When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini "what's the best tool for X?", they don't get ten blue links. They get one answer — a short list of names. If your product isn't in it, that buyer never learns you exist. It's the new "not ranking on Google," except there's no page 2 to scroll to.
I wanted to know how bad it actually is, so I ran the real buyer questions for 9 SaaS categories against AI search and tallied which brands actually get named.
What I did
For each category I generated the questions a real buyer would ask ("best CRM for a small team", "top project management tool for agencies", and so on), sent them through AI search (Perplexity as the first engine), and counted:
- every brand named across all the answers,
- which brand was the single top pick, and
- the source domains the AI pulled its answer from.
Categories: CRM, project management, email marketing, AI writing, help desk, website builders, password managers, video conferencing, and note-taking apps.
What surprised me
1. Most brands are simply invisible. In nearly every category the same 3-4 incumbents soak up almost all the recommendations. If you are not one of them, you are not in the answer at all — not ranked low, absent.
2. A few small tools quietly win their niche. In some categories a smaller name grabs the top-pick slot — and when you look at why, it is almost always because a handful of specific sources (a popular Reddit thread, one widely-cited listicle, their own comparison page) get pulled again and again.
3. It is not fixed — it moves. Re-run the same questions a week later and the ranking shifts. That means it is trackable, and it means it is influenceable.
The leaderboards
I put the per-category rankings up here (who AI names most, plus the sources it reads from):
https://willylam2222-bot.github.io/cited/leaderboards.html
If you want to sanity-check your own category, look it up — and if your product is not on the board, that gap is exactly the thing worth fixing.
Curious whether folks here have checked where their product stands in AI answers. Drop your brand + category in the comments and I will run it.
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