Every source credited beneath a Google AI Overview is a slot. Someone’s page is in it. In US car insurance answers, here is who holds those slots.
| Source type | Share of citations |
|---|---|
| Insurers | 35.5% |
| Comparison sites | 29.8% |
| Publishers | 18.0% |
| Forums and video | 7.8% |
| Agencies and brokers | 4.1% |
| Regulators | 2.4% |
That is 5,732 citations across 1,064 searches in 50 US states and 6 Canadian provinces, September 2026.
The specific names
Comparison sites are not an abstraction. Four companies hold most of that 29.8%: NerdWallet (450 citations), The Zebra (330), Insurify (219) and Compare.com.
Add US News at 519 citations and you have five companies, none of which underwrites a policy, holding more citation share than any individual carrier.
Why this is different from ranking
Aggregators have dominated insurance search results for years. That is not news and carriers have long since priced it in.
What is different is the mechanism. A comparison site ranking at position three costs you a click. A comparison site cited as a source means its framing of the category is what the reader sees before any click happens at all.
When someone asks Google what the cheapest car insurance is, the answer they read is assembled substantially from pages written by companies paid to route that person to whoever bids highest.
The agency number
4.1% is the part worth sitting with if you sell through independent agents.
Agencies produce enormous quantities of insurance content. Local guides, coverage explainers, state requirement pages, FAQs. Across our entire US car insurance capture, that whole category holds one twenty-fifth of the source slots.
In commercial insurance the number is better, 6.4%, and in home insurance worse.
Where agencies still win
One place, clearly. Near-me insurance searches return a Google map pack on 97.3% of captures across 109 US and Canadian metros, and an AI Overview on 2.3%.
There is effectively no answer layer on local insurance search yet. The map pack is still the whole game, and it is contested almost entirely by local businesses rather than by national brands.
That is a real advantage and it has a shelf life. If the AI Overview rate on near-me queries moves the way it has moved on every other query type we track, this is the last quiet year.
What a carrier or brokerage can do about it
Nothing quick. But the diagnosis is cheap:
- Count your own citation share on the queries you care about, by market.
- Look at what the aggregators’ cited pages actually contain. They are usually structured comparison and cost content, updated on a schedule, with the numbers in plain text.
- Check whether your own equivalent content exists as extractable text or as an interactive tool. Tools do not get quoted.
Method
1,064 car insurance searches across 56 markets, captured September 2026 through geo-targeted live SERP retrieval. Citations are attributed to source types through a published entity taxonomy covering 340 domains.
Full method: https://insuranceseosem.com/about/#methodology
The car insurance board: https://insuranceseosem.com/index/auto/