New American Funding AI Market Strategy Report - Mortgage

Answer Capsule

New American Funding recorded the steepest valid recommendation coverage decline of any tracked mortgage lender in the September 2026 LLM Authority Index benchmark, falling 11.8 points from 28.8% in July 2026 to 17.0% in September 2026. The decline is presence-driven rather than placement-driven, with raw mention presence dropping 9.9 points while top-three and rank-one rates moved far less. New American Funding retains the strongest net sentiment score in the category at 0.8806, indicating that when the brand appears, it is framed positively. The clearest opportunity lies in restoring the brand's presence across high-intent mortgage discovery prompts, particularly on surfaces where it has shown it can convert visibility into recommendations.

Who This Report Is For

This report is for mortgage marketing, digital strategy, and brand leadership teams at New American Funding who need to understand why AI recommendation coverage has declined and where to focus remediation.

Report Card

Executive Summary

New American Funding holds a 20.87% raw mention presence rate in the September 2026 qualified benchmark, meaning the brand appears in roughly one in five AI-generated responses across the tracked mortgage discovery surfaces. That presence converts to a 16.98% valid recommendation coverage rate, placing the brand fifth among six tracked lenders. The gap between presence and recommendation conversion is narrow, which distinguishes New American Funding from lenders like Freedom Mortgage that show wider presence-to-coverage gaps.

The benchmark recorded 134 total mentions for New American Funding in September 2026, with 118 positive mentions, 16 neutral mentions, and zero negative mentions. The brand received 109 valid recommendations out of 642 qualified observations. Its top-three rate stands at 5.14% and its rank-one rate at 0.47%, both among the lowest in the category.

The strongest cluster for New American Funding is the only cluster with qualified observations: Best Mortgage Lenders & Top Home Loan Providers, which captures consideration-stage discovery prompts. The brand's strongest platform signal comes from Perplexity, where it achieves a 34.85% positive visibility rate and a 22.73% valid recommendation coverage rate, well above its category-wide averages.

The clearest platform gap is on Copilot, where New American Funding records zero top-three placements and zero rank-one recommendations across 62 observations. The brand's presence on Copilot is 19.35%, but its recommendation conversion is weak, suggesting the brand is named as context rather than as a recommended option.

The benchmark evidence suggests New American Funding's coverage decline is primarily a visibility problem. When the brand appears in AI responses, it is recommended at a high rate relative to its presence, and it is framed positively. The issue is that it appears less often than it did at the July 2026 baseline.

What New American Funding Is Winning

Questions This Section Answers

• Where does New American Funding hold the strongest net sentiment in the tracked mortgage category?
• Which platforms show the highest conversion of New American Funding's presence into valid recommendations?

New American Funding holds the strongest net sentiment score in the tracked category at 0.8806, calculated from 118 positive mentions, 16 neutral mentions, and zero negative mentions. No tracked lender achieves a higher positive-to-negative framing ratio, and the brand has no negative visibility at all across the 642 qualified observations.

The brand's presence-to-coverage conversion is efficient. With a 20.87% presence rate converting to a 16.98% valid recommendation coverage rate, New American Funding converts roughly 81% of its appearances into valid recommendations. This is the highest conversion efficiency among the six tracked lenders and indicates that when AI systems surface the brand, they tend to recommend it rather than merely mention it.

Perplexity represents a meaningful pocket of strength. On that platform, New American Funding achieves a 34.85% presence rate, a 22.73% valid recommendation coverage rate, and a perfect 1.0 net sentiment score with zero neutral or negative mentions. The brand also records its only rank-one placement on Perplexity outside of ChatGPT and AI Mode, suggesting the platform treats New American Funding as a legitimate first-choice answer in certain prompt contexts.

Where New American Funding Has the Clearest AI Visibility Gaps

Questions This Section Answers

• Why did New American Funding's valid recommendation coverage decline most sharply among tracked lenders?
• Which platform shows the weakest placement profile for New American Funding?
• How does New American Funding's placement profile compare with Rocket Mortgage and Veterans United Home Loans?

The dominant issue is declining presence. New American Funding's raw mention presence fell from 30.8% in July 2026 to 20.9% in September 2026, a 9.9-point drop that accounts for most of the 11.8-point decline in valid recommendation coverage. The brand was recommended in 195 of 678 qualified observations in July 2026, compared with 109 of 642 in September 2026. This is a visibility problem first and a placement problem second.

Copilot is the clearest platform gap. Across 62 qualified observations on Copilot, New American Funding appears in 12 responses but receives zero top-three placements and zero rank-one recommendations. Its valid recommendation coverage on Copilot is 11.29%, and its average recommended rank is 7.0, the weakest placement profile of any platform where the brand appears. The brand is present but not chosen on this surface.

Google AI Overviews also shows a notable gap. New American Funding's presence on AI Overviews is 14.97%, but its valid recommendation coverage is only 13.17%, with zero rank-one placements. The brand appears in 25 of 167 observations but is never the first recommendation, and its top-three rate is just 5.39%.

The competitive displacement pattern is clear. Rocket Mortgage leads the category with 62.77% valid recommendation coverage and a 95.17% presence rate, while Veterans United Home Loans holds second at 42.21% coverage. New American Funding's 17.0% coverage places it behind loanDepot at 26.32% and PennyMac at 23.68%, both of which have also declined but from higher baselines. The brand's decline of 11.8 points since July 2026 is the largest of any tracked lender and has not stabilized, with coverage falling in each of the two measured months.

Biggest Opportunity

Questions This Section Answers

• Where should New American Funding focus first to restore its AI recommendation presence?
• What explains the gap between New American Funding's platform strengths and its overall coverage decline?

The clearest opportunity for New American Funding is restoring presence on the prompts and surfaces where it has demonstrated it can convert visibility into positive recommendations. The brand's high net sentiment score and efficient presence-to-coverage conversion indicate that the underlying framing is healthy. The problem is that AI systems are surfacing the brand less often across the consideration-stage discovery prompts that dominate the qualified benchmark.

Perplexity offers the most direct path. The brand already achieves its strongest recommendation metrics on that platform, including a 22.73% valid recommendation coverage rate and a perfect sentiment score. Expanding the public evidence layer that supports Perplexity's retrieval patterns, while addressing why Copilot and AI Overviews surface the brand less frequently, would target the widest gap between current performance and demonstrated potential.

Competitive Landscape

Questions This Section Answers

• Where does New American Funding rank among the six tracked mortgage lenders in September 2026?
• What does New American Funding's average recommended rank of 4.19 indicate about its standing?

Rocket Mortgage holds dominant recommendation-stage strength in the mortgage category with 62.77% valid recommendation coverage, followed by Veterans United Home Loans at 42.21%. New American Funding sits fifth of six tracked lenders, ahead of only Freedom Mortgage, with coverage of 16.98%.

Average recommended rank covers rank-eligible recommendations only.

The table shows New American Funding with the highest sentiment score in the category but the second-lowest top-three and rank-one rates. The brand's average recommended rank of 4.19 indicates that when it is recommended, it tends to appear lower in the list, behind the category leaders and often behind mid-tier competitors.

Prompt Evidence

Perplexity / Best Mortgage Lenders & Top Home Loan Providers Prompt: "Which bank loan is best for a home loan?" Result: New American Funding appears with its strongest platform-level recommendation profile, achieving a 22.73% valid recommendation coverage rate and a perfect sentiment score on Perplexity.

Copilot / Best Mortgage Lenders & Top Home Loan Providers Prompt: "best mortgage lenders" Result: New American Funding is present in 19.35% of Copilot observations but receives zero top-three placements and zero rank-one recommendations, indicating the brand is named as context rather than recommended.

ChatGPT / Best Mortgage Lenders & Top Home Loan Providers Prompt: "What is the best lender for FHA loans?" Result: New American Funding receives a 9.59% valid recommendation coverage rate on ChatGPT with one rank-one placement, showing narrow but real recommendation presence on a high-intent loan-type prompt.

What CiteWorks Studio Would Do Next

Phase 1: AI Market Discovery Audit Map which specific prompts and surfaces drove the 9.9-point presence decline from July to September 2026, identifying where competitor displacement is occurring.

Phase 2: Recommendation Readiness Plan Prioritize the prompt clusters and platforms where New American Funding already converts presence into recommendations, starting with Perplexity and the FHA-focused prompts where the brand holds rank-one placements.

Phase 3: Owned Answer Layer Buildout Strengthen owned content that answers high-intent mortgage discovery questions directly, giving AI systems clearer material to cite when evaluating the brand.

Phase 4: Citation / Authority Layer Development Expand the backlink-supported public evidence layer that supports retrievability, focusing on the sources and domains that AI systems appear to synthesize from in mortgage recommendation responses.

Phase 5: Monthly AI Visibility and Recommendation Tracking Track presence, valid recommendation coverage, top-three rate, and rank-one rate monthly to confirm whether the decline has stabilized and whether remediation efforts are converting presence back into recommendations.

Why This Matters

AI-generated recommendations are becoming a primary input into how prospective borrowers choose a mortgage lender. New American Funding's decline in valid recommendation coverage means the brand is appearing in fewer AI-generated shortlists at the moment of consideration, even though its framing quality remains the strongest in the category.

Presence alone is not enough, and neither is positive sentiment. The brands winning the mortgage discovery conversation are those that appear often and are recommended prominently. For New American Funding, the next move is targeted correction of the prompt, page, and citation layers that determine whether AI systems surface the brand in the first place.

Core Metrics

Sentiment Score

Questions This Section Answers

• How is New American Funding's net sentiment score of 0.8806 calculated?
• Why is classified sentiment needed rather than relying only on raw mention counts?

Sentiment Score = (positive mentions x 1 + neutral mentions x 0 + negative mentions x -1) / total mentions

For New American Funding, the calculation is (118 x 1 + 16 x 0 + 0 x -1) / 134, producing a net sentiment score of 0.8806.

This score matters because unclassified mention counts are misleading. A raw mention count of 134 tells you nothing about whether those mentions are recommendations, neutral references, or cautionary notes. Share of voice is a diagnostic metric, not a business KPI. A positive recommendation, a neutral reference, a cautionary mention, and a competitor-displaced mention are not equal, and counting all mentions as wins is bad measurement. Classified sentiment is required before interpreting AI visibility, because it separates framing quality from mere presence.

Sentiment by Platform

Methodology

1. Report orientation: This is a benchmark-based AI market strategy report analyzing New American Funding's visibility and recommendation patterns within the mortgage category, based on the LLM Authority Index AI Market Discovery Index and CiteWorks Studio industry analysis.
2. Reporting window: September 2026, with trend comparisons to the July 2026 baseline and August 2026 intermediate month.
3. Platforms tracked: ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode, representing six canonical AI and search surface families.
4. Observation count: 642 qualified benchmark observations in September 2026, drawn from 800 raw prompt-surface observations.
5. Competitor universe: Six tracked mortgage lenders: Rocket Mortgage, Veterans United Home Loans, loanDepot, PennyMac, New American Funding, and Freedom Mortgage.
6. Public clusters used: One qualified buyer-intent cluster, Best Mortgage Lenders & Top Home Loan Providers, capturing consideration-stage discovery prompts. No qualified observations existed in pricing or comparison clusters.
7. Stage 0 role: Raw prompt-surface observations were collected and passed through qualification stages to filter irrelevant and off-topic responses before public metrics were calculated.
8. Definition of a mention: A mention is any qualified observation where the brand appears in the AI response, regardless of whether it is recommended.
9. Definition of a valid recommendation: A valid recommendation is a qualified observation where the brand is explicitly recommended or shortlisted, distinct from a neutral reference or cautionary mention.
10. Limitations: The public benchmark does not measure market share, sales attribution, organic search ranking performance, social mention volume, or private channels. Movement identifies changes worth investigating but does not establish cause. The qualified pool of 642 observations is smaller than July 2026's 678, which affects how percentage movements translate into absolute counts. New American Funding's 109 valid recommendations are based on a qualified set of 642, so small absolute changes produce visible percentage movement.

See How AI Is Recommending Your Brand

The public benchmark shows where New American Funding stands against five tracked competitors, but it does not explain which prompts, surfaces, and evidence sources drive the brand's presence and recommendation patterns. A company-level AI visibility audit maps those drivers into a prioritized strategy for restoring recommendation coverage.