Credit Cards,
according to AI
Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about credit cards — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Barclaycard owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
Barclaycard is the default answer.
Named in 23% of credit cards answers, typically in position 2.4. American Express follows at 17%, HSBC at 17%.
Every brand AI names, ranked.
Visibility is the share of answers naming the brand; citation share is its slice of all brand-owned pages cited; read→cited is how often its pages convert a read into a citation.
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Barclaycard | 23% | 2.4 | 12% | 50% |
| 2 | American Express | 17% | 1.6 | 2% | 100% |
| 3 | HSBC | 17% | 2.1 | 30% | 71% |
| 4 | Lloyds Bank | 12% | 2.9 | 14% | 13% |
| 5 | Virgin Money | 10% | 3.2 | 4% | 0% |
| 6 | Chase | 10% | 4.5 | 2% | 50% |
| 7 | NatWest | 8% | 2.6 | 6% | 100% |
| 8 | Tesco Bank | 8% | 2.8 | 2% | — |
| 9 | Santander | 8% | 3.8 | 2% | 13% |
| 10 | Starling Bank | 8% | 4.0 | 0% | 0% |
| 11 | Monzo | 7% | 2.3 | 2% | 17% |
| 12 | Halifax | 5% | 2.0 | 4% | 50% |
| 13 | Vanquis Bank | 5% | 2.7 | 2% | — |
| 14 | Nationwide | 3% | 3.0 | 6% | 0% |
| 15 | Aqua | 3% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
Credit Cards is decided on attraction.
Being named is visibility. Underneath it, every answer describes a brand in three ways — how much it stands out, how much it belongs, and how much it is returned to. In credit cards, American Express leads attraction at 126 against Poundland at 67, indexed on the category at 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full credit cards desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for Barclaycard.
An assistant does not answer from memory alone. It runs its own web searches first, and whoever it searches for is the shortlist it then chooses from. Across 75 searches in credit cards, Barclaycard is named in 17% of the ones that name a brand at all. ChatGPT Web does not report its searches, so these shares are measured against the ones that do.
These are the assistants' own searches, read from their answers — not what anyone typed into a search engine.
The referees of credit cards.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering credit cards questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
HSBC converts reads into citations. Nationwide doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? HSBC converts 71% of reads; Nationwide just 0%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Barclaycard | 23% | 2.4 | 12% | 50% |
| 2 | American Express | 17% | 1.6 | 2% | 100% |
| 3 | HSBC | 17% | 2.1 | 30% | 71% |
| 4 | Lloyds Bank | 12% | 2.9 | 14% | 13% |
| 5 | Virgin Money | 10% | 3.2 | 4% | 0% |
| 6 | Chase | 10% | 4.5 | 2% | 50% |
| 7 | NatWest | 8% | 2.6 | 6% | 100% |
| 8 | Tesco Bank | 8% | 2.8 | 2% | — |
| 9 | Santander | 8% | 3.8 | 2% | 13% |
| 10 | Starling Bank | 8% | 4.0 | 0% | 0% |
| 11 | Monzo | 7% | 2.3 | 2% | 17% |
| 12 | Halifax | 5% | 2.0 | 4% | 50% |
| 13 | Vanquis Bank | 5% | 2.7 | 2% | — |
| 14 | Nationwide | 3% | 3.0 | 6% | 0% |
| 15 | Aqua | 3% | 4.0 | 0% | — |
Three models. Three different answers.
Ask about credit cards and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → Virgin Money, Gemini → Barclaycard, ChatGPT → Chase. Their top-five lists share just 0% of names.
Brands whose visibility swings most between models — the bar per model, widest gap on the right.
The data behind this chart
| Brand | Claude | Gemini | ChatGPT | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barclaycard | 15% | 45% | 10% | 35pp |
| American Express | 5% | 35% | 10% | 30pp |
| Lloyds Bank | 0% | 25% | 10% | 25pp |
| HSBC | 10% | 30% | 10% | 20pp |
| Virgin Money | 15% | 15% | 0% | 15pp |
| Tesco Bank | 10% | 15% | 0% | 15pp |
| Santander | 0% | 15% | 10% | 15pp |
| Chase | 5% | 10% | 15% | 10pp |
| Vanquis Bank | 5% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
| Nationwide | 0% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
Comparisons carry credit cards.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Comparisons supply the most citations; Product pages convert best — 96% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comparisons | 85 | 6 | 93% |
| How-to guides | 68 | 9 | 88% |
| Editorial | 63 | 15 | 81% |
| Product pages | 26 | 1 | 96% |
| Other | 16 | 15 | 52% |
| Listicles | 12 | 5 | 71% |
| Reviews | 7 | 1 | 88% |
| Community threads | 7 | 4 | 64% |
Answer up front is what separates cited from ignored.
Of the credit cards pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Answer up front is worth 11 percentage points; updated this year pages fare 6pp worse. Measured within the read population, so selection can't flatter it.
The data behind this chart
| Feature | Pages with | Cited % | Pages without | Cited % | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer up front | 209 | 86% | 171 | 75% | +11pp |
| Comparison table | 123 | 88% | 257 | 77% | +10pp |
| Specifications | 37 | 89% | 343 | 80% | +9pp |
| Structured data | 223 | 81% | 157 | 80% | +1pp |
| Named author | 147 | 79% | 233 | 82% | -3pp |
| Hard statistics | 226 | 79% | 154 | 83% | -4pp |
| Updated this year | 206 | 78% | 174 | 84% | -6pp |
TSB builds pages AI can quote.
Readiness scores each brand's own pages on the structure models reward — a direct answer up front, tables, hard numbers, named authors, structured data, recency, specifications. TSB is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| TSB | 56 | 0% | 4 |
| Curve | 54 | 0% | 3 |
| Santander | 53 | 20% | 5 |
| Capital One | 51 | 8% | 12 |
| Vanquis Bank | 43 | 20% | 5 |
| Nationwide | 40 | 35% | 17 |
| Zable | 39 | 29% | 7 |
| HSBC | 39 | 24% | 29 |
| Chase | 38 | 38% | 8 |
| Tesco Bank | 36 | 13% | 8 |
Readiness is the share of eight measurable structural signals present on a brand's profiled pages. It is a build-quality measure, not a ranking of the brand.
The questions credit cards pages have to settle.
Read straight off the pages AI cited: the consumer questions cited content answers most often. Content that fails to settle these is content models have no reason to quote.
Nineteen more categories.
Method: 20 unbranded consumer prompts per category, spread across the buying journey, run weekly against ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Read→cited uses Claude and ChatGPT only (Gemini does not separate the two). Correlational observations of model behaviour at the time of the run. Data from the run completed Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:42:06 GMT.