Ask an AI tool which eSIM to buy for a trip and the answer almost always includes Airalo: 95% of holiday answers name it, and it is the first brand named in 43% of them. Four more brands, Holafly, Nomad, Saily and Ubigi, fill out nearly every shortlist. Nobody else reaches 25% in any kind of trip.
Yet the shortlist is not the whole answer. In 25% of answers the AI also tells the traveller to buy a local SIM from an operator at the destination, and in 19% to check the roaming deal on the carrier they already have. For a UK traveller, those two options are named in 48% and 42% of answers. The eSIM brands are competing with the traveller's own phone contract and with AIS, Telcel and Telstra, not only with each other.
The Travel eSIM AI Visibility Index 2026 is a snapshot of 1,170 answers from five AI tools to 90 questions travellers ask, collected on 25 October 2026. It covers 40 travel eSIM brands across three kinds of trip: a holiday in one country, a multi-country or long-haul trip, and a long stay abroad for work or study.
Key findings
- Airalo is in almost every answer. 95% of holiday answers name Airalo, 94% of multi-country answers and 82% of long-stay answers, and it is the first brand named in 43%, 48% and 35% of them. Every tool names it in at least 87% of holiday answers.
- Five brands own the category. Airalo, Holafly, Nomad, Saily and Ubigi are the only brands above 25% in any kind of trip. The top three take 54%, 58% and 51% of all brand mentions in their segments.
- AI does not only recommend eSIM brands. 25% of answers point to a local operator at the destination, 19% to a carrier the traveller already has, and 12% to a marketplace or an eSIM sold inside another app. A dedicated eSIM brand is still named in 97% of answers.
- 48% of the sources AI cites are eSIM or telecom companies' own sites. 26% belong to the brands being ranked and 22% to other eSIM and telecom companies. Another 21% is affiliate comparison content. Reddit and other social sources supply 4%.
- Ranking on Google and being named by AI are different contests. Nomad's sites rank in Google's top 10 for 8% of holiday questions; AI names Nomad in 67% of answers. Only 7% to 16% of the sites the four API tools cite also rank in Google's top 10 for the same question (37% for Google AI Overviews).
- Each tool tells a different story. Saily is in 99% of Claude's holiday answers and 40% of Perplexity's; Nomad is in 89% of ChatGPT's and 36% of Google AI Overviews'. Two tools answering the same question name 41% to 62% of the same brands and cite 3% to 11% of the same websites.
How we ran the study
We wrote 90 questions the way travellers ask them: "best eSIM for Japan", "I'm backpacking through South America for three months, which eSIM should I use?", "is a travel eSIM better than paying my carrier's roaming fees?". Thirty per kind of trip, covering best-of, use case, destination, pricing, problem, alternatives and comparison questions, framed from the point of view of buyers in Spain, the UK, Germany, the EU and worldwide. Seven questions are in Spanish and six in German.
Each question went to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude through their official APIs with web search switched on, three times each, because answers change from one ask to the next. Google AI Overviews were collected once per question from Google search results located in the buyer's market. A language model then read every answer and listed the brands, carriers and operators it named, in order, and we classified every website the tools cited.
Fifteen questions name a brand ("alternatives to Airalo", "Holafly vs Saily"). They are excluded from the rankings, because naming a brand in the question hands it a mention, and analysed separately in the challenger map. The full method and its limitations are at the end, and every ranking can be explored by AI tool and market on the data page.
Where AI sends travellers
Before ranking the brands, we asked a simpler question of every answer: what kind of option does it send the traveller to? Four kinds appear. A dedicated travel eSIM brand. The carrier the traveller already has, through roaming or a travel pass. A marketplace, reseller or an eSIM sold inside another app. Or a local operator at the destination, bought on arrival. One answer can name several.
- Dedicated eSIM brand97%
- Own carrier or roaming19%
- Marketplace or in-app eSIM12%
- Local operator at destination25%
A dedicated eSIM brand is named in 97% of answers, so the category has won the argument that a travel eSIM is the default. But the alternatives are never far away. 25% of answers point to a local operator at the destination: AIS for Thailand, Telcel for Mexico, Telstra and Optus for Australia, Movistar and Orange for visitors to Spain. 19% tell the traveller to check their own carrier first; the ones named most are Vodafone (11% of answers), O2, Orange and EE. 12% name a storefront that sells other people's eSIMs: MobiMatter leads at 8%, with Trip.com, Klook and SimOptions behind it, and an eSIM sold inside a payments app in under 1%.
| Buyer's market | Dedicated eSIM brand | Own carrier | Marketplace or in-app | Local operator at destination |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All questions | 97% | 19% | 12% | 25% |
| Global | 97% | 11% | 11% | 21% |
| Spain | 99% | 41% | 8% | 35% |
| UK | 97% | 42% | 12% | 48% |
| Germany | 97% | 29% | 11% | 28% |
| EU | 100% | 20% | 25% | 13% |
The market changes the answer. UK buyers, who lost free EU roaming after Brexit, are told about their own carrier's roaming in 42% of answers and about a local operator in 48%: the AI tools have absorbed the British habit of comparing roaming passes. Spanish buyers hear about their carrier in 41% of answers, because EU roaming already covers much of where they travel. Buyers framed as EU residents are the most likely to be sent to a marketplace or reseller (25%).
A carrier or local operator is rarely the first option named: a carrier is named before any eSIM brand in 4% of answers and a local operator in 5%. They arrive as the caveat after the shortlist: "or check what your network charges", "or pick up an AIS SIM at the airport". For an eSIM brand, that caveat is the competitor it cannot see in a rank tracker.
Who gets named
Visibility is the share of answers that name a brand. It is the headline measure here, because it is stable when averaged across many answers. Rank position is not: the order of a list changes most times a question is asked again, a pattern SparkToro and Gumshoe documented across ChatGPT, Claude and Google earlier this year.
- Airalo95%
- Holafly86%
- Saily71%
- Nomad67%
- Ubigi49%
- Maya Mobile18%
- Jetpac15%
- Orange Travel14%
The shaded band behind each bar is its 95% range: where the true figure plausibly sits, given that our questions are a sample of all the questions travellers could ask. Where two ranges overlap heavily, treat the brands as tied.
Holiday trips
| Brand | Named in | 95% range | Named first |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airalo | 95% | 90–99% | 43% |
| Holafly | 86% | 78–93% | 7% |
| Saily | 71% | 64–78% | 18% |
| Nomad | 67% | 59–76% | 11% |
| Ubigi | 49% | 39–59% | 14% |
| Maya Mobile | 18% | 12–23% | 0% |
| Jetpac | 15% | 9–23% | 1% |
| Orange Travel | 14% | 5–25% | 1% |
| Roamless | 10% | 5–18% | 1% |
| Sim Local | 7% | 3–11% | 0% |
Holiday questions are the most concentrated. Airalo and Holafly are named in most answers, and five brands take all but a sliver of the first mentions. Below Ubigi the field drops to Maya Mobile (18%), Jetpac (15%) and Orange Travel (14%), the one carrier-owned product in the ranking. Answers name 4.67 brands on average.
Multi-country trips
| Brand | Named in | 95% range | Named first |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airalo | 94% | 89–97% | 48% |
| Holafly | 76% | 68–83% | 4% |
| Nomad | 63% | 55–71% | 17% |
| Saily | 49% | 40–56% | 8% |
| Ubigi | 31% | 22–41% | 8% |
| Jetpac | 13% | 8–19% | 0% |
| Roamless | 13% | 6–21% | 2% |
| Orange Travel | 10% | 3–18% | 2% |
| Sim Local | 10% | 4–16% | 2% |
| Maya Mobile | 8% | 4–12% | 0% |
Regional and global plans are Nomad's strongest ground: it moves up to third and is named first in 17% of answers, more than Holafly (4%). Airalo is named first in almost half of multi-country answers, its highest top-pick rate anywhere. Roamless, a pay-as-you-go eSIM, enters the top eight.
Long stays and remote work
| Brand | Named in | 95% range | Named first |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airalo | 82% | 74–90% | 35% |
| Holafly | 78% | 68–86% | 19% |
| Nomad | 55% | 47–64% | 10% |
| Saily | 47% | 39–54% | 4% |
| Ubigi | 44% | 35–54% | 15% |
| Maya Mobile | 23% | 18–28% | 3% |
| Roamless | 17% | 11–23% | 2% |
| Orange Travel | 15% | 6–26% | 5% |
| GigSky | 11% | 6–16% | 0% |
| aloSIM | 9% | 4–14% | 0% |
Long stays are the most open segment, and the one where the alternatives bite hardest: 25% of all answers name a local operator, but for long-stay questions it is 31%. Holafly, whose unlimited plans suit a month abroad, is named first in 19% of answers, its best showing. Ubigi, with monthly plans, is named first in 15% despite ranking fifth. Maya Mobile reaches 23%, almost entirely through Gemini.
Named is not the same as recommended
An answer can name a brand as the option to avoid, as the expensive benchmark, or as the thing the reader asked about. We asked the extractor to flag whether each mention was a recommendation. For most brands the two figures sit close together. Holafly is the exception.
| Brand (long stays) | Named in | Recommended | Named first |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airalo | 82% | 70% | 35% |
| Holafly | 78% | 51% | 19% |
| Nomad | 55% | 48% | 10% |
| Saily | 47% | 41% | 4% |
| Ubigi | 44% | 42% | 15% |
In long-stay answers Holafly is named in 78% and recommended in 51%. The gap is the answers that mention it as the unlimited option that costs more, or that warn about its hotspot limits, before recommending something else. Across all three segments Holafly is second by visibility and far behind on first mentions: 7% of holiday answers name it first, against 43% for Airalo. Being in the answer and being the answer are different things.
Who owns the brands AI names
Most of the brands in the ranking are independent eSIM companies, but not all. Saily belongs to Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN. Ubigi is Transatel's consumer brand, part of the NTT group; 1GLOBAL took over Truphone; Jetpac is owned by Circles, a Singapore telecoms company. Orange Travel is a carrier's tourist product. In holiday answers, independent brands take 68% of mentions, security-company-owned brands 15%, telecom-owned brands 14% and carrier-owned 3%.
Which AI tool you ask changes the shortlist
Airalo is everywhere. Below it, the tool you ask decides who else you hear about.
| Brand (holiday trips) | ChatGPT | Gemini | Perplexity | Claude | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airalo | 96% | 99% | 87% | 99% | 96% |
| Holafly | 83% | 93% | 76% | 95% | 76% |
| Saily | 52% | 88% | 40% | 99% | 84% |
| Nomad | 89% | 79% | 36% | 76% | 36% |
| Ubigi | 75% | 27% | 41% | 59% | 32% |
| Maya Mobile | 4% | 59% | 4% | 8% | 4% |
| Jetpac | 1% | 15% | 4% | 40% | 16% |
Saily is named in 99% of Claude's holiday answers and 40% of Perplexity's. Nomad is in 89% of ChatGPT's answers and 36% of Google AI Overviews. Ubigi does best on ChatGPT (75%) and worst on Gemini (27%). Maya Mobile is a Gemini phenomenon: 59% there, under 10% everywhere else. A brand tracking only ChatGPT would not know.
The tools also disagree with themselves. Asked the same question again, Claude names 77% of the same brands, Gemini 74%, ChatGPT 71% and Perplexity 58%. Two different tools answering the same question name 41% to 62% of the same brands, and cite 3% to 11% of the same websites. Five tools read five different webs.
Ranking on Google is not the same as being named by AI
For every question we also collected Google's top 10 organic results, located in the buyer's market. Then we asked two things: does a brand's own site rank, and do the sites AI cites overlap with Google's top 10?
- AiraloHoliday+67
- HolaflyHoliday+54
- SailyHoliday+59
- NomadHoliday+59
- UbigiHoliday+45
- JetpacHoliday+15
- Maya MobileLong stays+23
- RoamlessLong stays+1
- Orange TravelHoliday+14
Holafly's site ranks in Google's top 10 for 32% of holiday questions, the best of any brand, and AI names it in 86%. Airalo ranks for 28% and is named in 95%. Nomad's sites rank for 8% of questions and Ubigi's for 4%, yet AI names them in 67% and 49% of answers. Their visibility comes from being named inside other people's pages, not from ranking.
Google's own top 10 for these questions looks nothing like the AI answers. Facebook pages fill 13% of the results and Reddit threads 11%; the AI tools almost never cite Facebook and take 4% of their citations from Reddit and other social sites. The overlap between what AI cites and what Google ranks confirms it:
| AI tool | Cited sites also in Google's top 10 for the same question |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 37% |
| Gemini | 16% |
| ChatGPT | 12% |
| Claude | 9% |
| Perplexity | 7% |
Even Google's AI Overviews draw more than six in ten of their sources from outside the top 10 of the results page they sit on. For the other tools it is nine in ten. In our HR study the same figures were 8% to 29%; travel is a market where Google and AI have drifted even further apart.
What AI reads before it answers
The five tools cited 8,642 websites across all answers (each site counted once per answer). We grouped them by who wrote them.
- ChatGPT
- Google AI Overviews
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Claude
- All tools
Across all tools, 26% of citations point to the website of a brand in the ranking and 22% to another eSIM or telecom company: smaller eSIM apps, wholesalers, carriers and marketplaces, many of them publishing "best eSIM for Japan" lists that rank their rivals. Affiliate comparison content, from eSIM comparison sites to travel blogs with discount codes, makes up 21%. Independent media, review platforms and blogs without affiliate links make up 20%. Social platforms and forums, Reddit included, make up 4%.
Three findings stand out.
ChatGPT reads the brands themselves. 82% of ChatGPT's citations go to the sites of brands in the ranking: coverage pages, plan pages, help centres. Airalo's and Holafly's own sites are the two most cited domains in the whole study (419 and 384 answers). If a brand's coverage or hotspot page is out of date, ChatGPT is likely to repeat it.
The "independent" layer is mostly paid for. Of the sources that are not telecom companies, affiliate content outweighs independent media two to one. We inspected the 25 most cited domains by hand: 15 of the travel sites among them carry affiliate links or an affiliate disclosure on the very page the AI cited. Claude, which cites brand sites least (13%), leans hardest on this layer: 59% of its citations are comparison content, media and blogs. The most cited independent publishers were Gizmodo (205 answers) and TechRadar.
Community content barely registers, except for Google. Reddit and other social sources supply 4% of citations overall, but 24% of Google AI Overviews' sources, mostly Reddit and YouTube. The same Reddit threads fill 11% of Google's organic top 10. The four API tools pass over community content that Google ranks and that Google's own AI reads.
Reputation versus sources
To separate what a model already believes from what it reads, we asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude the 75 unbranded questions again with web search switched off. What a model names from memory is its built-in preference. The difference between memory and search shows how much of a brand's visibility depends on the pages AI finds.
- AiraloHoliday−2
- HolaflyHoliday−2
- NomadHoliday−8
- SailyHoliday+26
- UbigiHoliday−8
- Maya MobileHoliday−11
- JetpacHoliday+15
- RoamlessLong stays+16
- Orange TravelHoliday+3
The leaders are visible on reputation. With search off, the three models name Airalo in 100% of holiday questions and Holafly in 92%; with search on, 98% and 90%. Search changes almost nothing for them. Nomad is the same: 89% from memory, 81% with search.
Saily is made visible by sources, on one tool. Averaged across the three models, Saily goes from 53% from memory to 80% with search. The whole of that is Gemini: 12% without search, 88% with it. Claude already knows Saily (96% from memory) and ChatGPT names it at the same rate either way. Jetpac appears only when a model searches: 4% from memory, 19% with search, and up to 40% on Claude. Roamless, in long-stay questions, rises from 4% to 20%.
Search can also cost visibility. Ubigi is named in 61% of answers from memory and 53% with search on; Claude alone drops from 92% to 59%. Maya Mobile falls from 35% to 24%. The models remember these brands; the pages they read for these questions do not put them forward.
Who AI offers as the alternative
The 15 branded questions show which brands AI treats as substitutes. Each was answered 13 times (three runs on four tools, plus one AI Overview).
| Question | Brands named most, with the number of answers |
|---|---|
| What are the best alternatives to Airalo? | Holafly (13), Nomad (12), Saily (12), Ubigi (11), Roamless (9) |
| Alternativas a Holafly con datos ilimitados | Airalo (12), Holafly (11), Saily (9), Nomad (8), GigSky (7) |
| Alternatives to Nomad eSIM for regional plans | Airalo (13), Ubigi (13), Nomad (10), Saily (10), Holafly (10) |
| Alternatives to Airalo's global plan | Nomad (12), Airalo (11), Holafly (11), Roamless (9), Saily (9) |
| Alternatives to Holafly for unlimited data | Saily (11), Airalo (11), Nomad (11), Holafly (11), GigSky (9) |
| Alternatives to Airalo for digital nomads | Nomad (13), Holafly (13), Saily (11), Airalo (10), Ubigi (9) |
The alternatives are drawn from the same five names. Asked for alternatives to Airalo, AI offers Holafly, Nomad, Saily and Ubigi; asked for alternatives to Holafly, it offers Airalo, Saily and Nomad. Roamless and GigSky are the only brands outside the five to appear in most answers to any alternatives question. And the brand in the question nearly always reappears in the answer: Airalo is named in 10 to 12 of the 13 answers to questions asking for its alternatives.
What this means for eSIM brands
The findings point to a few practical conclusions. None of them is a shortcut, and none guarantees a result.
- Measure visibility, not rank, and measure every tool. Track the share of answers that name you across many questions and five tools, with a range around the number. Saily's visibility runs from 40% to 99% depending on the tool; a single screenshot tells you nothing.
- Count the competitors that are not eSIM brands. A quarter of answers send the traveller to a local operator and a fifth to their own carrier. The brands that win long-stay and UK questions will be the ones whose pages answer "why not just buy a local SIM" and "what does my carrier charge" directly.
- Keep your own pages accurate and specific. ChatGPT takes 82% of its citations from the brands' own sites. Coverage, hotspot rules, validity and top-up pages are read and repeated, so they should state facts plainly and be current.
- Know which third-party pages shape the shortlist. A handful of affiliate comparison sites and travel blogs, plus a few publishers, carry most of the non-brand citations. Whether you appear on them, and how you are described, matters more than your Google position for the same query.
- Challengers win through sources, one tool at a time. Saily on Gemini and Jetpac on Claude show that a brand the model does not remember can still be named in most answers when the pages that tool reads mention it. That is the realistic route for everyone outside the top five.
- Expect change. This is a snapshot. Research tracking AI citations daily has found most of the variation shifts within weeks, so a single measurement is a starting point, not a verdict.
Method and limitations
Read the full method and limitations
Questions. 90 questions, 30 per kind of trip, written to match how travellers phrase requests: destination (23), best-of (19), use case (16), comparison (9), pricing (9), problem (8) and alternatives (6). Buyer markets: global (58), Spain (9), UK (8), Germany (8), EU (7). Seven questions are in Spanish and six in German. Pricing questions were included to see who gets named when the traveller cares about cost; no price quoted by any tool was recorded or checked. The full list is on the data page.
AI tools and models. ChatGPT through the OpenAI API (gpt-5.6-luna with web search); Gemini through the Google Gemini API (gemini-3.8-flash with Google Search grounding); Perplexity through its Agent API (perplexity/sonar with web search); Claude through the Anthropic API (claude-sonnet-5-5 with web search). Each question was sent as a plain user message with no system prompt, three times per tool. As in our HR study, Gemini alone received one line, "Use Google Search to find current information before answering", because without it the API answers from memory. Google AI Overviews and Google's organic top 10 were collected through DataForSEO's search results API, located in the buyer's market: Spain, the UK, Germany, Ireland for EU questions and the US for global questions, in the question's language. An AI Overview was shown for every one of the 90 searches.
Dates. All answers were collected on 25 October 2026; Google organic results and the search-off answers on the same day.
Extraction. A language model (Claude Haiku 5.5) read each answer and listed every travel eSIM brand, carrier, operator, marketplace or app selling an eSIM that it named, in order, whether it was recommended, and whether the answer advised using the reader's own carrier or an eSIM inside another app. We checked its output against the answer texts: 99.8% of the 5,592 names it found appear in the answers, and it missed about 0.6% of mentions. Names were matched to a list of 62 tracked brands, carriers and storefronts with their aliases and disambiguation rules (Nomad the eSIM, not "digital nomad"; Three the UK network, not the number). Ten eSIM brands that the tools named seven or more times were added to the list after the run; none exceeds 2.5% visibility.
Channels. Each named company was assigned to one of four kinds: a dedicated travel eSIM brand; a carrier the buyer would already have, judged by the buyer's market; a marketplace, reseller, white label or eSIM sold inside another app; or a local operator at the destination. Carriers named without a home market were classified by a language model. Advice to "check your carrier" without naming one was recorded but is not counted in the channel figures, because a hand check found about half of those flags ambiguous.
Measures. Visibility is the share of answers naming a brand, from the 75 unbranded questions, pooled across tools and runs. Ranges are 95% bootstrap intervals, resampling whole questions 2,000 times. "Named first" is the share of all answers in which the brand is the first dedicated eSIM brand mentioned. "Recommended" counts only mentions the extractor flagged as a recommendation. Overlap between two answers is the number of brands (or websites) they share divided by the number either names (Jaccard similarity). Only dedicated eSIM brands and Orange Travel enter the leaderboards; carriers, operators and storefronts appear in the channel view.
Source classification. Cited websites were reduced to their domain and classified as a ranked brand's own site, another eSIM or telecom company, an affiliate comparison site, independent media, a review platform, a travel blog, a forum or social platform, or other. The 25 most cited domains were inspected by hand, one cited page each, for affiliate links and disclosures; the rest were classified by a language model with hand-checked corrections. Travel blogs without affiliate evidence on the cited page are counted with independent media.
Limitations.
- The study uses the tools' APIs. Answers in the consumer apps can differ, because the apps add personalisation, location and conversation history.
- It is a single-day snapshot. AI answers change with model updates and with the web.
- Three runs per question is enough to average across 75 questions, but not to rank brands within a few points of each other. The ranges show where that applies.
- Market figures rest on five to nine questions per market, and the per-tool figures on 25 questions per tool and segment.
- Gemini returned no source list for 99 of its 270 answers; its source shares rest on the remaining 171.
- The split between a buyer's own carrier and a local operator depends on country lists and a model's judgement for carriers outside Europe and the US.
- Google AI Overviews were collected once per question, not three times.
- Three of the ten brands added after the run have domains we could not confirm.
Data. Everything behind this report is on the data page: an interactive explorer, the questions, the brand list, the leaderboards with ranges, the channel view, the cited websites, Google vs AI, search off vs on, and all 1,170 raw answers. The data is free to reuse with credit under CC BY 4.0.
Disclosure. At the time of publication Plámenos has no commercial relationship with any brand in this study. Plámenos sells AI visibility services and may in future work with companies in this market, including brands named here. No brand saw the results before publication.
Five names, then a local SIM
When a traveller asks an AI tool which eSIM to buy, the shortlist they get is five names long and was settled before they asked: the models already know Airalo, Holafly and Nomad, and the pages they read confirm it. The sixth option in the answer is not a sixth brand. It is the traveller's own carrier, or the operator at the arrivals hall.
Search rankings do not decide who is on the list, and neither does one tool. For the leaders, the advantage is reputation the models already hold. For everyone else, the route runs through the specific pages each tool reads for each kind of trip, and through answering the questions that send travellers elsewhere. Those pages can be identified, measured and improved. That work starts with knowing where you stand today.