Israel Ranks #1 on Anthropic's AI Usage Index

Part of EPR's Israel & the AI Answer Layer pillar · Israeli Tech's Communications Reckoning · Israel Uses AI / Startups Invisible

For thirty years, the Israeli PR industry has operated on a unique rhythm. Small country, global markets, bilingual workforce, and a domestic tech sector that produced category-defining brands — Check Point, Wix, Mobileye, Fiverr, Wiz, CyberArk — at a rate disproportionate to the country's size.

A joint research study released this week by 5W and Louder suggests that rhythm is about to accelerate. The study finds that Israel ranks first in the world on Anthropic's AI Usage Index at 4.9x — ahead of Singapore (4.19x), the United States (3.69x), and every other country measured.

The ranking itself is notable. The implications for PR, brand-building, and corporate communications are more consequential.

The information layer is where first impressions are now formed

When 4.9x the expected share of Claude usage per capita is happening inside one country, the audience of any brand operating in that market is increasingly forming its first impression of that brand from an AI answer — not from a website, not from a press release, not from a LinkedIn post. Israeli buyers, journalists, analysts, and investors are getting summarized by LLMs faster than they are reading source material.

This changes what a brand's "owned assets" actually are. The traditional list — website, blog, press center, executive social accounts, case studies — is now joined by a new one: how the brand is described inside AI models. How accurately? How prominently? With what framing? Against which competitors?

Most companies have never audited their AI-layer presence

The basic exercise — open Claude, open ChatGPT, open Gemini, ask what each says about your company — takes thirty minutes. Few companies have done it systematically. Fewer still have reacted to what they found. That is a competitive gap that is open for the next 12-18 months.

The companies actively managing their AI-layer presence are doing three things. They publish primary-source material — research, original data, executive commentary, documented case studies — in formats designed to be cited. They keep that material consistent across owned properties so LLMs compress it into accurate summaries instead of garbled ones. And they measure what models actually say, not what they hope models say.

Small teams are changing what PR support looks like

The Israeli playbook used to require a U.S. agency, a U.S. office, and a Series B before serious brand-building started. That sequence is collapsing.

Above Security raised a $43 million Series A with ten employees at eight months old. Cyera went from a $3 billion to a $9 billion valuation in under a year. Ten-person Israeli teams are now producing the output that fifty-person teams produced five years ago — and they expect their communications partners to operate at the same compression.

That changes what they buy. Less retainer maintenance, more AI-visibility research. Less press release volume, more primary-source publishing built to be cited inside Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Hebrew and English as a native pair, in the same workflow, from week one.

The agencies built around the old sequence are not built for this one.

This piece is part of Israel & the AI Answer Layer — the Everything-PR research hub on who the AI engines cite about Israel, and who they can't see.