Suren Pillai · Calgary, Alberta · Working US & Canada

I spent a decade running insurance marketing from the inside. Now I measure what replaced it.

I led digital marketing at Westland Insurance, one of the largest independent brokerages in Canada, and before that ran digital for Sompo and AXA in Singapore. Seven-figure paid budgets, compliance review cycles, and location programs across seventy branches. Hands on throughout: I built the campaigns, managed the ad accounts and did the SEO myself rather than briefing it out. Not advising on insurance marketing. Accountable for it.

For the past three years I have worked with insurance agencies across the United States, concentrated in trucking insurance, workers compensation and commercial lines: lead generation and follow-up, paid search and paid social.

Then the results page changed. Google began answering coverage questions itself, and no tool could tell an insurer whether it was named in those answers. So I built the capture and published it: 3,644 searches a month across 56 states and provinces and 109 metros, free, with the method and the query sets in the open.

It is the only continuous public measurement of AI visibility in North American insurance that I am aware of. If you find another, I would like to see it.

The track record, named

Current work, then the decade before it · employers named, clients not

2023–now · United States

Insurance agency growth
Independent practice

For the past three years I have worked with insurance agencies across the United States, concentrated in trucking insurance, workers compensation and commercial lines. Lead generation and lead follow-up, paid search and paid social, and the measurement underneath all of it. Still hands on in the accounts rather than briefing the work out.

Commercial lines is where the search demand runs furthest ahead of the quality of the pages competing for it, which is why the Index carries a commercial board alongside car and home.

2020–2023 · Canada

Led Digital Marketing
Westland Insurance

Senior Manager, Digital Marketing. Led the team and the strategy on a seven-figure budget, and stayed hands on in the accounts: managed the paid search and paid social builds, ran the SEO programme and the technical fixes, and owned the email calendar. Organic traffic up 300%, web leads tripled, 1,000+ keywords into the top three. Took Westland to the highest-visibility insurance domain in Canada, ahead of TD Insurance, ICBC, BCAA and RBC.

2019–2020 · Singapore

Digital Marketing Lead
Sompo Insurance Singapore

Grew digital revenue 10% year over year while cutting ad costs 28%. Brought paid search in-house and ran the accounts myself, taking cost per acquisition down more than 30%. Unbranded organic traffic up over 500%.

2016–2018 · Singapore

Assistant Manager, Digital Commerce
AXA Insurance Singapore

Led the analytics and SEO teams for a global carrier operating across regulated markets. Organic traffic up 46%, ecommerce site traffic up 200% year over year.

2015–2016 · British Columbia

Online Marketing Specialist
Westland Insurance Group

Doubled web leads and tripled website revenue, running local search across more than seventy branches: profile setup, listings, and location page architecture, branch by branch. The multi-location problem the Index now measures is one I have had to solve with my own budget on the line.

Also: SEO, SEM, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager instructor, Tertiary Infotech Singapore, 2016–2020. BBA, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Diploma in Marketing, Temasek Polytechnic, Singapore.

What I can speak to

For journalists, editors and conference programmes

Which insurers AI assistants actually name. Citation share in AI Overviews across car, home and commercial lines, measured monthly rather than estimated.
What the AI answer layer has taken and what it has not. An AIO appears above 87.5% of quote keywords, yet insurers still hold 67% of the top ten on quote intent.
Who really owns local insurance search. State Farm, Allstate and Farmers hold 2.66% of American insurance map slots between them. State Farm appears in no map pack at all in 84 of 99 metros.
Why insurance search costs what it does. Car insurance quotes runs 823,000 searches a month at $157.72 per click, roughly $1.5bn a year to buy outright.

For media

Same-day comment, usually within the hour, Mountain Time
Original figures with capture dates, not estimates or vendor data
Custom cuts by state, province or metro on request, at no cost to newsrooms
Data is free to cite with attribution to Insurance SEO SEM
Direct line: hello@insuranceseosem.com

Disclosure

I used to work for the company that leads my own Canadian board.

Westland Insurance holds 10.1% of Canadian insurance map slots in the August 2026 capture, the largest share of any operator in the country. I was Senior Manager, Digital Marketing at Westland from 2020 to 2023.

I have no current commercial relationship with Westland, and the boards are produced from a fixed, published query set that I do not adjust. But you should not have to take that on trust, so the query sets and the method are public and the capture is reproducible. Rerun it.

Publicly checkable

The full Index is free, no signup, with capture dates on every figure
The method is published, including what it gets wrong
The query sets are published so anyone can rerun them
No client is ranked into a board
Within six months of launch this site ranked first in Canada and fifth in the US for "insurance SEO"

Who you actually work with

Named, because I ask insurance sites to do the same

Suren Pillai

Principal · Insurance SEO and GEO

Over a decade in search, concentrated in insurance and financial services across Canada, the United States and Singapore. I run the monthly Index captures and every client analysis myself.

This is a small senior practice, not an agency floor. You work with the person doing the analysis. There is no account manager relaying questions to an analyst you never meet, and no junior learning insurance on your retainer. If that shape is wrong for your organization, I will say so on the first call rather than in the third month.

How we measure

The same method on client work and public boards

Fixed query sets. Each line has a published query list. It does not change between months, so movement is movement rather than a different question.
Two scores, never blended. Organic visibility is position-weighted share indexed to the geography leader. AI visibility is citation share in AI Overviews. One number hiding both would be easier to sell and less true.
Three captures, median reported. AI answers vary. We publish the spread alongside the figure.
Participant types are separated and filterable. Comparison sites, publishers and forums supply most citations. Blending them into a carrier board would make it unreadable, so the split is published and you can filter it yourself.

Every figure is dated. On the page it appears on, with the next refresh date beside it.
Businesses are named as captured. Map pack and organic results are public search results, and we report them as they appeared. Client relationships are never disclosed.
Corrections are published. If a figure was wrong, the page says what changed and when, rather than quietly updating.
No client is ranked into the Index. Client work does not affect a board. If that ever becomes hard to prove, the Index is worth less than the client.

Contact

Start with the scorecard.

Tell us your lines and your markets. We run the same capture the Index runs, send you the board with your competitor set on it, and you decide from there whether there is work worth doing.

Free · 2-day turnaround · no call required to receive it

hello@insuranceseosem.com

Calgary, Alberta, Canada