Investment Platforms,
according to AI
Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about investment platforms — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Capital.com owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
Capital.com is the default answer.
Named in 40% of investment platforms answers, typically in position 2.2. AJ Bell follows at 28%, Trading 212 at 25%.
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 | Capital.com | 40% | 2.2 | 0% | — |
| 2 | AJ Bell | 28% | 3.7 | 7% | 27% |
| 3 | Trading 212 | 25% | 2.7 | 2% | 22% |
| 4 | Hargreaves Lansdown | 25% | 3.1 | 14% | 29% |
| 5 | Vanguard | 20% | 3.2 | 7% | 43% |
| 6 | InvestEngine | 17% | 3.6 | 3% | 22% |
| 7 | Interactive Investor | 13% | 4.6 | 10% | 21% |
| 8 | Freetrade | 13% | 4.9 | 3% | 33% |
| 9 | fidelity | 10% | 3.8 | 7% | 16% |
| 10 | IG | 8% | 2.6 | 4% | 20% |
| 11 | Interactive Brokers | 8% | 2.8 | 0% | 0% |
| 12 | Saxo | 8% | 3.6 | 3% | 23% |
| 13 | Dodl | 8% | 5.2 | 0% | — |
| 14 | Wealthify | 7% | 4.5 | 3% | 100% |
| 15 | Aberdeen | 5% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
Capital.com is named most. That is not the same as being wanted.
Being named is visibility. Underneath it, asked to rate each brand directly, the AI assistants judge it three ways — how much it stands out, how much it belongs, and how much it is returned to. They put 8% of the 39 brands rated above indifference. Vanguard leads the brands the answers name, at 70% of maximum Desire. On attraction, the most divided driver, Monzo indexes 140 against EQi at 66, on a category average of 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared (84 / 92 / 100 / 108 / 116). Above indifference means Desire above two-thirds of its maximum. See the full investment platforms desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for Trading 212.
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 86 searches in investment platforms, Trading 212 is named in 15% of the ones that name a brand at all. ChatGPT Web, Copilot do not report their 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 investment platforms.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering investment platforms questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
Vanguard converts reads into citations. Interactive Brokers doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Vanguard converts 43% of reads; Interactive Brokers just 0%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Capital.com | 40% | 2.2 | 0% | — |
| 2 | AJ Bell | 28% | 3.7 | 7% | 27% |
| 3 | Trading 212 | 25% | 2.7 | 2% | 22% |
| 4 | Hargreaves Lansdown | 25% | 3.1 | 14% | 29% |
| 5 | Vanguard | 20% | 3.2 | 7% | 43% |
| 6 | InvestEngine | 17% | 3.6 | 3% | 22% |
| 7 | Interactive Investor | 13% | 4.6 | 10% | 21% |
| 8 | Freetrade | 13% | 4.9 | 3% | 33% |
| 9 | fidelity | 10% | 3.8 | 7% | 16% |
| 10 | IG | 8% | 2.6 | 4% | 20% |
| 11 | Interactive Brokers | 8% | 2.8 | 0% | 0% |
| 12 | Saxo | 8% | 3.6 | 3% | 23% |
| 13 | Dodl | 8% | 5.2 | 0% | — |
| 14 | Wealthify | 7% | 4.5 | 3% | 100% |
| 15 | Aberdeen | 5% | 5.0 | 0% | — |
The models do not agree on who leads.
Ask about investment platforms and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → Freetrade, Gemini → Capital.com, ChatGPT → Capital.com. Their top-five lists share just 67% 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capital.com | 20% | 65% | 35% | 45pp |
| AJ Bell | 20% | 40% | 25% | 20pp |
| Vanguard | 10% | 30% | 20% | 20pp |
| Wealthify | 0% | 20% | 0% | 20pp |
| Hargreaves Lansdown | 20% | 35% | 20% | 15pp |
| fidelity | 15% | 0% | 15% | 15pp |
| Freetrade | 20% | 10% | 10% | 10pp |
| Trading 212 | 20% | 30% | 25% | 10pp |
| IG | 5% | 15% | 5% | 10pp |
| Aberdeen | 0% | 10% | 5% | 10pp |
Editorial carry investment platforms.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; pricing convert best — 100% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial | 121 | 6 | 95% |
| How-to guides | 120 | 11 | 92% |
| Comparisons | 92 | 9 | 91% |
| Product pages | 45 | 1 | 98% |
| Documentation | 31 | 8 | 79% |
| pricing | 28 | 0 | 100% |
| Other | 15 | 9 | 63% |
| Listicles | 14 | 1 | 93% |
Answer up front is what separates cited from ignored.
Of the investment platforms pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Answer up front is worth 10 percentage points; hard statistics pages fare 12pp 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 | 293 | 96% | 288 | 85% | +10pp |
| Specifications | 33 | 94% | 548 | 90% | +4pp |
| Named author | 282 | 91% | 299 | 90% | +2pp |
| Comparison table | 198 | 90% | 383 | 91% | -0pp |
| Updated this year | 246 | 90% | 335 | 91% | -1pp |
| Structured data | 220 | 90% | 361 | 91% | -1pp |
| Hard statistics | 264 | 84% | 317 | 96% | -12pp |
St James's Place 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. Nutmeg is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| St James's Place | 60 | 67% | 6 |
| Freetrade | 41 | 19% | 36 |
| Moneybox | 39 | 56% | 9 |
| AJ Bell | 38 | 20% | 54 |
| Bestinvest | 38 | 57% | 7 |
| Nutmeg | 38 | 14% | 7 |
| Wealthify | 36 | 54% | 13 |
| InvestEngine | 33 | 53% | 15 |
| CMC Markets | 32 | 57% | 7 |
| HSBC | 32 | 13% | 15 |
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 investment platforms 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 Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:59:23 GMT.