India BFSI AI visibility study covers 594 brands, 32 categories and more than 14,000 AI answers. Household names are missing from the shortlists customers now see, and Google rank no longer predicts what AI recommends
MUMBAI, 03 September 2026 — AI assistants never name one in three Indian BFSI brands. Of 594 banking, financial services and insurance companies tracked across 32 categories, 187 were not named once. Not by ChatGPT, not by Google AI Overviews, not by Perplexity.
The finding comes from the State of AI Visibility 2026 – BFSI India, published today by AI visibility firm Geology. The index asked 1,390 unbranded buying questions and 2,832 brand-specific ones. Three assistants answered each. More than 14,000 answers were recorded. It is the first study of AI visibility across Indian BFSI at this scale.
The absent are not small companies.
Take travel insurance. Asked the fifty questions Indian buyers most commonly put to an assistant, none of the three named New India Assurance, Oriental Insurance or United India Insurance. Not once. Tata AIG was named in 45 of the 50.
The same holds elsewhere in BFSI. Punjab National Bank and Canara Bank appear in none of the fifty most common credit card questions. HDFC Bank appears in 44. BharatPe appears in none of the fifty on business payments. Razorpay appears in 47. Axis Direct appears in no stockbroking question at all. Zerodha appears in 47.
The pattern is sector-wide. In payments infrastructure, data and analytics, and regtech, more than half the tracked field is never named.
Google rank no longer predicts what AI recommends
The index put the same questions to Google and to the assistants. The two surfaces disagree.
Bajaj Allianz General ranks on Google’s first page for none of the fifty motor insurance questions. AI names it in 80% of answers. Policybazaar ranks for 96% of those questions. AI names it in 34%. In personal loans, Yes Bank ranks for 42%. It appears in one AI answer out of fifty.
“Every bank and insurer in India watches its Google ranking. Almost none watches what an AI assistant says,” said Mehul Jain, co-founder of Geology. “Those are now different questions with different answers. A BFSI brand can be doing everything right on search and still be missing from the shortlist a customer is shown. Nothing in its current reporting would show that.”
Where the answers come from
The index also traced what the assistants read.
In five of the 32 BFSI categories, the most-cited source was Reddit. Not a provider. Not a regulator. Not a publication. Those categories include UPI and payments, conversational AI and banking-as-a-service.
In health insurance, the most-cited company website was not an insurer’s. It belonged to Ditto, a small advisory startup. On ChatGPT it was cited more often than any insurer, and behind only the regulator.
One assistant drew 13% of its sources for Indian health insurance from American websites, including healthcare.gov and uhc.com. It named Indian insurers correctly while sourcing the claims from US carriers.
The assistants are also unreliable on published facts. Asked for one insurer’s claim settlement ratio, a single published number, they returned 17 different values between 61% and 97%. In another case an insurer’s own page stated its hospital network three ways. The assistants reported a fourth figure that appears nowhere on the site.
Methodology
Geology ran the index between August and September 2026. It put 1,390 unbranded buying questions to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity across 32 categories of Indian BFSI. It then asked 2,832 questions naming specific companies.
No unbranded question named a company. The brands that appeared were chosen by the assistants, not prompted. All queries ran from an Indian market context.
More than 14,000 answers were recorded, with every source cited. Mentions and citations are counted separately and never combined. Results are reported per assistant, never blended, because what earns a mention differs sharply between them.
The report covers 32 BFSI categories. They include health insurance, motor, term life, credit cards, personal loans, home loans and deposits. Also UPI and payments, stockbroking, mutual funds, wealth management, payments infrastructure, KYC and onboarding, and lending technology.
The report can be requested here: State of AI Visibility 2026 – BFSI India – Request Report
About Geology
Geology measures and improves how AI engines find, cite and recommend brands. It works with BFSI and technology companies in India and internationally. The State of AI Visibility 2026 – BFSI India is its first sector-wide index.
The report is unveiled at Global Fintech Fest 2026, 9 to 11 September, at booth JZ14 in Jasmine Hall.
