Does AI recommend your insurance agency? How to check in three minutes

Probably not, and you can find out in three minutes. Ask ChatGPT for the best independent insurance agent in your town and see whose name comes back. When we ran that test for 151 independent agencies, seven prompts each, 43 percent of them were never named once.

Last updated: September 23, 2026

How do you check whether AI names your agency?

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and ask each one the question a buyer would actually type. Not “insurance” and your city. The whole sentence. “Who is a good independent insurance agent in Norman, Oklahoma for home and auto?” Then ask it six more ways: small business insurance, life insurance, the peril that matters where you live, “near me” with your zip code. Write down every agency each engine names.

That is the whole test. It is what our free audit does automatically, seven prompts across three engines, for the agency’s own market, and then it scores the answer. But you do not need the audit to run the test. You need ten minutes and the honesty to write down the names you did not want to see.

Two things to know before you start. The answer changes from day to day, the way it changes for a real buyer, so one run is a snapshot and not a verdict. And the engines disagree with each other more than most people expect. Rondon Insurance in Edmond, Oklahoma was named twice by Google’s AI and twice by ChatGPT, on different prompts, and never by Perplexity. If you only check one engine you are reading one third of the answer.

What do the numbers look like across the industry?

Bad, and specific. Of the 151 independent agencies that have run our audit, 65 were never named in any of their seven prompts. Across all 1,024 answers those prompts produced, the agency being audited was named in 309 of them. Call it three in ten. And 21 of those agencies, 14 percent, were never named while a competitor was named in every single prompt. That is the agency down the street getting the buyer every time.

The wider data says the same thing from the other direction. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found that 45 percent of consumers have now used an AI tool for a local business recommendation, up from 6 percent a year earlier. SOCi’s index found ChatGPT recommends about 1.2 percent of all local business locations, against 35.9 percent that show up in Google’s local pack. AI search is roughly thirty times more selective than the search you grew up on. If you are in the set, it is an enormous structural advantage. If you are not, you are invisible to a share of buyers that doubled in a year.

Why does the AI name the other guy?

Every engine is asking three questions, and it asks them in this order.

Can I identify you as a specific business? That is your name, address and phone matching everywhere, a Google Business Profile with the right category, and schema on your site that says InsuranceAgency instead of leaving the machine to guess.

Do other sources agree that you exist and are who you say you are? Reviews, a BBB profile, the state association directory, a Chamber link. AI trusts what other sites say about you more than what you say about yourself.

Can I pull a clean answer off your site without working too hard? One page per line you write, named producers with license numbers, plain headings, an answer in the first sentence. And, before any of that, a site the crawler can read at all. Thirteen percent of the sites we audit hand a crawler an empty page because everything is rendered in JavaScript.

The agency that gets named is not the one with the biggest ad budget. It is the one that answered those three questions clearly. That is why a two-person shop can beat a regional brokerage on this test, and regularly does.

What should you do with the answer?

If you were named in most prompts, keep doing what you are doing and check again in a month. Position matters: the first name in an AI answer gets picked most of the time.

If you were named in a few, look at which prompts missed you. The gaps cluster by line of business. An agency named for home and auto and missed for commercial usually has no commercial page worth citing.

If you were named in none, do not start with marketing. Start with the three questions above, in order. The free checklist walks through all 25 fixes, most of them free, and the audit tells you which ones apply to you. If the audit shows the crawler cannot read your site, that is the one to fix first, and it usually means a new site rather than a repaired one.

Whichever result you got, you now know something most of your competitors do not. Most of them have never asked.