How an insurance broker gets recommended by AI

An insurance broker gets recommended when an assistant can confirm the IRDAI licence in text, see that you handle the specific cover being asked about, and find a description of how you support a claim. Brokers lose these answers to comparison portals for one reason: the portals publish specifics and most broker sites publish adjectives.

What buyers of an insurance broker actually ask an assistant

Two very different buyers. On the corporate side it is an HR head, an admin manager or a founder. On the retail side it is an individual with one problem. The corporate questions are worth more and are easier to win, because fewer people have written pages for them.

• "Group health insurance for a company with fifty employees in India"
• "Do I need a broker or can I buy directly from the insurer"
• "What does group mediclaim, group personal accident and group term life mean and which do we need"
• "Is maternity cover included in a standard group mediclaim"
• "Fire and marine insurance for a small factory, what is the process"
• "Who helps if the insurer rejects a claim"
• "Is workmen's compensation insurance compulsory for our contract staff"

The claims question is the one brokers should own outright and almost never write about. Claims support is the whole reason a broker exists, and it is the part of the sales conversation that never reaches the website.

Which sources the assistants read for this trade

The IRDAI registers and publications. IRDAI lists licensed brokers with registration numbers and validity, publishes the annual report and the handbook on Indian insurance statistics, and publishes insurer wise claim settlement data. Those pages are what tell an assistant you are real, and the settlement data is what it reaches for when a buyer asks which insurer pays.

Employee benefits platforms and insurance marketplaces, which publish very good explanatory content for exactly the corporate questions above, and get cited for them.

HR, founder and finance communities, where the "who did you use for group health" question gets asked in plain words.

Insurer product pages, brochures and policy wordings, which the assistant uses for cover definitions and exclusions.

The Insurance Ombudsman's published awards and the Bima Bharosa grievance portal, which are where claim disputes become citable documents.

Local business directories and maps listings, which matter for the retail and small business side of your book.

The three fixes that matter most here

Put the licence in text. Registered name, IRDAI registration number, category of licence, validity, and the principal officer. This is a factual sentence an assistant can repeat, and it separates you from the many sites that only claim to be brokers.

Write one page per line of business, sized to the buyer. Group health for a company of ten is a different page from group health for a company of five hundred. Fire, marine, liability, directors cover and employee benefits each need their own page, with the cover definitions, what is excluded, and what the renewal cycle looks like.

Describe your claims support as a process. Who the buyer contacts, what you do on their behalf, how an escalation to the insurer or to the ombudsman works, and what you need from them. Describe it, do not put a number on your success rate unless you have measured one.

The six things a corporate buyer asks before they move their policy

These come up in every renewal conversation. Answering them in public is how you get shortlisted before the conversation starts.

• Which insurers you are able to place with, and whether you can move the policy at renewal without breaking continuity.
• How the premium is arrived at, and what happens to it after a bad claims year.
• What the policy excludes, said plainly: waiting periods, room rent limits, copay, sub limits on named procedures.
• Who administers the claim on a day to day basis, whether that is the insurer, a third party administrator or your own team.
• What service you provide during the year: endorsements for joiners and leavers, employee helpdesk, and how fast an addition is confirmed.
• Whether you are paid by commission from the insurer, by a fee from the client, or both, since that decides whether your advice is independent.

A worked example: the claims page

Write the page your sales team describes on every call. Structure it as a sequence with named actors and named documents.

Take a cashless hospitalisation on a group mediclaim. Step one: the employee informs the helpdesk, and you state the number and the hours it is answered. Step two: the hospital sends the pre authorisation request to the administrator, and you say what you do if it is delayed. Step three: approval, partial approval or query, and you explain what a partial approval usually means, which is a sub limit or a non payable item rather than a rejection. Step four: discharge, with the list of items normally not payable such as consumables, registration and administrative charges. Step five: reimbursement claims, with the document list: the claim form, discharge summary, original bills and payment receipts, investigation reports, prescriptions, and the employee's bank details for the transfer. Step six: what you do on a rejection, in order, including the internal grievance route at the insurer, the Bima Bharosa portal, and the Insurance Ombudsman with the time limit that applies.

Then add one sentence on what you need from the client's HR team to make all of this work, usually an up to date member list and a single named contact. That sentence is why the page reads as written by someone who does the work rather than by a marketing agency.

How to measure it

Take ten corporate questions and ten retail questions, written the way an HR manager or a shop owner would type them, and ask them on more than one assistant without naming your firm. Score how often a broker is recommended at all against how often a portal or an insurer is recommended instead, because losing the whole category to portals is the more common failure.

Then read the citations. If the cited pages are all employee benefits platforms explaining group cover, the gap is that you have not written that explanation yourself.

Disclosure: we sell AI Knows Us, a tool for running this measurement. No tool, ours included, can guarantee a place in an assistant's answer.

What this does not cover and cannot do

It does not set premium. Pricing sits with the insurer and depends on the group's age mix, sum insured, past claims and the conditions applied, so a broker page that quotes a rate per employee is quoting something it does not control.

It cannot promise a claim outcome. You can describe your process, your escalation route and your response times. You cannot publish a settlement percentage unless you have measured it on your own book and can state the period and the denominator, and even then it will be read alongside the insurer's published data.

It also does not replace regulated disclosure. Your licence details, principal officer and grievance mechanism have to appear as the rules require, and the page described here is in addition to that, not instead of it.

Common questions

Is it a problem to say we earn commission from insurers?

No, and saying nothing is worse. Buyers already assume it and an assistant will raise the conflict as a general caution if you leave it unstated. Explain how you are paid, and explain what you do when the best option for the client pays you least. That paragraph is the most persuasive thing on a broker site.

Can we publish the claim settlement record of the insurers we place with?

You can reference the published regulatory data and link to it, which is safer and more credible than restating figures. Do not mix that with your own claim numbers unless you keep them separately and can explain how each was counted.

We are a small broker competing with large portals. Where do we actually win?

On the questions a portal will not answer: the renewal increase after a bad claims year, the exclusions a specific industry keeps hitting, what the factory licence and statutory covers look like in your state, and what happens on a disputed claim. Portals write for volume, so they write general pages. Yours can be specific to a buyer size and an industry, and that is what a question carries.

Should we write for employees or for the HR team?

Both, on separate pages. HR asks about cover design, premium and administration. Employees ask how to use the card, what is not payable and why a claim was short paid. The employee pages are read far more often, and they are the ones that make HR keep you.

How often should these pages be reviewed?

Once a year at minimum, and immediately after any regulatory change that alters cover or grievance rules. Put the review date on the page. In insurance, an undated explanation of what is covered is assumed to be out of date, which means it does not get used.

What to do first

Publish the licence details as text, then write the claims page described above. Those two pages take a day between them and they are the two facts that decide whether an assistant treats you as a broker worth naming.