. Carriers sell policies. Brokers and aggregators compare them. The two pull different questions, and Google leans on AI Overviews far more for one side than the other. In this study, 40.7% of Insurance searches triggered an AIO. That average hides a wide gap between the two subindustries.
Insurance AIO prevalence by subindustry
- Direct Carriers (40.7%) triggered an AI Overview far more often than brokers.
- Brokers/Aggregators (24.7%) trailed by roughly 16%.
When someone asks about a specific insurer or policy, Google is quick to summarize. When the query is about comparing or shopping across providers, it holds back more often, which is why carrier queries return an overview far more often than broker and aggregator ones.
Page types cited most in Insurance AI Overviews
Knowing which page types get cited in AI Overviews tells you what content to actually create. Insurance brands win with their own product and policy pages. The charts below show the top five page types cited in AI Overviews for each subindustry. Here is what each label means:
Page type | What it is |
|---|---|
Product/Policy | A page for a specific insurance product or policy: auto, home, life, Medicare, annuities, coverage, and plan pages |
Guide/Resource | Educational and advice content: guides, resource centers, tips, answers, and how-to pages |
Blog | Blog posts |
Article | A standard editorial article that isn't one of the more specific formats above |
Other | A mixed bag the classifier couldn't sort into a named format: tools, calculators, and landing pages. Treat it as a mixed bag, not a single content type |
Direct Carriers: top five page types in AIO
- Product/Policy (57.5%) dominated, followed by Other (14.7%), Guide/Resource (11.6%), Blog (9.3%), and Article (3.5%).
Carriers earned citations with their own coverage and plan pages, which pulled well over half the total. Guides and blogs rounded out the rest. A carrier's citable asset is a clear product or policy page, not an explainer article.
Broker/Aggregator: top five page types in AIO
- Product/Policy (77.8%) dominated even more heavily, then Other (10.7%), Guide/Resource (4.6%), Blog (4.2%), and Article (1.7%).
The pattern hits harder for brokers and aggregators. Product and policy pages pulled more than three-quarters of citations. Comparison sites win overviews by putting structured plan and quote pages in front of Google, not long-form content.
Insurance AIO share of voice leaders by subindustry
The following tables show the top five domains in each subindustry that were cited most often in Google AI overviews.
Direct Carriers: top winning domains for AIO share of voice
- Progressive (5.1%) led, followed by Guardian Life (3.2%), Allstate (2.9%), UnitedHealthcare (2.8%), and Western & Southern (2.8%).
No single carrier ran away with it. The top five together held under 17% of Direct Carriers' AIO citations.
Brokers/Aggregators: top winning domains for AIO share of voice
- Policygenius (13.5%) led, ahead of The Zebra (10.4%), Insurify (7.9%), eHealth (6.4%), and SelectQuote (5%).
Brokers and aggregators tell a completely different story. Their top five sites claimed 43.2% of the subindustry's AIO citations, more than double the 16.8% the top five direct carriers held. Policygenius alone pulled 13.5%, more than any single carrier managed.
The reason is structural. Shop-and-compare queries, like which policy is cheapest or how quotes stack up, get answered by a small set of marketplaces built to aggregate across carriers. Google leaned on the same few names: Policygenius, The Zebra, and Insurify, over and over.
The Direct Carriers subindustry looked the opposite: its AIO citations spread across dozens of insurers, even the pack leader, Progressive, reached only 5.1%.
Where AI search goes from here for Insurance
AI search plays by its own rules, and it’s no exception for Insurance. Where your brand stands in the answer engines and where it stands in AI Overviews can be two different things. Insureon led citations in the AI engines at 13.2%, but took just 1.2% of AI Overview citations in the study. Policygenius was the mirror image: fourth among brokers in the AI engines, first in AI Overviews at 13.5%. A lead in one channel can hide a gap in the other, so track both.
The bigger gap is between ranking and getting cited. In Insurance, 53.3% of AIO citations went to pages that weren't in Google's organic top 10 for that search. Rank helped, but it didn't guarantee AIO visibility. Your old scoreboard doesn't measure the new game.
So what should Insurance brands do about it? The data from this study points to a clear playbook.
- Track visibility on more than ChatGPT. Google AI Mode and Perplexity cited Insurance far more than ChatGPT did in this study, so a dashboard that stops at ChatGPT watches a sliver of the field. Cover the engines your audience actually uses, and make sure to include AI Mode and Perplexity in the mix.
- Write for how the leading engines read. AI Mode and Perplexity pull many sources into a single answer in Insurance, which rewards depth and structure. A thin page gives them nothing to pull.
- Answer cost questions head-on. Pricing drove 17.6% of Insurance citations, second only to broad educational questions. Content that meets quote and cost questions with real numbers wins citations that generic explainers miss. Build it as the format AI Overviews actually cited: the insurer's own product and policy pages, with the explainer article playing a supporting role.
- In Insurance, being a well-known brand helps less than you'd think. The biggest consumer brands got mentioned far more than they got cited. GEICO drew 4% of brand mentions but only 1.7% of citations. State Farm drew 4% against 1.2%. AI knows the household names and still reaches elsewhere for the content. That gap is the opportunity. Publish the structured coverage and policy pages AI can actually pull, and convert brand equity into citations.
- Tailor AIO strategy to your subindustry. The AI Overview field looks completely different depending on which side you're on. For direct carriers, an AI Overview showed up often (40.7% of searches) and no single site owned it (the top five held about 17% of citations), so the box is wide open to whoever brings the best product and policy pages. For brokers and aggregators, AI Overview results showed up less (24.7%) and a few marketplaces locked it down (the top five took 43.2%), so breaking in means finding the questions where Policygenius and The Zebra are thin.
- Measure how you're mentioned, not just if you’re mentioned. The numbers in this study are the volume baseline. Whether you showed up. Whether AI recommends you or quietly points shoppers elsewhere is another question. You should be ready to answer both by tracking sentiment across your AI visibility.
None of this replaces SEO, though. Ranking and AI citation are two connected games, and the brands that win discoverability within the Insurance search landscape play both.
AI visibility is the next frontier of Insurance search performance. The brands measuring and acting on those insights now are the ones that will own a larger market share slice later.
