National & Regional Credit Union AI Search Visibility Study (Zenodo)

Summary

• The benchmark ran 1,800 brand-inclusion evaluations across 18 anonymized institutions in three cohorts of 6.p.1
• Across all evaluations there were 79 positive brand inclusions, an aggregate 95.6% Total Brand Omission rate (4.4% visibility).p.2
• Omission for the original 12 national credit unions and ethical fintechs shifted by only 0.5 percentage points, from 96.0% to 95.5%, between sterile and default logged-in mode.p.2
• The Indianapolis credit union cohort had a 98.3% omission rate (1.7% visibility) across the 20 unbranded queries.p.2
• On the 5 localized prompts the Indianapolis cohort still had an 81.7% omission rate (18.3% visibility, or 22 of 120 evaluations).p.2
• The four AI engines populated 413 recommendation slots: ChatGPT 109, Gemini 112, Perplexity 104 and Claude 88.p.8

Key insights

1. Total Brand Omission is a persistent failure rather than an artifact of browser privacy settings, given the 0.5 percentage point shift between modes.p.2
2. The Indianapolis cohort recorded 0.0% visibility on ChatGPT and Gemini across the 20 unbranded queries.p.2
3. On the localized high-yield savings query (Q22), the Indianapolis cohort faced an 83.3% omission rate.p.2
4. AI models often replaced specific institutions with generic placeholders such as "local credit unions".p.13
5. On Q22, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude routed 100% of their slots to out-of-state online-only banks.p.14
6. Total Brand Omission of 95.6% across 1,800 evaluations is invariant between sterile and default authenticated sessions.p.14