This study starts from one bank. The questions come from IndusInd Bank's own product lines: savings, fixed deposits, credit cards, and home, gold, personal, education, vehicle and instant loans, plus NRI banking and loan calculators. None of them names a bank, so every bank an assistant recommends competes on the same answer.
What we asked
Forty questions, ten for each of four customers: a digital native who lives on credit cards, a small business owner, a young home buyer in a metro, and a non-resident Indian building wealth. Two examples: best savings account for digital-first users with high interest rates and no minimum balance, and calculate my exact monthly EMI for a 40 lakh home loan at current interest rates.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews answered from an Indian connection. Claude answered through its API with no live search, told only that the customer is in India, so its answers and the links in them come from what the model learned. One run on 09 Sep 2026, 200 answers. A judge model recorded which banks on IndusInd's competitor list each answer named.
The banks the assistants named
| Bank | Named |
|---|---|
| ICICI Bank | 173 |
| Axis Bank | 147 |
| Kotak Mahindra Bank | 92 |
| IDFC First Bank | 69 |
| Federal Bank | 54 |
| RBL Bank | 40 |
| Standard Chartered | 38 |
| IndusInd Bank | 26 |
| Bandhan Bank | 25 |
HDFC Bank and State Bank of India were not on IndusInd's competitor list, so the judge was not asked to look for them. It still recorded HDFC Bank in 35 answers; treat that as a floor, and the table as a ranking among the listed banks only.
Where IndusInd appears, and where it does not
IndusInd was named most on deposits: 8 of 20 answers on savings accounts and 7 of 20 on fixed deposits. Credit cards came next at 4 of 20, then gold loans at 3 of 20 and personal loans at 2 of 20. Across four product lines it was named in none of 80 answers: home loans, instant loans, education loans and loan calculators.
By customer, the credit card native heard IndusInd in 10 of 50 answers, the home buyer and the NRI in 6 of 50 each, and the small business owner in 4 of 50.
The assistants disagree
| Assistant | Named |
|---|---|
| Claude | 12 |
| Copilot | 6 |
| Gemini | 4 |
| Google AI Overviews | 3 |
| ChatGPT | 1 |
Claude named IndusInd most often, 12 times in 40. We asked Claude the same 40 questions a second time with no customer and no market, and it named IndusInd 12 times again. ChatGPT named the bank once in 40 answers.
The model still links to the old addresses
The Reserve Bank of India directed banks on 22 Apr 2025 to move their websites to .bank.in addresses by 31 Oct 2025 (Business Standard, April 2025). On that change the answers split by assistant: Claude, answering from memory, linked to the old .com addresses and never to a .bank.in address, while the four web assistants linked to the new addresses in 45 answers and to the old ones in 18.
| Bank | Old .com, Claude | Old .com, web | .bank.in, Claude | .bank.in, web |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ICICI Bank | 31 | 7 | 0 | 20 |
| Axis Bank | 36 | 9 | 0 | 8 |
| Kotak Mahindra Bank | 13 | 2 | 0 | 6 |
| IDFC First Bank | 8 | 0 | 0 | 8 |
| IndusInd Bank | 12 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
All 12 Claude answers that linked to IndusInd used indusind.com. The three answers that linked to indusind.bank.in came from Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT. Across the study, 158 of 200 answers cited at least one website; the most cited site that was not a bank was bankbazaar.com, in 35 answers.
What this does not establish
- One run on one day. The web assistants answered each question once, so a single answer can turn on chance; the pattern across 200 is the finding.
- The questions come from IndusInd's product lines, so the table ranks banks on IndusInd's ground, not on Indian banking as a whole.
- Banks outside IndusInd's competitor list, HDFC Bank and State Bank of India among them, are under counted.
- English questions only, and being named measures who is considered; applications and accounts would need their own data.
- A repeat run in another month, or the same questions in Hindi, would show whether this order holds.
Anand Mahajan, founder of BrandCrux