Analysis of more than 18,000 AI-generated responses finds a gender gap, a strong US bias and widespread use of outdated job information
NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, October 12, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Men account for nearly four in five gender-coded expert mentions produced by leading artificial intelligence platforms, according to a new study by PromptRadar examining who appears in AI-generated recommendations across nine industries.
The AI Spokesperson Index 2026 analysed 18,348 responses to 1,529 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. From 25,029 expert mentions, women accounted for 21%, compared with 28% of named expert quotes in a benchmark sample of trade-press coverage from the same industries.
The imbalance was most pronounced in defence, where women represented 11.9% of expert mentions, and cybersecurity, at 17.3%. Healthtech recorded the highest proportion, at 37.9%.
The research also found a strong geographic skew. When prompts did not specify a region, 74% of the experts named were based in the US. Even when questions were framed specifically around the UK, 28% of the people named were US-based. For Middle East-focused questions, only 45% of the experts named came from the region.
Accuracy was another concern: 16.9% of expert mentions included a role or company that was no longer current. Defence and AI had the highest shares of outdated information, at 22.2% and 20.5% respectively. Perplexity produced the lowest proportion of outdated roles or affiliations, at 9.8%.
The people selected by AI also differed substantially from those quoted by industry media. Across nine industry top-20 lists, the average overlap between AI and trade press was 37%. Of experts quoted at least three times in the six-month trade-press sample, 58% were not named by any of the four AI platforms.
The findings suggest that AI does not draw from a single, settled roster of authorities. Only 38.4% of names returned consistently across all three runs, while just 9% appeared on all four platforms for the same prompt.
“The shortlist matters as much as the answer,” said a PromptRadar spokesperson. “Communications teams need to understand whose expertise AI can see, whose it leaves out and whether the information it repeats is still accurate. A strong reputation in traditional media does not automatically translate into visibility in AI-generated answers.”
The four platforms displayed distinct patterns. Perplexity surfaced the widest pool of names and the highest proportion of women, while Google AI Overviews drew on the narrowest and most repetitive pool. Gemini was more likely to answer with organisations or general advice instead of naming an individual.
PromptRadar said the results have practical implications for communications teams. It recommends maintaining clear, machine-readable spokesperson profiles; keeping titles and affiliations consistent across company websites, LinkedIn and speaker biographies; publishing region-specific evidence for local experts; and measuring AI visibility regularly rather than relying on a single response.
“AI-generated answers are becoming a new layer of reputation,” said Kamal Leadbitter, Marketing Manager at PromptRadar.ai. “Organisations that want a broader and more accurate range of voices to be found must make those experts clearly identifiable, consistently cited and supported by current evidence.”
The full AI Spokesperson Index 2026, including industry scorecards and an interactive data explorer, is available at: https://promptradar.ai/insights/ai-spokesperson-index
Kamal Leadbitter
PromptRadar
+1 602-301-8658
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