India, Sep 17: FTA Global, a new-age marketing company, today released “The Context Report”, a study of how AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini answer the same buying question differently depending on where the buyer is and what language they speak.
The study ran 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. It held each question the same and changed only the buyer’s city and language, testing across 12 cities and 7 languages on ChatGPT and Gemini, with every question run five times to measure how much the answer moved.
The report challenges the idea that a single AI visibility score can capture how a brand is discovered across different buyer contexts. The brands recommended by AI can change depending on where the buyer is, the language they use and the engine they ask.
The difference is particularly clear in the study’s payment gateway tests. When asked which payment gateway to use in New York, ChatGPT and Gemini surfaced brands including Stripe, Square and PayPal. When the same question was asked in Mumbai, the recommendations shifted to Indian brands including Razorpay, Cashfree and PayU. The two city-level results had no brand names in common, illustrating how significantly AI-generated recommendations can change with buyer context.
Among the key findings:
●Nearly 3 of the top 5 recommended brands change the moment the buyer moves away from New York and English, highlighting how strongly AI-generated recommendations can shift with context.
●159 of the 206 brands seen across the study appeared in only one country, showing how strongly AI recommendations vary by market rather than reflecting a single global view of brand visibility.
●Money categories showed far greater variation by geography, with 4.4 of the top 5 brands changing across markets, against 1.5 for everyday categories such as video conferencing and cloud storage. In HR software, not one of the top United States brands appeared in any other country tested.
●ChatGPT and Gemini shared only about 3.2 of the top 5 brands for the same question in the same city, showing that different AI platforms can produce materially different recommendations.
●The same question produced a consistent top brand in only 35% of repeated tests, showing how AI recommendations can shift even when the question, location, and language stay the same.
●42% of the sources cited by AI in Germany were German web pages, showing how local content shapes AI answers to local 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 introduces Context Authority, a metric designed to assess how consistently a brand owns a buying moment across the cities, languages, and AI environments relevant to its audience. Rather than treating AI visibility as a single global score, the approach evaluates brand presence across many contextual variables and repeated AI responses.
The findings point to a broader shift in how brands need to approach search visibility. As AI becomes part of the research and consideration journey, being visible in one market or one AI response does not mean a brand is visible across the contexts in which customers actually make decisions.