FTA Global has released “The Context Report”, examining how AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini can provide different brand recommendations when the same buying question is asked from different locations and in different languages.
The study analysed 1,200 identical questions across 10 business categories, including CRM, project management, payroll, email marketing, accounting, payments, video conferencing, web hosting, cloud storage, and HR and recruiting. The questions were tested across 12 cities and seven languages on ChatGPT and Gemini, with each question repeated five times to measure changes in the responses.
The report questions whether a single AI visibility score can accurately represent how brands are discovered across different buyer situations. According to the study, AI-generated recommendations can vary based on the buyer’s location, language and the AI platform being used.
The report highlights this difference through its payment gateway tests. When asked about payment gateways in New York, ChatGPT and Gemini recommended brands such as Stripe, Square and PayPal. When the same question was asked in Mumbai, the recommendations moved towards Indian brands including Razorpay, Cashfree and PayU. The two city-level results did not share any brand names, highlighting the extent to which recommendations can change according to buyer context.
The study found that nearly three of the top five recommended brands changed when the buyer moved away from New York and English. Of the 206 brands identified across the study, 159 appeared in only one country, indicating significant variation in AI recommendations across markets.
The report also found greater geographical variation in money-related categories, where an average of 4.4 of the top five brands changed between markets, compared with 1.5 for everyday categories such as video conferencing and cloud storage. In HR software, none of the top United States brands appeared in any of the other countries tested.
The study further found that ChatGPT and Gemini shared only about 3.2 of the top five brands for the same question in the same city. Repeated testing also showed that the same question generated a consistent top brand in only 35 per cent of tests, despite the location, language and question remaining unchanged.
Local content also emerged as a factor in AI-generated responses. In Germany, 42 per cent of the sources cited by AI were German web pages, highlighting the role of local content in answers to location-specific buying questions.
Commenting on the report, Senthil Kumar Hariram, Founder and Managing Director, FTA Global, said, “AI is changing the way brands are discovered, but discovery does not happen the same way for every buyer. The same question can lead to different brand recommendations depending on the buyer’s location, language, or the AI platform being used. This report makes clear that brands need to move beyond asking how visible they are and start asking where, in what context, and how consistently they are being discovered. This report is a wake-up call for brands to look beyond a single visibility score, and Context Authority is how we help them see the full picture.”
FTA Global has also introduced Context Authority, a metric intended to evaluate how consistently a brand owns a buying moment across the cities, languages and AI environments relevant to its audience. Instead of treating AI visibility as one global measure, the approach assesses brand presence across multiple contextual factors and repeated AI responses.
The report points to a changing approach to brand visibility as AI becomes increasingly involved in the research and consideration process. According to the findings, visibility in one market or within a single AI response may not necessarily translate into visibility across the different contexts in which customers make purchasing decisions.
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