The NFL AI Endorsement Index 2026, the study 5W and Talent Resources released on August 26, scores 50 NFL players on how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity answer sponsor-facing questions ahead of the September 9 season opener. Five players capture 61% of every endorsement-intent citation tested, and that concentration should worry the managers of endorsement portfolios more than it does today.

Why did five players capture 61% of the citations?

Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Travis Kelce, Sam Darnold and Kenneth Walker III are not the five most talented players in the NFL. They are the five players AI engines treat as the default answer to "who should a brand sign." I have spent decades in this business watching fame and commercial value drift apart, and I have never seen the gap open this fast, in this few names, this early in a season.

Mahomes leads the field with a Citation Share Score of 97. Allen sits at 94 and Kelce at 91. All three draw consistent, favorable answers across every engine tested, which is a different achievement than being famous. Fame gets you recognized. A structured, dated, retrievable record is what gets you named first when a model has to pick one answer.

What surprised me most in the data?

Thirty of the 50 players tested score in the lowest AI visibility tier. Some of those players had Pro Bowl seasons. None of that mattered to the four AI engines, because none of it had been documented in a way the engines could retrieve. A good story needs a distributor, and the distributor has changed. It is no longer only a journalist or a producer deciding what runs. It is a model deciding, in milliseconds, whether a client's name belongs in its answer at all.

Why does the kickoff rematch change the picture?

The Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots open the season on September 9 in a rematch of Super Bowl LX, and six players from those two rosters make up a large share of the data. Four of them, Darnold, Walker, Cooper Kupp and Drake Maye, rank in the top eleven of the 50-player field.

Patriots cornerback Christian Gonzalez, who forced two turnovers in that Super Bowl, scores a 57. Seahawks kicker Jason Myers, who made five field goals in the same game, a Super Bowl record, scores a 12. Same game, same teams, and a 45-point gap between them. Recent, widely covered achievement moves the needle for a quarterback or a receiver in a way it does not for a kicker, whatever the record.

What does Talent Resources' Dunkin' campaign show about this shift?

Talent Resources brokered Dunkin's first Super Bowl commercial with Ben Affleck in 2023, and Dunkin' has run a star-studded Super Bowl spot every year since. That partnership worked because Talent Resources understood which relationship would make a brand relevant, not just recognizable. Mike Heller of Talent Resources builds the celebrity relationship, and 5W measures the AI visibility around it.

The AI engines answering questions about NFL sponsorships today are running a similar calculation, in milliseconds, and most of the league is losing it without knowing the game is being played.

What should a brand do with this before kickoff?

A brand should check whether the athlete it is about to sign is the one ChatGPT and Perplexity name when a marketer asks who to sign, not the one the scouting report says should be named. Seventeen percent of the answers in the study cited a sponsor deal that had expired, been renegotiated, or never existed. That is a high error rate for systems now doing informal due diligence before a deal reaches the table.

Document the deal, date it, and give the model something current to retrieve, or accept that it will keep citing whatever it found last. The full ranking and methodology are on 5W's NFL AI Endorsement Index 2026 page, and the launch is described in 5W's announcement of the study.

Where does this study sit in the NFL section?

This study is the player-level companion to the franchise and owner research in the NFL section. The franchise ranking is covered in what 750 NFL queries found about citation share, and the full set of NFL cases is in the NFL public relations guide. For the wider field, including NIL, sponsorship and crisis planning, see the sports PR guide, and for deal structure see sports sponsorship strategy.

Frequently asked questions

What is the NFL AI Endorsement Index?

It is a study by 5W and Talent Resources that scores 50 NFL players on how four AI engines answer sponsor-facing questions, released on August 26, 2026.

Which NFL players scored highest?

Patrick Mahomes scored 97, Josh Allen 94 and Travis Kelce 91 on the Citation Share Score in the published report.

How often did AI answers cite a false or expired deal?

Seventeen percent of the answers in the study cited a sponsor deal that had expired, been renegotiated or never existed, according to the report.

Published August 26, 2026. Updated October 2026. Index figures come from 5W's published report and were not re-checked against the dataset. The earlier version referred to a 25-player ranking; the study tested 50 players.