The State of AI Search in the Philippines 2026

Software companies live or die by their websites, and it shows. This was the only sector where multiple brands cleared 70: Sprout Solutions and Cloudstaff tied for the national top score at 76, with First Circle at 73 and Taxumo at 69. Cloudstaff also posted the highest answer-readiness score in the entire study, 10 of 16, the closest any Philippine brand came to writing for AI on purpose. The lesson the rest of the country can borrow is blunt: clean, server-rendered pages with real structured content are not a nice-to-have, they are the whole foundation. If your industry wants a benchmark to chase, it is here.

The quiet overachiever. A college, Enderun at 74, outscored every bank, telco, and fast-food chain we audited, and it was no fluke: FEU (64) and DLSU (56) landed high too. The reason is structural. Program pages, course catalogs, and faculty profiles are long, factual, and well-organized, exactly the kind of text AI engines find easy to read and quote. Schools did not set out to win at AI search; their content format simply happens to be ideal. Any brand sitting on deep, factual information, and most are, should take the hint.

The most divided sector in the report. At the top, specialists who kept real text on the page: Toby's Sports (72), Plains & Prints (69), R.O.X. and Penshoppe (61), the last of which also carried genuine answer-ready content, proof a large consumer brand can do this. At the bottom, image-first labels where the whole experience is photography and almost nothing is readable; one well-known name scored 16. Same industry, a gulf of nearly 60 points, decided by one question: is there text, or just pictures? Fashion is the clearest case in the whole study of design winning humans and losing machines.

A small but instructive field. Pru Life UK (63) leads, and tellingly it was one of only a handful of brands anywhere with real answer-ready content, the FAQ-style structure AI lifts directly into answers. The rest of the category clusters in the 40s: crawlable and competent, but not yet quotable. Insurance is a high-consideration, heavily-researched purchase, exactly the kind buyers now take to ChatGPT first, which makes the gap between merely present and actually recommended an expensive one to leave open.

Real estate benefits from its own habit: listings. Pages packed with project details, prices, locations, and amenities give engines plenty to read, which lifted Camella (61), Avida (56), SMDC (55), and Ayala Land (53) above the national average. The ceiling is still low, none broke into the solid tier, but property has the raw material most sectors lack. The opportunity here is to structure the listing data you already have, not to create content from scratch.

The widest spread in the entire study, and the starkest proof that the website, not the company, sets the score. LBC (68) reads cleanly and topped the sector, while a major courier posted the single lowest score of all 111 brands, down in the teens. Two companies doing nearly the same job, separated by roughly fifty points, purely on how their sites are built. In a category buyers compare constantly ("cheapest courier to...", "fastest delivery for..."), being the unreadable one is a direct handoff to a rival.

The middlemen beat the makers. Marketplaces and aggregators like Carmudi (55) and AutoDeal (49) outscored the carmakers' own brand sites, which tend to bury everything in heavy, scripted configurators and image galleries a crawler cannot follow. So when a buyer asks AI for the best family SUV in the Philippines, the platforms are positioned to be the answer, and the manufacturers are positioned to be left out of it entirely.

The irony sector. News publishers are among the sources AI engines cite most when they answer questions, yet their own sites are only average at being read. Philstar (55) and Inquirer (49) lead; the broadcast networks trail. The organizations whose content trains and feeds the models have not optimized their own properties for them, a missed chance to shape how they are represented in the very answers they help generate.

A clean generational split. The digital-natives are running away: Maya (71) and the new app-first lenders read clearly and scored high. The country's biggest traditional banks sit in the 30s and low 40s, their useful content locked behind logins, apps, and scripted dashboards crawlers never reach. For the single most research-heavy purchase there is, money, the incumbents are quietly invisible while the challengers own the answer. That is a strategy problem, not a technical footnote.

A field of extremes. Maxicare (67) and The Medical City (61) are genuinely strong, with deep, readable service and facility content. At the other end, a major HMO scored 16. People research healthcare in moments of stress and urgency, more and more by asking AI directly, so the inconsistency is costly: the readable brands will be recommended in exactly the moments that matter most, and the rest will not surface at all.

The household-name paradox at its sharpest. The traditional retailers won, Rustan's (68), National Bookstore (61), SM Store (51), while several of the biggest marketplace apps landed in the 20s and 30s despite commanding enormous traffic. Their content lives inside JavaScript-driven product feeds a crawler sees as an empty shell. They win the click economy and lose the answer economy, and as discovery shifts from search bars to AI, that trade is going to start hurting.

Gorgeous, and largely invisible. Beauty builds some of the most visually striking sites in the country, and that is precisely the problem: most are image-first experiences with almost no readable text, so they cannot be quoted. Happy Skin (58) and the Sunnies brands (54 to 55) proved a beautiful site can also be readable, but they are the exception; one well-known label scored 16. In a category driven by reviews, recommendations, and "best of" lists, being unreadable to the AI that now generates those lists is a serious miss.

A two-speed sector. Hotels and resorts, with their room, rate, and amenity pages, fared reasonably, Okada Manila (54) led. The airlines did not. One flag carrier scored 17, near the rock bottom of the entire study, on the site of a company millions of Filipinos fly with every year. Travel is one of the most AI-assisted purchases there is ("best airline to...", "where to stay in..."), which makes an unreadable booking site an especially costly place to be invisible.

Uniformly unready, with almost no bright spots. Nearly every brand landed between 32 and 44, the tightest and lowest cluster of any sector. The cause is consistent: menus, store locators, promos, and brand stories all live inside images and scripts, leaving a crawler with little to read. These are among the most beloved and most searched names in the country, and they are nearly absent from AI answers. The flip side: the bar is so low that one brand doing this properly would instantly own the category.

Dead last, and the most quietly damning result in the report. The companies that sell Filipinos their internet connection are the hardest to read on it. Two of the five scored in the teens. Telco sites are sprawling, heavily scripted, and built around account logins, so the actual content, plans, coverage, support, is largely invisible to a crawler. When a buyer asks AI for the best fiber plan in their city or which network has the best coverage, this entire sector risks not being in the conversation at all.