FTA Global’s Context Report finds AI brand recommendations shift sharply by city and language

FTA Global, a marketing company, has released ‘The Context Report,’ a study examining how AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini answer the same buying question differently depending on a buyer’s location and language.

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 — testing across 12 cities and 7 languages on both ChatGPT and Gemini, with each question repeated five times to measure how much the answer moved.

The variation was clearest in the study’s payment gateway tests. Asked which payment gateway to use in New York, ChatGPT and Gemini surfaced Stripe, Square and PayPal. Asked the same question from Mumbai, the recommendations shifted entirely to Indian brands — Razorpay, Cashfree and PayU — with no overlap between the two city-level results.

Among the report’s other findings: nearly three of the top five recommended brands changed once the buyer moved away from New York and English; 159 of 206 brands identified across the study appeared in only one country; and the two AI platforms agreed on only about 3.2 of the top five brands for the same question in the same city. The same question produced a consistent top brand in just 35% of repeated tests.

Senthil Kumar Hariram, Founder and Managing Director of FTA Global, said AI is changing how brands are discovered, but ‘discovery does not happen the same way for every buyer,’ adding that brands need to move beyond a single visibility score. FTA Global is introducing what it calls Context Authority, a metric intended to assess how consistently a brand is discovered across different cities, languages and AI platforms.

Source: FTA Global, press release, 17 September 2026.