Pensions,
according to AI
Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about pensions — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Hargreaves Lansdown owns the conversation.
0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated
Hargreaves Lansdown is the default answer.
Named in 7% of pensions answers, typically in position 1.8. Vanguard follows at 7%, Legal & General at 7%.
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 | Hargreaves Lansdown | 7% | 1.8 | 6% | 0% |
| 2 | Vanguard | 7% | 1.8 | 3% | 100% |
| 3 | Legal & General | 7% | 3.3 | 6% | 50% |
| 4 | Aviva | 5% | 2.0 | 13% | 33% |
| 5 | AJ Bell | 5% | 2.3 | 6% | 50% |
| 6 | Interactive Investor | 5% | 3.3 | 8% | 100% |
| 7 | Fidelity International | 5% | 3.7 | 7% | 25% |
| 8 | NEST | 3% | 1.0 | 3% | — |
| 9 | Scottish Widows | 3% | 3.5 | 6% | 0% |
| 10 | Peoples Pension | 2% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Standard Life | 2% | 4.0 | 3% | 33% |
| 12 | Aegon | 0% | — | 8% | 67% |
| 13 | Freetrade | 0% | — | 1% | — |
| 14 | Monzo | 0% | — | 1% | — |
| 15 | Nutmeg | 0% | — | 1% | — |
Legal & General is named most. That is not the same as being wanted.
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 pensions, Aviva leads affinity at 97 against Peoples Pension at 91, indexed on the category at 100.
Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full pensions desire edition →
Before it answers, it goes looking for AJ Bell.
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 pensions, AJ Bell is named in 20% 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 pensions.
The independent sources AI models cite when answering pensions questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.
Aegon converts reads into citations. Hargreaves Lansdown doesn't.
When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Aegon converts 67% of reads; Hargreaves Lansdown just 0%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.
Full data table
| # | Brand | Visibility | Avg. position | Citation share | Read→cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hargreaves Lansdown | 7% | 1.8 | 6% | 0% |
| 2 | Vanguard | 7% | 1.8 | 3% | 100% |
| 3 | Legal & General | 7% | 3.3 | 6% | 50% |
| 4 | Aviva | 5% | 2.0 | 13% | 33% |
| 5 | AJ Bell | 5% | 2.3 | 6% | 50% |
| 6 | Interactive Investor | 5% | 3.3 | 8% | 100% |
| 7 | Fidelity International | 5% | 3.7 | 7% | 25% |
| 8 | NEST | 3% | 1.0 | 3% | — |
| 9 | Scottish Widows | 3% | 3.5 | 6% | 0% |
| 10 | Peoples Pension | 2% | 1.0 | 0% | — |
| 11 | Standard Life | 2% | 4.0 | 3% | 33% |
| 12 | Aegon | 0% | — | 8% | 67% |
| 13 | Freetrade | 0% | — | 1% | — |
| 14 | Monzo | 0% | — | 1% | — |
| 15 | Nutmeg | 0% | — | 1% | — |
Three models. Three different answers.
Ask about pensions and the brand you are shown depends on the assistant: Claude → Peoples Pension, Gemini → AJ Bell, ChatGPT → Fidelity International. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hargreaves Lansdown | 5% | 15% | 0% | 15pp |
| AJ Bell | 0% | 15% | 0% | 15pp |
| Vanguard | 0% | 15% | 5% | 15pp |
| Legal & General | 0% | 15% | 5% | 15pp |
| Interactive Investor | 0% | 10% | 5% | 10pp |
| Aviva | 0% | 10% | 5% | 10pp |
| NEST | 0% | 10% | 0% | 10pp |
| Fidelity International | 0% | 10% | 5% | 10pp |
| Peoples Pension | 5% | 0% | 0% | 5pp |
| Scottish Widows | 0% | 5% | 5% | 5pp |
Editorial carry pensions.
Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; How-to guides convert best — 97% of the ones models opened were actually cited.
The data behind this chart
| Page type | Cited | Read but not cited | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial | 107 | 5 | 96% |
| How-to guides | 68 | 2 | 97% |
| Comparisons | 25 | 1 | 96% |
| Documentation | 19 | 2 | 90% |
| Product pages | 10 | 1 | 91% |
| Other | 9 | 5 | 64% |
Answer up front is what separates cited from ignored.
Of the pensions pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Answer up front is worth 7 percentage points; hard statistics pages fare 9pp 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 | 180 | 96% | 115 | 89% | +7pp |
| Structured data | 234 | 94% | 61 | 90% | +3pp |
| Comparison table | 82 | 95% | 213 | 92% | +3pp |
| Updated this year | 122 | 92% | 173 | 94% | -2pp |
| Named author | 128 | 91% | 167 | 94% | -3pp |
| Hard statistics | 144 | 88% | 151 | 97% | -9pp |
Freetrade 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. Wealthify is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.
| Brand | Readiness | Pages cited | Pages profiled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freetrade | 59 | 25% | 4 |
| Wealthify | 54 | 0% | 3 |
| PensionBee | 51 | 25% | 36 |
| LV= | 48 | 0% | 5 |
| Standard Life | 45 | 14% | 29 |
| Royal London | 44 | 14% | 22 |
| InvestEngine | 40 | 0% | 5 |
| Scottish Widows | 39 | 22% | 9 |
| AJ Bell | 37 | 1% | 142 |
| Canada Life | 33 | 20% | 5 |
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 pensions 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 Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:07:21 GMT.