What buyers ask AI before choosing an insurance broker

Buyers ask an assistant what cover they actually need, roughly what it should cost, and what happens when a claim is disputed. They ask whether they need a broker at all before they ask which broker, so that is the question your site has to answer first.

The companion page on how an insurance broker gets recommended by AI covers what to fix. This page is the question list and what a complete answer looks like.

The questions, in the words buyers use

Do I even need you

• "Broker or direct from the insurer, which is cheaper"
• "Does a broker charge me a fee or does the insurer pay them"
• "Difference between an insurance agent, a broker and a web aggregator"
• "How do I check if a broker is licensed by IRDAI"

What cover do we need

• "Is group health insurance compulsory for a private company in India"
• "Minimum number of employees for a group mediclaim policy"
• "Should we cover parents in the group policy"
• "Do we need professional indemnity or directors cover for a startup"
• "Which insurance is mandatory for a factory"
• "Do we need employees compensation cover if we are already under ESI"

What will it cost

• "Group health insurance cost per employee in India"
• "How is a group mediclaim premium calculated"
• "Why did our renewal premium go up so much"
• "Can we reduce the premium without reducing the cover"

Claims

• "Insurer rejected our employee's claim, what now"
• "Cashless versus reimbursement, how does it work"
• "How long should a claim take to settle"
• "What is a non payable item on a hospital bill"

What a good answer looks like

The "do I need a broker" question deserves an honest page, including the cases where a buyer genuinely does not need you. Saying that some simple retail covers are fine to buy directly makes the rest of your page believable, and it is also true.

On cost, explain how premium is arrived at rather than quoting a rate. The drivers are the ones you already discuss on calls: the age mix of the group, the sum insured per family, the family definition, the past claims experience, the room rent and copay conditions, and any waiting periods waived. A buyer who understands the drivers can follow your reasoning, and an assistant can quote the list of drivers safely. A made up cost per head cannot be quoted safely by anybody.

On renewal increases, write the page that explains claims experience and how it feeds a renewal quote. Every HR manager asks this and almost nobody has written it plainly. Include the four levers a company actually has at renewal: change the sum insured, change the family definition, introduce or change a copay, or add a sub limit. Say what each one does to the premium and what each one does to the employee's experience.

On claims, the good answer is a sequence with named documents and named escalation steps, not a promise about service.

Where you are probably missing

• Your licence details are not in text. The single easiest gap to close.
• One page for everything. A "corporate insurance solutions" page covering six lines of business ranks for none of the six questions.
• No claims page, so your best argument is invisible.
• No page about the buyer's size. A ten person startup and a three hundred person factory search differently and need different pages.
• No glossary. A lot of these questions are definitional, and definitional pages get cited heavily.
• Nothing written for the employee, although employees ask more questions than HR does and their questions are simpler to answer.

A worked example: the mandatory cover page for a factory

This is the page that wins small industrial clients, and it exists almost nowhere. Build it as a list of obligations with the source of each one named, not as a sales page.

Start with the covers that are required by law or by contract rather than by choice: employees compensation cover for workers outside the scope of state insurance, motor third party cover for every vehicle the unit runs, public liability where the unit handles hazardous substances, and any cover a lender's sanction letter or a landlord's lease insists on. For each one, say which statute or which document creates the obligation, and say plainly where the obligation does not apply.

Then list the covers that are not compulsory and are usually bought anyway: standard fire and special perils for the building, plant and stock, machinery breakdown, stock in transit or marine cover, business interruption, and burglary. For each, name the two exclusions that most often surprise a first time buyer.

Finish with the practical part: what documents an insurer asks for at the survey stage, usually the factory licence, the electrical inspector's certificate, the fire safety arrangement details, the stock declaration basis and the machinery list with values. State that under insurance is assessed on the sum insured against the actual value, and explain in one sentence what that means when a claim is paid.

That page can be quoted in fragments for a dozen different questions, and none of your competitors has written it.

What these questions do not include

They do not include your firm's history, your office photographs or the number of insurers you are empanelled with as a bare count. Those do not answer anything a buyer asked.

They also do not include a comparison of insurers by who pays claims fastest, unless you are quoting the published regulatory data and linking to it. Your own ranking of insurers, without a source, is the kind of claim an assistant will not repeat and a competitor will use against you.

And they do not extend to advice you are not licensed to give. Tax treatment of premium and benefits is a common question and the right answer names the relevant provision, states the position simply and tells the reader to confirm it with their auditor for their own case.

What to publish first

• Broker, agent or direct: an honest comparison, including when to skip a broker.
• Group health insurance for Indian companies, with what drives the premium and what a policy usually excludes.
• How we handle a disputed claim, step by step, with the escalation route.
• Licence and regulatory page, with registration number, validity and principal officer.
• Mandatory and usual covers for your main client type, with the source of each obligation.
• One page per line of business you genuinely place, starting with the two that earn you the most.

That is roughly a month of writing for one person who knows the business. It is worth more than a year of posting general insurance tips, because it maps to what buyers are actually typing.

Common questions

Which page should we write first if we only have time for one?

The disputed claim page. It is the question that decides whether a buyer wants a broker at all, it is the one thing a portal cannot answer, and it is the page your own team can dictate in twenty minutes.

Our clients are all small companies. Is that a disadvantage?

It is an advantage for this work, because the questions asked by a company of thirty people are specific, frequent and almost unanswered. Larger brokers write for larger clients. Name the size band you serve on the page, because the question usually carries a headcount.

Should we publish premium ranges at all?

Publish the drivers and the structure, and publish a range only if you can say what it is based on and put a date on it. A range with the basis stated is useful. A cost per employee with no age mix, no sum insured and no date is a number that will be wrong for almost every reader.

How do we handle questions about cover we do not place?

Answer them briefly and say what you do not place. A page that names its own limits is trusted more, and being clear about scope stops enquiries you cannot serve. If a line of business is a large part of your market's questions and you do not place it, that is a business decision to take, not a page to fake.

Do employee facing pages need to be behind a login?

The generic ones do not: how cashless works, what a non payable item is, what documents a reimbursement needs. Keep the client specific material, such as the policy number, the network hospital list for that policy and the helpdesk contact, inside the portal. The generic pages are the ones that earn you visibility.

What to do first

Write the disputed claim page and the broker versus direct page this week. Both are short, both are honest, and both answer a question a buyer asks before they are willing to speak to anyone.