How CAP Insurance Group went from 15.7% to 22.7% of ChatGPT answers in eight weeks

About half of CAP's business comes from referrals by mortgage brokers, realtors and existing clients. The rest arrives through its website, phone calls and paid search. More buyers now ask ChatGPT for a good local agent before they call anyone, and in spring 2026 CAP had no way to see what ChatGPT told them.

When Waniwani first ran CAP's market, ChatGPT built its answers from Reddit threads, NerdWallet lists and insurance directories, and CAP appeared in few of them. Wording made it harder. A buyer types "who's a good independent agent in Charlotte", and that phrasing pulls different sources, and different agencies, than the keywords an agency would put on its own site.

Waniwani set up daily tracking on 39 unbranded questions, written the way buyers type them, and ran each one on ChatGPT. For every answer the tracker records which agencies are named, in what order, and which sites ChatGPT cites.

From that data CAP got a ranked plan of the lists, review sites and forum threads to target. In August 2026 Reddit appeared in 53% of the answers to CAP's questions, NerdWallet in 42% and Expertise.com in 28%. A mention on one of those sites carries more weight in ChatGPT's answers than anything on the agency's own website, so that is where the plan points.

From September 8 to October 7, ChatGPT named CAP in 22.7% of answers, up from 15.7% in the four weeks before, a 45% relative gain. CAP moved from third to second of the 24 local agencies tracked. When an answer names CAP it usually names it first, at an average position of 1.4, and CAP's share of voice (30.8%) is the highest of all 24 agencies.

For an agency that gets about half its business from referrals, a ChatGPT answer works like a referral from someone the buyer has never met. The buyer asks who to call and gets a short list of names. CAP is now on that list in about 23 of every 100 answers, up from about 16, and it is usually the first name on it. A mention in an answer also has no cost per click, which a paid search ad does.

Gains came first on questions where ChatGPT already mentioned CAP. Topics where CAP was absent need new mentions on third-party sites, and those take longer to earn. The numbers show the change over the period and don't isolate the effect of any single action.