Nearly three of the top five brands recommended by AI change when a buyer moves away from New York and English, according to FTA Global’s “The Context Report,” highlighting how location and language can influence brand discovery through AI platforms.
The study examined how AI chatbots, including ChatGPT and Gemini, respond to the same buying questions across different buyer contexts. It tested 1,200 answers across 10 business categories, including CRM, project management, payroll, email marketing, accounting, payments, video conferencing, web hosting, cloud storage, and HR and recruiting.
According to the report’s methodology, the study covered 10 cities and seven languages. Each question was run on ChatGPT and Gemini five times.
The findings show that AI-generated brand recommendations can vary significantly across markets. Of the 206 brands identified in the study, 159 appeared in only one country, indicating a strong presence of local brands in AI-generated recommendations.
The variation was higher for categories linked to money and local market requirements. The report found that 4.4 of the top five brands changed across markets for money tools such as payroll, accounting, payments and HR, compared with 1.5 for everyday tools such as video conferencing and cloud storage. HR and recruiting showed the highest category-level movement, with all five brands changing against the New York answer.
The report also found differences between AI platforms. ChatGPT and Gemini shared about 3.2 of the top five brands for the same question in the same city. In one example, for a CRM query in Paris, Gemini placed Sellsy first, while ChatGPT placed Pipedrive first.
The payment category showed the geographic variation. In New York, the top five recommendations were Stripe, Square, PayPal, Helcim and Shopify. In Mumbai, the list was Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU, PhonePe and Instamojo, with no brands appearing in both lists.
The report also tested the same Mumbai buying question in English, Hindi and Hinglish. All three versions returned Indian brands, while Paytm appeared in the Hindi results in place of one of the brands in the English list.
Repeated testing also produced variations. The same question, location and language returned the same top brand in only 35% of cases when run five times. On average, two different brands took the No. 1 position across the five runs, while 76% of runs matched the most common pick.
The study found that AI recommendations also draw on local sources. In Germany, 42% of cited sources were German pages, followed by 34% in France, 28% in the UK, 23% in Spain, 22% in Mexico, 17% in India and 12% in the UAE. The report said the sources included local review sites, media and company pages.
Commenting on the report findings, 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 introduced Context Authority, a metric designed to assess brand presence across cities, languages and AI environments. The report says the metric uses repeated AI responses to assess how consistently a brand appears in a particular buying context.
The report argues that AI-driven discovery is becoming part of the buying process and that a brand’s visibility in one market or AI response may not reflect its presence across other buyer contexts.
The study used questions based on 10 categories and states that no FTA client was included. The questions were seeded from neutral sources rather than brands’ own websites. FTA Global said it will share the full question set and raw brand and source data on request.
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