AI Recommendations in Insurance Vs Skincare: We Asked Two Leading Sri Lankan Brands

AI Recommendations in Insurance Vs Skincare: We Asked Two Leading Sri Lankan Brands

Sri Lanka's Q2 State of AI Visibility data from BrandRadar shows that insurance and skincare brands earn AI recommendations through opposite mechanics. Insurance rewards specific, structured content that can shift scores overnight. Skincare rewards accumulated third-party authority built over time. 

Contributors: 

Chamath Alwis - AGM, Ceylinco Life Insurance
Shanela Anthony - Manager Marketing & Communications, Spa Ceylon Ayurveda Wellness

Analysed Data:

• BrandRadar AI Visibility Index (March, April & May)
• The State of AI Visibility in Sri Lanka - Q2 2026

Key Takeaways: 

• AI visibility strategies are industry-specific. What works for insurance may not work for skincare because AI evaluates trust differently across categories.
• Insurance visibility can change rapidly. A single high-quality, structured content asset can significantly improve AI visibility in a short period.
• Skincare visibility compounds over time. AI relies more on reviews, editorial coverage, and third-party authority than individual content pieces.
• Average scores can hide platform gaps. Strong overall visibility doesn't guarantee consistent performance across every AI platform.
• AI is compressing the customer journey. In retail, awareness, comparison, and purchase decisions increasingly happen within a single AI conversation.

There's an assumption that there's one playbook for AI Visibility. Get cited more. Build authority. Show up across platforms. Repeat for every brand, every industry, every category.

Three months of data from Sri Lanka's first State of AI Visibility Report says otherwise.

In Life Insurance, Ceylinco Life built one of the most consistent visibility profiles in the entire dataset. In Motor Insurance, a separate category entirely, one brand recorded the single largest month-on-month swing across all 198 brands tracked. In Skincare, Spa Ceylon held the #1 position every month of the quarter without a single category rival coming close.

Once you look closely at how each result actually happened, you realise these categories aren't running the same race at different speeds. They're running different races entirely. And understanding which race your brand is in might matter more than any individual visibility tactic.

The Dataset We Studied

Ceylinco Insurance - Life 

Ceylinco Life built the kind of AI visibility that's harder to achieve than it looks: broad, even strength across every platform, every month. Its Q2 average of 82.5 wasn't carried by one strong platform while the others lagged. OpenAI, Gemini, and Perplexity all moved in the same direction across the quarter. In a dataset where most brands have at least one platform where they nearly disappear, that consistency is genuinely rare.

This is what sustained, structural AI visibility looks like in a trust-led category. No single dramatic event. No platform doing the heavy lifting while the others sit idle. Just a steady, compounding presence across every engine where customers are asking questions.

Ceylinco Insurance - Motor 

Motor insurance, a separate business category with its own competitive dynamics, tells a different story. Ceylinco motor insurance in this category recorded a 55-point jump in a single month, the largest swing recorded across all 198 brands in the report. But underneath that surge is an important nuance. The gain was concentrated heavily on one platform, while another stayed weak across the entire quarter.

Winning loudly on one engine while being nearly invisible on another is one of the most common and least noticed patterns in AI visibility. A strong average can hide significant exposure.

Spa Ceylon

Spa Ceylon's Q2 average declined month on month, but it never lost its #1 position in Skincare. What looked like a gradual decline was really platform volatility, a meaningful distinction for any brand trying to understand where the real risk lies.

A single average score can describe three very different situations: a brand winning everywhere, a brand winning loudly on one platform while invisible on another, and a brand losing and regaining ground on a single platform while staying flat elsewhere. They can all average out to look similar. They are not similar at all.

Why Life Insurance Moves in Sudden Jumps

Chamath Alwis, AGM of Brand Development at Ceylinco Life, points to something most of the life insurance industry hasn't fully absorbed yet: how early AI now enters the customer journey. 

"One of the primary aspects the Sri Lankan life insurance industry underestimates about AI brand visibility is how quickly it is becoming the first touchpoint for customer discovery," 

he says. In his view, this reaches far beyond marketing.  

“A potential customer might use a result from an AI search as a point of contention or objection, and ample preparation needs to be present in all touchpoints to answer the information one might gather about a product, service or company.”

If an AI search result can become an objection a salesperson has to handle face-to-face, then a brand's AI-facing content isn't just a discovery channel. It's effectively part of the sales conversation, whether the brand has planned for that or not. In life insurance, where trust is built over months and the sales cycle is long, a single well-structured, comprehensive answer about a specific policy type, claims process, or coverage detail can resolve an objection at scale across every future conversation the moment an AI system picks it up and starts citing it. 

That is the mechanism behind Ceylinco Life's consistent, broad platform strength. It isn't built in one update cycle. It compounds.  

The right content, addressing the right query, lands in one update cycle and the number jumps.

Alwis's second answer points to where this is heading. 

"Insurers will need to create highly credible, educational, and conversational content that AI systems can easily surface, especially around topics like protection planning, retirement, and health-related financial security." 

Why Skincare Category Moves in Narrow Bands

Spa Ceylon's pattern needs a different explanation, and Shanela Anthony, Marketing Communications Manager at Spa Ceylon Ayurveda Wellness, offers the sharpest possible framing for it.

"What used to be awareness, consideration, conversion is now happening in one conversation," 

she explains. 

"Brands are not only competing in AI visibility and awareness, but also with recommendability." 

That distinction matters enormously here. In a category like insurance, a customer might encounter a brand across multiple touchpoints over weeks: an ad, a search, an agent conversation, a renewal reminder, with multiple chances for a single strong content asset to shift the outcome. 

In skincare, the entire decision can happen inside one AI exchange. There's no second touchpoint to recover the moment if a brand isn't already trusted at exactly that instant.

That also reframes what happened to Spa Ceylon on Perplexity in April. A platform going dark for one month isn't necessarily a sign of declining brand strength.

In a compressed-funnel category, it's closer to disappearing from the only conversation that mattered that month, on that engine, for that customer.

Shanela's view on what comes next reinforces this. 

"Brands not only must invest in their own content, but also the conversations that are happening around them." 

In practice, for a skincare or lifestyle brand, that means the review on a beauty platform, the mention in a wellness editorial, the Reddit thread recommending local Ayurvedic brands. 

These are the signals AI draws on when answering a broad trust question. They accumulate through sustained presence, credibility, and the organic conversations a brand earns over time. That's why skincare visibility moves in narrow, steady bands rather than sudden jumps, and why defending a #1 position in this category is a long game, not a sprint.

The Synthesis of Both

Put both leaders' answers side by side, and a single underlying framework emerges. Neither of them states it outright, but both are describing it from inside their own category.

According to a Senior GEO Specialist at BrandRadar, the pattern is structural rather than incidental. 

"What we've consistently seen across the brands we work with is that AI visibility is earned through sustained authority and trust, not temporary ranking gains. The brands that stay visible are the brands that stay relevant. As AI discovery continues to reshape customer journeys, the real competitive advantage lies in building a presence that AI systems can confidently cite, compare, and recommend over time."

Insurance moves through structural specific, citable, well-organised content that directly answers a precise query (a coverage type, a claims scenario, a comparison). A single strong asset can resolve that query decisively the moment an AI system picks it up. 

Skincare and lifestyle categories move through accumulated third-party authority. Broad, trust-based queries are answered by AI drawing on the weight of what other people and other sources have already said about a brand across the internet. 

No single asset manufactures that. It's built slowly, through reviews, editorial presence, organic mentions, and consistent visibility across every platform where the category conversation lives.

What This Means If You're Not in Either Category

The majority of readers would surely be representing brands that aren’t in these two categories, but that’s okay. The insurance-versus-skincare contrast isn't unique to these two industries. It shows up across the full report. 

• Automotive behaves more like insurance: specific, comparison-heavy queries that reward precise, well-structured content and can produce sharp month-on-month swings. 
• Real estate behaves more like skincare, but with even less stability, reputation-driven, slower-moving, and highly sensitive to whatever third-party coverage happens to exist that month.

The practical question for any brand starting to think about AI visibility: what kind of question is your category's customer actually putting to AI? Is it specific and resolvable? where one excellent piece of content can move the needle fast? 

Or is it broad and trust-based where visibility is earned slowly through the accumulated weight of what other people and sources are already saying about you?

Final Thoughts

"Optimise for AI visibility" is not one instruction. It's at least two, and likely as many as there are distinct categories of customer decision-making. What's already clear from just one quarter of data is that the brands pulling ahead aren't following a generic checklist. They're the ones who understood, early, exactly which game their category is playing.

These findings come from a single quarter, three months inside a much longer shift in how Sri Lankan consumers discover and trust brands. The full Q2 2026 leaderboard, all 198 brands, all 18 segments, complete platform-by-platform breakdowns, is available in the State of AI Visibility in Sri Lanka report.

Download the full report →