Panama’s country brand facing AI
For twenty years, deciding on a vacation destination, a multinational's regional headquarters, or a country to retire in began with a search engine that ranked links and let you choose. Today artificial intelligence returns a written recommendation, with one country in front and the others as an alternative. Position is no longer a spot on a list: it is an award, and there is no second page.The open report
La marca país Panamá ante la inteligencia artificial (September 2026) measures where Panama ranks in these responses across sixteen distinct attributes, drawing on 401,824 coded data fields and 29,036 records, across five markets and four languages. Its conclusion is not the one the authors expected: Panama is almost never absent. What is missing, systematically and verifiably, is who backs it up. Panama appears in almost every response, and in none of them is it supported by a Panamanian source.
What the study measures and how it was done
The research is part of a line of work developed by nine institutions from five countries: Quality Leadership University and Or University (Panama); Universidad de Málaga,
ISEEN, AEMD and
Centria Group (Spain); UCEVA (Colombia); Universidad del Valle (Nicaragua); and IAAI (United States). It is the first case in the series devoted to a country brand, following studies on
Panamanian banking and
car brands in Panama.
Methodology in figures
- Real questions about Panama and its region: which country to visit on vacation, where to place a multinational's regional headquarters, where to retire, where to go birdwatching, where to set up a logistics center, whether it is safe to travel.
- Four assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity) and the search engine, queried in parallel, at the same time and from the same market.
- Five markets and four languages, with verification of the starting point before each batch.
- Browser queries, never via API, because the object of study is what a real person sees from a specific country. Search engine in incognito mode without a session; assistants with a session, in temporary mode.
- 205 archived pages with date, market and digital fingerprint, verifiable by any third party.
- First data collected in September 2026. The report is preliminary, without peer review or external validation.
The essentials in three minutes
- Panama is almost never absent, and almost never wins. In the flagship tourism query, repeated 45 times across four assistants, Costa Rica tops all 45. Panama appears in most, but tops none. This isn't a visibility problem: it's a hierarchy problem.
- There are
