A Google AI Overview does two things with brands. It names them in the answer text, and it credits sources beneath it. We measure both separately, and they are frequently not the same companies.
The clearest cases from our September 2026 US data.
Cited, never named
| Brand | Line | Cited as source | Named in answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liberty Mutual | Car | 14.0% | 0.0% |
| Kin Insurance | Home | 13.7% | 0.0% |
| Liberty Mutual | Home | 9.7% | 0.0% |
| Mercury Insurance | Home | 9.4% | 0.0% |
Averaged across all 50 US state boards for each line.
Liberty Mutual’s pages are being read and used to compose answers about car insurance in every state we measure. The answer never mentions Liberty Mutual.
Kin Insurance is the more striking one. It is a Florida-founded home insurer most people outside the market have not heard of, and it is the joint most-cited carrier source in US home insurance answers.
Named, never cited
| Brand | Line | Named in answer | Cited as source |
|---|---|---|---|
| USAA | Home | 10.2% | 0.0% |
| USAA | Car | 10.1% | 0.0% |
| Progressive | Commercial | 9.6% | 0.1% |
| Travelers | Car | 9.3% | 0.0% |
The inverse position. Google recommends USAA constantly and never builds the answer from USAA’s pages.
There is a plausible reason in USAA’s case: much of its useful content sits behind eligibility gating, and a page that cannot be crawled cannot be cited. Being named anyway suggests the model knows the brand from elsewhere.
Progressive in commercial is different again. Progressive is named in 9.6% of US commercial answers. Its commercial content sits on progressivecommercial.com, a separate domain, which is cited 717 times. Count only progressive.com and the brand looks absent from a category it is substantially present in.
Why both numbers matter
They fail differently.
Cited but not named means your content is doing work you get no attribution for. The reader learns what you taught them and hears someone else’s name.
Named but not cited means your brand recognition is carrying you, and nothing on your site is reinforcing it. That position is only as durable as the model’s existing impression of you.
Neither is visible in rank tracking. Both are measurable.
What to check on your own brand
- Whether your commercial, claims or coverage content sits on a second domain, and whether your reporting counts it as you.
- Whether the content most likely to be quoted is gated, behind a login, or rendered as a tool rather than text.
- Whether you are tracking mention share and citation share as separate numbers, or collapsing them into one “AI visibility” figure that hides which one is broken.
Method
3,248 insurance searches across car, home and commercial lines in 50 US states and 6 Canadian provinces, captured September 2026. Mention share counts answers naming a brand in the text. Citation share counts sources credited beneath the answer. Brands are attributed through a published entity taxonomy.
Full method: https://insuranceseosem.com/about/#methodology