The Answerability Index · Fortune 100 (pilot) · AirlinesReal capture · 2026-05-27

We asked three AI systems who leads US airlines. They agreed on the top three — and diverged on everyone else.

Delta, American, and United are surfaced by every engine, on nearly every prompt. Below them the picture splinters — Alaska, JetBlue, and Southwest trade places depending on which AI you ask.

Observed surfacing & cross-engine divergence6 buyer-intent prompts · 3 runs/engine · captured 2026-05-27
Surfacing rate0%100%· share of the 6 prompts in which the carrier was surfaced
σ — cross-engine divergence (std. dev. across the 3 engines)
The six prompts behind these numbers (US buyer-intent)
  1. What are the best US airlines for frequent business travelers?
  2. Which US airline is best for international business-class travel?
  3. Which major US airlines are most reliable?
  4. Top US carriers for transcontinental flights?
  5. Which airline should a company use for its corporate travel program?
  6. Best US airline frequent-flyer program for business travel?

Scope — US market. The roster (Fortune 100) and the prompts are US-specific; foreign carriers surface only on the international-business-class prompt. A global/regional edition would be a separate cut with its own roster and prompts.

How to read this: observed surfacing · within this prompt battery · during this capture window · most-consistently-surfaced, not "best." A measure of AI-mediated perception under bounded conditions — not airline quality, not an endorsement.

REAL pilot capture — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, web-grounded, 6 prompts × 3 runs, 2026-05-27. Claude + Grok pending (SDK / no live-search API). Company names canonicalized from auto-extracted output (loyalty-program and short-name variants merged). Airlines is a deliberately "clean" calibration sector; messier sectors will show more divergence. The Answerability Index · pilot.