Key takeaways
- We ran our live AI visibility audit tool against 21 established insurance brokerage sites and could scan 16. Average visibility was 31.2% across 80 live, grounded buyer queries. The median firm scored 40%.
- Thirteen of 16 firms were named in two of five queries or fewer. Four were not named once, and the best score was 80%, reached by one firm.
- The pattern differs from our law firm audit. Here the generic comparison query ("top insurance brokers") did best at 50%, and the problem-first query, where an owner describes a risk, did worst at 12.5%.
- Carriers and the biggest brokers crowded the answers. The Hartford and Aon were each named as an alternative in 14 of 80 answers, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. in 11 and Marsh McLennan in 8.
- Yelp was the most cited source, with 73 of 640 citations (11.4%), more than twice Wikipedia. A brokerage's own website accounted for 5 of 640.
- This is a sample of established, mostly national brokerages that we chose. It says little about a local independent agency.
Why we audited insurance brokerages
Insurance is a referral and relationship business. Agencies grow through the accountant who sends a client, the attorney who knows a good producer and the carrier rep who passes a risk along. That works well, up to a point.
The point is the business owner with no agent they trust yet, who has just been told to get cyber liability coverage, or whose carrier is not renewing. If that person describes the problem to an AI assistant, they read the shortlist it gives them, and we wanted to see what it says. So we asked a simple question. When a buyer describes an insurance need without naming a firm, which brokerages get named, and is being large and established enough?
31.2%
average AI visibility across 16 established insurance brokerages, measured by live grounded search on 80 buyer queries
Deligatr Insurance Brokerage AI Visibility Audit, October 3, 2026
How the audit works
The tool reads each brokerage's homepage, classifies it in the words a buyer would use, writes five buyer-intent queries (one local-style, two category, one problem-first, one comparison) and runs each as a live, grounded AI search with the firm's own name left out. It is one run, five queries per firm, on one day. AI answers change between runs, so read every score as a snapshot. The full method is in our audit documentation, and all twelve industry audits are on our AI visibility research page.
A firm is either in the answer or it is not.
The distribution: only one firm reached 80%
Firms by AI visibility score
16 established insurance brokerages, each tested on 5 live grounded buyer queries. Number of firms at each score.
Deligatr Insurance Brokerage AI Visibility Audit, October 3, 2026
Marsh led at 80%, followed by Aon and Lockton at 60%. Six firms, including HUB International, USI and AssuredPartners, sat at 40%. Four firms, Acrisure, McGriff, Relation Insurance and Sterling Seacrest Pritchard, were not named in any of their five queries.
Several of these are among the largest brokerages in the world. Being enormous did not make a firm reliably named, and being a niche specialist did not either: the trucking and freight specialist Reliance Partners scored 40%.
What kind of question loses the most
How often a firm was named, by query type
Share of queries in which the firm was named. 16 firms, 80 queries.
Deligatr Insurance Brokerage AI Visibility Audit, October 3, 2026
This is the opposite of what we saw with law firms, where the generic category query did worst. For brokerages, the "top insurance brokers" style of question did best, at 50%, and several of the biggest names were named for it, including Marsh, Aon and Lockton.
The weakest spot was the buyer with a problem. Only 2 of 16 problem-first queries named the brokerage. These are the queries that sound like a real owner: "my company needs help managing insurance risk and liability exposure". In those answers the names that showed up were largely carriers such as The Hartford and Progressive Commercial and payroll and benefits platforms such as Paychex, with few brokers.
Local-style queries were also weak at 18.8%. One caution: for several firms the local query was a generic "near me" with no city, and for global firms the tool picked a location from the homepage, for example Casablanca for Lockton and London for the bbrown.com site. Treat the local number as the roughest of the four.
Who got named instead, and where the answers came from
When a brokerage was not named, AI named someone else, and it was usually a carrier or one of the big brokers. The Hartford and Aon were each named as an alternative in 14 of 80 answers. Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. appeared in 11 and Marsh McLennan in 8. Goosehead Insurance and Willis Towers Watson were named in 6 each, and Hiscox, Chubb and HUB International in 5 each. Gallagher also appeared under the shorter name "Gallagher" in 8 more answers, though we cannot tell how many of those overlap.
Two of the five firms we could not scan, Gallagher and Willis Towers Watson, were still named by AI as alternatives in other firms' answers. A failure to scan with our tool is not the same as being invisible to AI.
The sources behind the answers were concentrated on review and comparison content. Across 640 citations on 299 domains, Yelp was cited 73 times, 11.4% of the total. Wikipedia was 33. The Hartford's own site was cited 17 times, MoneyGeek 16, Insurance Business 15, Alliant 13 and Hiscox 9. Almost all of the Yelp citations (71 of 73) came from the local-style queries.
73 of 640
citations pointed to Yelp, the single most cited source, more than twice Wikipedia and far more than any brokerage's own website
Deligatr Insurance Brokerage AI Visibility Audit, October 3, 2026
A brokerage's own website was cited 5 times in 640, under 1%. For firms whose marketing is mostly their own website and their carrier relationships, that is the number that matters. AI built its answers from review sites, carrier content and comparison sites. If a firm's profile is thin or inconsistent there, a very good website does not make up for it.
The five we could not scan
We attempted 21 sites and could scan 16. The five that could not be audited were Gallagher (ajg.com), Brown & Brown's brokerage site (bbrownins.com), Higginbotham, Hilb Group and Willis Towers Watson (wtwco.com). In each case the tool could not read enough of the site to run. We cannot tell from outside whether this was bot protection or something else, or whether it also affects the crawlers AI assistants use. If it does, the firm's content is not being read at all.
What the generic label costs
Our tool read 9 of the 16 firms as simply an "insurance broker". Others came out more specific: "trucking and freight insurance broker", "commercial insurance broker", "insurance agent for auto, home, farm, life and business insurance". The more specific the description, the more specific the questions the tool asked on the firm's behalf.
We did not run a controlled test, so we are not claiming specialization causes visibility. But the logic is simple. AI answers a question about a trade, a line and a state. An agency that states those things clearly, and consistently across its site and profiles, is easier to place than one that describes itself as a full-service broker.
What to do with this, if you run an agency
- State your appetite in one plain sentence. Name the trades, lines and states you write. "Workers' comp and general liability for roofing and trades contractors in Texas" is easy to place. "A full-service independent agency" is not.
- Treat your review and listing profiles as part of your marketing. Yelp topped the citations. Check that your name, address, lines and licensing are accurate and consistent, and ask satisfied clients for genuine reviews, openly.
- Write for the worried moment. Non-renewal, a new exposure, a contract that requires coverage. Plain-English pages that say what it means and what to do first are what problem-first questions need, and few agencies publish them.
- Be honest about broker versus carrier and independent versus captive. Carriers and comparison sites answer these in their own favor. A clear, fair explanation from an agency is rare enough to be quotable.
- Earn mentions that AI trusts. Trade media, carrier agency pages and association listings shape the answer. Pursue them openly, and within your state's insurance advertising rules.
- Check whether your site can be read, then re-test. AI answers change, so a single score tells you little.
If you want this work done as a program, see our AEO, GEO and SEO service for insurance agencies and brokerages. Outbound is a separate lane, and our case study on a referral-only broker's first outbound campaign is one client's experience, not a typical result.
Book a free consultation and we will run your own constructed questions against live assistants and show you who is named instead of your agency. Inbound is $2,500 a month on monthly billing.
Book a consultationEvery brokerage we audited
Firm | Visibility | Appeared on | Top rival named instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marsh | 80% | Category x2, Problem, Comparison | Aon |
| Aon | 60% | Category x2, Comparison | Willis Towers Watson |
| Lockton | 60% | Local, Category, Comparison | Aon |
| Alliant | 40% | Category, Comparison | Lemonbrew Insurance |
| AssuredPartners | 40% | Category, Comparison | HUB International |
| HUB International | 40% | Category x2 | Marsh McLennan Agency |
| Reliance Partners | 40% | Local, Category | The Hartford |
| Brown & Brown (risk-strategies.com) | 40% | Problem, Comparison | Chubb |
| USI | 40% | Category, Comparison | Goosehead Insurance |
| Brown & Brown (bbrown.com) | 20% | Comparison | The Hartford |
| Cottingham Insurance | 20% | Local | Kramer Agency |
| Goosehead Insurance | 20% | Category | State Farm |
| Acrisure | 0% | None | The Hartford |
| McGriff | 0% | None | Aon |
| Relation Insurance | 0% | None | Simply Business |
| Sterling Seacrest Pritchard | 0% | None | BIS Benefits |
Our tool read two different domains as Brown & Brown, which is why that name appears twice. Not scanned (the tool could not read enough of the site): Gallagher, Brown & Brown (bbrownins.com), Higginbotham, Hilb Group, Willis Towers Watson.
Check your own number
Every firm above was run through the same tool below. It takes about ninety seconds, and your agency's name is never in the query.
Do AI assistants recommend you?
Five buyer-style queries for your category, run through live AI search, show who gets named instead of you. Takes about ninety seconds.
Free. The full report arrives by email so the tab can close.
Methodology and honest limitations
What we did. On October 3, 2026 we ran the live audit tool that powers our free checker against 21 established insurance brokerage and agency sites: one run, five queries per firm, visibility measurement only. The step-by-step method is in our audit documentation. We could scan 16 of the 21, and a firm that disputes its result can ask us to re-run it.
The sample. We chose real, identifiable brokerages and agencies. It is mostly national and global brokerages, with a few regional agencies, picked by us and not at random. It is not a census and it is not representative of local independent agencies. A firm's score also depends on how our classifier read its homepage, and for firms with offices in several countries the tool's choice of location may not match the market you care about.
What it does not cover. Only the homepage was read, so a firm with a thin homepage and strong inner pages may be undercounted. Five queries per firm is a small sample of real buyer language, and most were broad, such as "top insurance brokers", rather than tied to one line and state. Results come from one run on one day, and AI answers change over time. We counted a citation as the firm's own site when the cited domain matched the firm's own domain and checked those matches by hand. We did not test whether any firm pays for directory or comparison-site placement.
On advertising rules. Nothing here is legal advice. Insurance advertising and licensing rules vary by state, and your own state insurance department's rules apply.
FAQ
How visible are established insurance brokerages in AI answers?
Not very. Across the 16 brokerages we could scan, average visibility was 31.2% over 80 buyer queries. Thirteen firms were named in two of five queries or fewer, four were not named at all, and only one, Marsh, scored 80%.
Who did AI name instead?
Carriers and the largest brokers. The Hartford and Aon were each named as an alternative in 14 of 80 answers, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. in 11, Marsh McLennan in 8, Goosehead Insurance and Willis Towers Watson in 6 each, and Hiscox, Chubb and HUB International in 5 each.
Where does AI get its answers about insurance brokers?
Heavily from review sites and comparison content. Across 640 citations, Yelp was the biggest source at 73, well ahead of Wikipedia at 33. Carrier sites, comparison and advice sites such as MoneyGeek, and trade media such as Insurance Business followed. A brokerage's own website was 5 of 640 citations.
Does this audit tell us how small independent agencies fare?
No. Our sample was mostly national and global brokerages, plus a few regional agencies, and we chose them rather than sampling at random. A local independent agency was not the focus, so treat the numbers as a picture of established brokerages, not as a forecast for a five-person shop.
Why could five sites not be scanned?
We attempted 21 sites. For five of them, Gallagher, Brown & Brown's brokerage site, Higginbotham, Hilb Group and Willis Towers Watson, our audit tool could not read enough of the site to run. We cannot tell from outside whether the cause was bot protection or something else, or whether it affects the crawlers AI assistants use.
Can an insurance agency pay for a better result?
We would not count on it. Some comparison sites and review platforms sell placement, and we cannot see how AI weighs that. Accurate listings, a clear statement of the lines and states you write and genuine reviews are the safer route, within your state's insurance advertising rules.
