Consumer Banking: AI Visibility Market Discovery Index

Benchmark Summary

Questions This Section Answers

• Which consumer bank leads the October 2026 AI recommendation benchmark, and by how much?
• How did the October 2026 benchmark differ from the July 2026 baseline?

Regions Bank leads the Consumer Banking benchmark with 23.2% valid recommendation coverage in October 2026, up from 0.0% in July 2026. The next closest brand, Flagstar Bank, trails by 7.4 percentage points.

October 2026 did not produce a month-over-month change large enough to stand out from normal variation for any tracked brand. Several brands did reverse the direction they had shown in September: Regions Bank, Flagstar Bank, Old National Bank, and Zions Bank each returned to an upward path after easing the prior month, while Santander Bank pulled back after increasing in September. Pinnacle Financial Partners continued a second consecutive month of easing.

Measured against the July 2026 baseline, seven of the ten tracked brands moved from zero coverage to rates between 1.6% and 23.2%. Three brands, Santander Bank, Webster Bank, and Zions Bank, remained within normal variation of their baseline across the four-month window. Because every tracked brand started from 0.0% coverage in July 2026, no brand recorded a decline relative to that baseline.

The benchmark began with 800 prompt-surface observations in October 2026 and produced 254 qualified observations after qualification.

Current Benchmark at a Glance

Qualified surface breadth reflects the six canonical AI and search surface families with at least one qualified observation: ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. October 2026 recorded qualified observations on all six families. September 2026 recorded qualified observations on five of the six families, with no qualified Gemini observations that month.

For the strategic interpretation of this benchmark, read CiteWorks Studio's analysis of How AI Search Is Recommending Consumer Banking

Research Scope and Qualification

Questions This Section Answers

• How many prompt-surface observations qualified for the public benchmark, and how does that compare with the raw collection?
• What separates source prompt-surface observations from qualified benchmark observations?

The public benchmark is narrower than the raw collection universe by design. The qualification funnel for each month is shown below.

Brand-level percentages use the qualified observations as the public denominator, not the raw collection. See the AI Visibility Market Discovery Methodology for full details.

Current Brand Standings

Questions This Section Answers

• Which consumer banks rank highest by valid recommendation coverage?
• How do presence rate, valid recommendation coverage, top-three rate, and rank-one rate differ across the tracked banks?

The table below shows current-month metrics for all ten tracked brands, sorted by valid recommendation coverage.

How to Read the Standings

• Presence rate: the share of qualified observations where the brand is mentioned at all, regardless of context or position.
• Valid recommendation coverage: the share of qualified observations where the brand appears in a valid recommendation shortlist.
• Top-three rate: the share of qualified observations where the brand appears among the top three recommended options.
• Rank-one rate: the share of qualified observations where the brand is the first and top recommendation.
• Net sentiment: a score from -1 to 1 measuring the balance of positive versus negative mentions, where 0 is neutral.

For formulas and denominator rules, see AI Visibility Market Discovery Metric Definitions.

Recommendation Coverage Movement

Questions This Section Answers

• Which banks moved furthest from zero coverage since the July 2026 baseline?
• Did any bank register a single-month change large enough to stand out from normal variation?
• Which bank showed the softest movement between September and October 2026?

No brand's September-to-October move was large enough to register as a distinct single-month shift. Several brands did reverse the direction they had shown the prior month: Regions Bank, Flagstar Bank, Old National Bank, and Zions Bank each returned to an upward path after easing in September, while Santander Bank eased after increasing in September. Pinnacle Financial Partners continued a second consecutive month of easing, moving from 3.6% in September 2026 to 3.1% in October 2026.

Largest Increase: Regions Bank

Regions Bank posted a gain of 23.2 percentage points from July 2026 to October 2026, moving from zero coverage to the category lead. This came from 59 valid recommendation observations out of 254 qualified observations in October 2026. Regions Bank also led all tracked brands in presence rate at 54.3% in October 2026, up from 0.0% in July 2026 (138 mentions out of 254 observations). Between September 2026 and October 2026, Regions Bank's rate moved from 17.3% to 23.2%, resuming the upward path after easing slightly in September.

Softest Month: Santander Bank

Santander Bank's valid recommendation coverage eased from 3.2% in September 2026 to 1.2% in October 2026. Against the July 2026 baseline of 0.0%, Santander Bank still stands higher than its starting point, and the benchmark does not flag this move as a significant decline. Santander Bank's presence rate remained comparatively high at 15.8% in October 2026, indicating that mentions do not always convert into recommendation placement.

Category Leader: Regions Bank

Regions Bank leads the category with 23.2% valid recommendation coverage in October 2026. The next closest brand, Flagstar Bank, holds 15.8% valid recommendation coverage, a leadership gap of 7.4 percentage points. Regions Bank also leads all brands in presence rate at 54.3%, top-three rate at 16.9%, and rank-one rate at 7.1% for the month.

Recommendation Placement Snapshot

Questions This Section Answers

• How does rank-one strength compare with overall recommendation coverage among the leading banks?
• Which bank holds the highest top-three and rank-one rates in October 2026?

Coverage alone does not show how prominently a brand is recommended. The table below compares top-three and rank-one rates for the three leading brands.

Flagstar Bank holds the second-highest coverage rate but a much lower first-choice rate (0.8%) than brands with smaller overall coverage, including First Horizon Bank at 2.0% and Pinnacle Financial Partners at 2.0%. Close coverage can hide different first-position strength.

Buyer-Intent Distribution

Questions This Section Answers

• Which buyer-intent classes produced qualified observations in the October 2026 benchmark?
• Are Pricing & Value or Multi-Brand Comparison prompts represented in the current public series?

All qualified observations in both months fell into the Brand Recommendation class.

All qualified observations sat in the Brand Recommendation class in both months, so the current public series measures that class of discovery and does not yet contain qualified observations in the Pricing & Value or Multi-Brand Comparison classes.

Historical Measurement Record

Questions This Section Answers

• What coverage leader and leader coverage level have been recorded across the four measurements?
• Has Regions Bank's lead been stable since August 2026?

This is an evergreen benchmark URL. New measurements are added to the same report.

Evidence and Source Layer

Questions This Section Answers

• What does source presence in the benchmark actually indicate about AI recommendations?
• What evidence does each prompt-level observation retain?

The benchmark is built from prompt-level observations that retain the query, AI/search surface, answer, brand outcome, recommendation placement, sentiment, and, where exposed, citations or attributable evidence sources. Source presence is evidence about the information environment. It is not automatically proof that the source caused the recommendation.

Scope Boundaries

• This public benchmark does not measure market share, attributable sales, every possible AI response, organic-search ranking, social mention volume, private or sponsored channels, or causality from a metric movement alone.

Top 10 Cited Domains

Questions This Section Answers

• Which domains were cited most often across AI platform responses, and how concentrated are those citations?
• How many tracked banks' own domains appear among the top ten cited domains?

Across all AI platform responses in this measurement period, 5,328 citations were observed across 1,253 unique domains. The table below shows the ten most-cited domains.

Citations are broadly distributed rather than concentrated: the top ten domains account for a combined 26.5% share, and no single domain exceeds 7.2%. Three tracked brands' own domains appear in the top ten, with regions.com, santanderbank.com, and firsthorizon.com all cited frequently across platforms. The remaining sources are a mix of aggregation and search surfaces (google.com, finance.yahoo.com), reference and community sites (en.wikipedia.org, reddit.com), and personal finance comparison publishers (bankrate.com, nerdwallet.com, youtube.com) that recur across nearly every AI surface.

About This Benchmark

The LLM Authority Index AI Visibility Market Discovery Index measures how brands appear across six canonical AI and search surface families: ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. It tracks presence, recommendation coverage, placement, and sentiment as distinct signals.

• AI Visibility Market Discovery Methodology
• AI Visibility Market Discovery Metric Definitions
• AI Visibility Market Discovery Research Standards
• Modeled AI Visibility Authority Value

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