Life Insurance,
according to AI
Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about life insurance — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Aviva owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
Aviva is the default answer.
Named in 18% of life insurance answers, typically in position 2.7. Royal London follows at 15%, Vitality at 13%.
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 | Aviva | 18% | 2.7 | 26% | 20% |
| 2 | Royal London | 15% | 3.8 | 9% | 25% |
| 3 | Vitality | 13% | 2.3 | 18% | 67% |
| 4 | Legal & General | 13% | 2.4 | 19% | 67% |
| 5 | LV= | 8% | 2.8 | 4% | 100% |
| 6 | Zurich | 8% | 3.2 | 3% | 67% |
| 7 | Scottish Widows | 7% | 2.8 | 0% | — |
| 8 | AXA | 7% | 3.3 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Bupa | 5% | 2.3 | 6% | 25% |
| 10 | Smart Insurance | 3% | 2.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | The Exeter | 2% | 5.0 | 1% | 100% |
| 12 | MetLife | 0% | — | 0% | 0% |
| 13 | Post Office | 0% | — | 7% | 25% |
| 14 | Shepherds Friendly | 0% | — | 3% | — |
| 15 | SunLife | 0% | — | 3% | — |
Life Insurance 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 life insurance, Vitality leads attraction at 120 against England Mutual at 70, indexed on the category at 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full life insurance desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for Aviva.
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 77 searches in life insurance, Aviva is named in 100% 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 life insurance.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering life insurance questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
Vitality converts reads into citations. Aviva doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Vitality converts 67% of reads; Aviva just 20%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aviva | 18% | 2.7 | 26% | 20% |
| 2 | Royal London | 15% | 3.8 | 9% | 25% |
| 3 | Vitality | 13% | 2.3 | 18% | 67% |
| 4 | Legal & General | 13% | 2.4 | 19% | 67% |
| 5 | LV= | 8% | 2.8 | 4% | 100% |
| 6 | Zurich | 8% | 3.2 | 3% | 67% |
| 7 | Scottish Widows | 7% | 2.8 | 0% | — |
| 8 | AXA | 7% | 3.3 | 0% | — |
| 9 | Bupa | 5% | 2.3 | 6% | 25% |
| 10 | Smart Insurance | 3% | 2.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | The Exeter | 2% | 5.0 | 1% | 100% |
| 12 | MetLife | 0% | — | 0% | 0% |
| 13 | Post Office | 0% | — | 7% | 25% |
| 14 | Shepherds Friendly | 0% | — | 3% | — |
| 15 | SunLife | 0% | — | 3% | — |
Three models. Three different answers.
Ask about life insurance and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → Royal London, Gemini → Aviva, ChatGPT → AXA. Their top-five lists share just 25% 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aviva | 10% | 35% | 10% | 25pp |
| Legal & General | 5% | 25% | 10% | 20pp |
| Royal London | 15% | 20% | 10% | 10pp |
| Vitality | 10% | 20% | 10% | 10pp |
| Smart Insurance | 10% | 0% | 0% | 10pp |
| Scottish Widows | 10% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
| LV= | 5% | 15% | 5% | 10pp |
| Bupa | 0% | 10% | 5% | 10pp |
| AXA | 0% | 10% | 10% | 10pp |
| Zurich | 10% | 5% | 10% | 5pp |
Editorial carry life insurance.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; Comparisons 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 | 86 | 9 | 91% |
| How-to guides | 39 | 5 | 89% |
| Product pages | 28 | 3 | 90% |
| Comparisons | 20 | 0 | 100% |
| News | 8 | 2 | 80% |
| Documentation | 6 | 9 | 40% |
| Other | 6 | 8 | 43% |
Structured data is what separates cited from ignored.
Of the life insurance pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Structured data is worth 26 percentage points; hard statistics pages fare 2pp 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structured data | 226 | 88% | 49 | 61% | +26pp |
| Comparison table | 95 | 91% | 180 | 79% | +12pp |
| Answer up front | 171 | 85% | 104 | 79% | +7pp |
| Named author | 127 | 86% | 148 | 80% | +5pp |
| Updated this year | 112 | 83% | 163 | 83% | +0pp |
| Hard statistics | 108 | 81% | 167 | 84% | -2pp |
Shepherds Friendly 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. Royal London is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shepherds Friendly | 55 | 25% | 8 |
| Post Office | 47 | 60% | 15 |
| Scottish Widows | 38 | 20% | 5 |
| Royal London | 36 | 4% | 117 |
| Vitality | 35 | 7% | 118 |
| LV= | 34 | 14% | 14 |
| Guardian | 31 | 0% | 4 |
| Zurich | 31 | 2% | 107 |
| Aviva | 24 | 11% | 131 |
| Legal & General | 24 | 8% | 116 |
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 life insurance 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 Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:05:55 GMT.