Federal Agencies Are Seen.
Their Contractors Are Chosen.
How 30 U.S. federal agencies are cited, and often replaced by their own contractors, when procurement officers, journalists, and citizens ask AI assistants about them. A cross platform measurement across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. This inaugural edition evaluates the 30 highest impact federal agencies to establish a repeatable baseline for measuring AI visibility across the U.S. government.
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Headline Findings
The Department of Defense leads all 30 agencies with a 77% mention rate, the leading "AI Dominant" agency. Yet even DoD receives 0% citation rate: AI never links to an official .mil source.
On contractor intent queries, AI named a private contractor 100% of the time, alongside or instead of the agency. Contractors are more visible in AI than the agencies they serve.
23 of 30 federal agencies scored below 15% mention rate, functionally invisible in the AI answer layer despite active missions, budgets, and public communications teams.
On every contractor intent query, AI named a private contractor. No agency was discussed without a contractor also surfacing in the answer.
What This Report Measures
This is not a search engine ranking. It measures whether a federal agency exists, in its own voice, inside the answer an AI system gives, before a user ever reaches a webpage.
AI mentioned the agency somewhere in its response. Awareness without influence.
AI actively suggested the agency as a relevant or authoritative source for the question asked.
AI named the agency as the primary answer, the entity responsible for the mission in question.
A private contractor was named instead of, or alongside, the agency, shifting authorship of the answer to industry.
The Leaderboard
Ranked by mention rate, how often each agency was named across all 4 AI platforms when asked neutral questions in their mission areas. The 30 agencies in this report represent the largest concentration of U.S. federal procurement activity across defense, civilian, healthcare, research, technology, and public services, selected using FY2025 to 2026 prime contract obligation data from USASpending.gov.
AI Dominant
Named in >60% of responsesAI Competitive
Named in 35 to 60% of responsesAI Emerging
Named in 15 to 35% of responsesAI Invisible
Named in <15% of responsesWhere Each Agency Wins and Loses
Each cell shows the mention rate for that agency in that prompt category, how often AI named the agency when asked neutral questions in that area. Green = named in every response. Gray = never named.
| Agency | Discovery | Contracting | AI & Tech | Leadership | News | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DoD | 100% | 71% | 100% | 66% | 100% | 75% |
| GSA | 100% | 99% | 88% | 68% | 100% | 24% |
| VA | 100% | 86% | 11% | 76% | 86% | 36% |
| NASA | 50% | 11% | 23% | 53% | 24% | 39% |
| DHS | 25% | 20% | 18% | 1% | 23% | 48% |
| DOE | 0% | 9% | 91% | 1% | 0% | 1% |
| CDC | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 1% |
| NIH | 0% | 18% | 53% | 3% | 3% | 0% |
| HHS | 0% | 6% | 28% | 1% | 0% | 28% |
| DOS | 0% | 1% | 0% | 1% | 0% | 0% |
| Army | 0% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| DOT | 0% | 1% | 11% | 4% | 0% | 0% |
| DARPA | 0% | 8% | 0% | 9% | 1% | 0% |
| DLA | 0% | 15% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| DOC | 0% | 5% | 4% | 1% | 0% | 0% |
| SSA | 0% | 1% | 0% | 1% | 8% | 0% |
| Navy | 0% | 0% | 0% | 1% | 0% | 0% |
| Air Force | 0% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 1% |
| DOJ | 0% | 0% | 0% | 1% | 4% | 0% |
| USDA | 0% | 3% | 0% | 3% | 1% | 0% |
| CBP | 0% | 4% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| DISA | 0% | 3% | 0% | 0% | 1% | 1% |
| FEMA | 0% | 3% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| DHA | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| FAA | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 3% |
| DOI | 0% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| DOL | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| EPA | 0% | 1% | 0% | 1% | 0% | 0% |
| OPM | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| DCAA | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
The Contractor Displacement Finding
When You Ask AI About Federal Agencies, Their Contractors Answer Too, Every Time
On every contractor intent query across all 30 agencies, private contractors were named 100% of the time, either alongside or instead of the agency being asked about. There was no exception.
Top Contractors Surfacing Across Agency Queries
This is not a coincidence of training data. Federal contractors produce a continuous stream of thought leadership, case studies, press releases, and capability statements about the government programs they support. Agencies, by contrast, publish far less content in a form that AI models recognize as authoritative. The result: contractors have trained the web, and the AI built on that web, to associate their brand with the agency's mission.
A small business owner asking AI how to win an Army contract is told about Palantir. A journalist asking about federal AI strategy is handed Booz Allen Hamilton. A policy analyst researching DHS cybersecurity programs receives Accenture Federal. In each case, the agency loses control of the narrative describing its own work.
Five Structural Findings
Contractors publish roughly ten times more indexed content about agency missions than the agencies publish about themselves. AI models trained on that imbalance default to the more prolific, more consistently framed source, which is almost never the agency.
0% of the 30 agencies in this study received an official URL citation from any of the four AI platforms tested. Presence without citation means the agency has no path to correct, update, or control the record.
Despite commanding the largest budgets in the federal government, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps all score below the majority of civilian agencies in AI presence, a structural mismatch between budget authority and narrative authority.
DCAA, NAVSEA, DLA, and AFMC, the agencies that actually run federal procurement and contract oversight, are invisible to the small businesses and vendors trying to reach them through AI assisted research.
Most agencies appeared on only 2 of the 4 platforms tested. The answer a user receives about a federal agency depends heavily on which AI assistant they use, there is no consistent federal presence across the AI answer layer.
"Federal agencies have spent decades building communications infrastructure for a world where people typed a question into a search engine and clicked a government link. That world is ending. Today, the answer arrives before the click ever happens, and our data shows federal agencies are simply not present at the moment that answer gets constructed. The contractors filled that vacuum, not through any wrongdoing, but because they were the only ones publishing consistently in a form AI could learn from. Agencies that don't treat AI presence as a communications priority in 2026 will spend the next decade explaining programs that a chatbot has already attributed to someone else."
Methodology
A cross platform measurement of AI narrative presence across 30 U.S. federal agencies, 1,000 prompts, and 4 AI platforms, conducted by Monic AI Systems.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is your organization visible in the AI answer layer?
Monic AI Systems measures and improves how public institutions, universities, and enterprises appear inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.
July 2026 · Monic AI Systems · Washington, DC · Methodology adapted from the 5W PR AI Visibility Index framework.
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