Sydney, Australia, Aug. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — AI search has changed what brand visibility measures. ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews compress discovery, evaluation and recommendation into a single conversational answer, so a brand can appear in that answer while the answer steers the customer toward a competitor named alongside it. AI visibility tracking has largely counted mentions and citations, both of which record presence rather than preference. Methodology detail and tier definitions are published at https://somantra.ai/brand-consideration.
Somantra, a Sydney-based AI search brand visibility and answer engine optimisation (AEO) platform, has launched the Somantra Brand Consideration Score to measure preference. The metric estimates the probability a customer would choose a brand based on how AI search engines describe and rank it against the competitors named in the same response.
The gap appears in Somantra’s published research. Its analysis of 2,437,107 AI search citation records in the Australian insurance category, released in July 2026, found 91 percent of ChatGPT citations served informational queries, while quote, buy and apply language appeared in 6.7 percent of ChatGPT citations against 12.4 percent of Google citations. Brands are researched in AI search far more often than they are transacted with, which makes the framing of a brand inside the answer the variable that decides the outcome.
“Most brands can already tell you whether ChatGPT mentioned them. Almost none can tell you whether it shaped the customer’s choice,” said Arun Prasad, Founder of Somantra. “That is the gap this closes. The model reads an AI response the way a customer comparing options would, and scores who wins the recommendation rather than who appears in it. In financial services, insurance, automotive, property and high-end consumer goods, that distinction is the difference between a vanity metric and a number the business can act on.”
The Brand Consideration Score is built on Somantra’s ICP-first methodology. For each brand, the platform simulates a minimum of 15,000 conversational journeys across the Ideal Customer Profiles most relevant to that brand, constructed from clickstream, geo-location and income datasets.
A proprietary Somantra model, trained with human feedback, reads every AI response across those journeys and predicts customer preference among the brands presented. Each response is scored at its stage of the journey and benchmarked against every competing brand named in the same answer, identifying the point at which a brand loses consideration to a competitor. It is also included in Somantra’s free AI Search Visibility Audit for Brands, which covers a minimum of 15,000 conversation paths across five Ideal Customer Profiles tailored to the brand’s category.
The score is an estimate derived from modelled conversational journeys and AI response framing. It is not a measure of completed transactions.
Each AI response places a brand into one of four categories: most likely, may consider, unlikely, or most unlikely. The tiers describe how the response positions the brand relative to the competitors named beside it, from leading choice through to framed well below. Within each tier, a further probability percentage shows where the brand stands in closely contested comparisons.
“A brand at the bottom of the ‘may consider’ band and a brand at the top of it face completely different problems,” said Prasad. “One needs positioning work. The other needs to be present in a different part of the conversation entirely. A mention count cannot tell those two situations apart, which is where marketing budget gets spent on the wrong problem.”
The Somantra Brand Consideration Score is available now within the Somantra platform, alongside the company’s existing Brand Mindshare and Brand Engagement metrics, and is tracked across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Perplexity.
The ChatGPT and Google AI Search Ranking Factors Report for Australian Insurance Brands is available at https://somantra.ai/post/australian-insurance-what-ranks-in-ai-search-2026
About Somantra
Somantra Pty Ltd is a Sydney-based AI search brand visibility and answer engine optimisation (AEO) platform that measures how brands are represented in AI-generated answers. The company tracks brand performance across three proprietary customer-intent metrics, Brand Mindshare, Brand Engagement and Brand Consideration, on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Perplexity, running a minimum of 15,000 simulated customer conversations per brand. Somantra works with enterprise brands across financial services, insurance and other high-consideration categories. Learn more at https://somantra.ai
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