Updated August 2026. The data below was captured in 2024 and is kept as a record of that moment. Where our current monthly measurement supersedes it, we say so inline rather than quietly overwriting it. The live equivalent is the Insurance Visibility Index.
Domain authority is a third-party score, not a Google metric, and the useful question about it is narrow: does it predict who ranks?
The 2024 finding
Across Canadian insurance keywords, higher-authority domains ranked better on average, but the relationship was loose. Comparison sites and national publishers with high scores frequently outranked insurers, and several brokerages with modest scores held strong positions on regional and coverage-specific terms.
The practical reading was that authority acts as a floor rather than a predictor. It correlates with being able to compete; it does not determine who wins a given search.
What our 2026 measurement adds
We asked the same question of a different outcome: does authority predict whether Google cites a page as a source in its AI answers?
Across our August 2026 capture of car and business insurance searches in all 50 US states and 6 Canadian provinces, 62% of the sources Google credited also appeared in the top ten organic results for that same search. Not one answer in the dataset cited nothing that ranked.
That is the useful correlation, and it is not about authority. Ranking is close to necessary for citation and nowhere near sufficient: 38% of citations came from outside the top ten, and every answer drew on at least one page that was ranking.
What that means in practice
Insurance SEO and AI visibility are not competing budgets. The ranking work buys eligibility. What decides which of the eligible pages actually gets cited is something else: our measurement points at direct answers early in the page, state-specific figures with visible dates, and being referenced by sources Google already trusts.
Authority scores tell you very little about either.
Canadian specifics
In Alberta, comparison sites hold the top two organic positions for car insurance ahead of every insurer, which does not happen in any US state we measure. Canadian brokerages also supply a larger share of the sources behind Canadian insurance answers than US agencies do in the United States.
The Canada boards carry the current figures, updated monthly.
Method
The 2024 correlation used third-party domain authority scores against Canadian insurance keyword rankings. The 2026 overlap figure comes from our own capture: every source credited beneath an AI answer, matched against the top ten organic results for the identical search and geography. 815 answers, 5,185 citations.