AI is now recommending Sri Lankan brands by name

Sri Lanka’s top 15 most AI-visible brands, ranked

Tuesday, 14 July 2026 00:11 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

A new BrandRadar study tracked 198 brands across the most popular Large Language Models (LLMs) over a period of three months. This article is about what brands AI is actually recommending and the numbers that explain why.

In April, Ceylinco General Insurance’s AI visibility score jumped from 28.5 to 83.6, a 55-point swing in a single month, the largest movement recorded in a new study of how artificial intelligence is reshaping brand discovery in Sri Lanka. In the same three-month window, Shangri-La Colombo ranked #1 among hotels in March, vanished from AI recommendations entirely in April, before returning in May at a third of its former standing.

These are the kinds of shifts BrandRadar’s State of AI Visibility in Sri Lanka 2026 uncovered after tracking 198 brands across 18 segments and 6 industries - covering automotive, banking, insurance, hospitality, retail and real estate on ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity - in the country’s broadest AI visibility study ever - conducted between March and May this year.

The question the study set out to answer was “when a customer asks an AI system for a recommendation, which brands actually get named?”

Here are the fifteen most consistently AI-visible brands in the country.

Sri Lanka’s top 15 most AI-visible brands : April to May 2026

Five things the data reveals

1.A brand can gain 55 points in one month or lose a top spot overnight

Ceylinco General Insurance’s April surge was the single largest movement recorded in the study. At the other extreme, Shangri-La Colombo disappeared from the hotel rankings for a full month before returning below its previous peak. AI visibility, unlike a Google ranking, can move dramatically in either direction within weeks.

2.A brand can dominate one AI platform and not exist on another

Santani, one of Sri Lanka’s most internationally awarded wellness resorts surfaced only on ChatGPT in April, registering zero on both Gemini and Perplexity. Because each AI platform draws on different sources, a brand can hold real presence on one system while two-thirds of AI conversations simply don’t know it exists and most brands don’t have visibility to which conversations they’re missing from.

3.Media spend and AI visibility are different layers - the winners are building both

The top 15 wasn’t determined by who spent the most. AI systems draw on editorial coverage, structured product information and third-party citations - signals that sit alongside media investment, not instead of it. The implication isn’t that advertising matters less; it’s that a new layer has been added on top of it. The brands converting campaign awareness into AI recommendations are the ones investing in both.

4.Legacy brands are winning on accumulated content

Toyota’s high scores, rest on decades of distributed coverage across automotive media and review ecosystems. Galle Face Hotel continues to be cited by AI systems even in months when its score dips, as years of press coverage have built a citation mass newer brands cannot quickly overtake. AI systems learn from everything ever written about a brand, which means the brands with the deepest content archives start every AI conversation ahead; an insight first raised at BrandRadar’s AI Visibility Summit in March, and now confirmed across three months of data.

5.Industries don’t rank equally - and the pattern runs inverse to what you’d expect.

The higher a category’s average visibility score, the fewer brands actually surface: for example, ICE vehicles averaged 88.6 with the same four brands locked in identical order all quarter. The lower the category’s scores, a higher number of brands rotate through AI answers: for instance, villa stays averaged just 14.8 yet turned over their entire top five every single month - Pastel House and Meda Gedara went from no index presence at all to top-five rankings within four weeks. High-scoring categories are consolidated and hard to break into. Low-scoring ones are wide open and the top spots are still effectively unclaimed.

“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.” said Afrah Fazulhaq, Content Strategist and co-author of the BrandRadar Visibility Report.

Industry response

Commenting on the index, Shalendra Mendis, renowned Digital Marketer and Founder & Managing Partner of The Hackvertising Network opined, “This AI Visibility Index by BrandRadar sheds light on how brands are being discovered across AI search platforms as consumer discovery rapidly evolves beyond traditional search. What’s encouraging is that the brands performing well are, more often than not, the ones that have consistently invested in the fundamentals -strong content, clear expertise and trusted digital assets. As AI becomes a bigger part of discovery, those fundamentals will matter more than ever.”

Sharing his sentiments on the findings of the visibility index, Chamath Alwis, AGM Brand Development at Ceylinco Life said, “AI is now the first touchpoint for customer discovery - before an agent, before a website, before a referral. In life insurance, where trust drives every decision, your AI results either support your brand or work against it.”

Implications for Sri Lankan brands

Across the three months, AI systems surfaced 980 Sri Lankan brands in their answers. Only 67 held a position across all three months. 94 appeared once - and vanished. That is roughly a one-in-fourteen rate of staying visible, and it is happening in conversations no brand can see: none of it appears in web analytics, media reports or search rankings. A brand can hold the top position on Google and be entirely absent from the answer a customer actually reads on an LLM.

The speed of movement should concern category leaders as much as challengers. A 55-point visibility swing - the kind Ceylinco General Insurance recorded in April, fits comfortably inside a single quarterly planning cycle. Share of voice in AI recommendations can be claimed, or lost, faster than most brands review their marketing performance. And this 3-month index is now the baseline. Every brand in these rankings and every brand absent from them will be measured against these three months’ positions from here on. The brands studying where they stand today are the ones that will be recommended tomorrow.

The full report, including rankings for all 18 industry segments, is available at brandradar.ai.

Scan the QR to directly download the report

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