Most AI Mentions Are Runner-Up Mentions: 30 AI Tools & Assistants Brands Measured

We asked 4 AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini — the questions buyers actually type, about 30 AI tools & assistants brands, on 2026-09-12. That is 359 answers. 44.4% of the mentions we found were not recommendations at all — they were the brand being offered as an alternative to something else.

Every figure below comes from those answers, and the query to re-run them is at the bottom of this page.

Which engine actually names brands?

Not equally. Gemini named a brand in 58.4% of its answers; ChatGPT managed 50%. That is an 8.4-point gap between two engines asked identical questions on the same day, which is the whole argument for measuring more than one.

359 answers measured 2026-09-12.

Do the engines agree on who exists?

21 of the 30 brands were named by all 4 engines, and one was named by none of them (DeepBrain). The rest sit in between, visible to some engines and invisible to others.

The widest split was Claude: Perplexity named it in 100% of the answers we asked about it, ChatGPT in 0%. That comparison rests on the handful of questions we asked about that one brand, not on the full sample — treat it as a lead to investigate, not a law.

Brands, out of 30 measured.

Named is not the same as recommended

A mention is not an endorsement. Of every mention in this study, 42.3% was the engine's first recommendation, while 44.4% was the brand being offered as an alternative to something else. A brand can look visible and still only ever appear as the runner-up.

Share of all mentions in this study.

6 brands were named but never recommended first by any engine: InVideo, Lumen5, Pictory, Stable Diffusion, Sudowrite, Writesonic. For those, visibility work is not the problem — positioning is.

Which sources are the engines reading?

The engines cited zapier.com more than any other source (106 citations, 3.1% of all citations in this study). But the long tail is the real story: the top 10 domains together account for only 13.6% of citations. There is no short list of sites to get listed on — the engines are reading widely.

Citations counted across 359 answers. "Engines" column below shows how many of the 4 cited each source.

Source	Citations	Engines citing it
zapier.com	106	3 of 4
reddit.com	74	2 of 4
learn.g2.com	45	3 of 4
pcmag.com	45	2 of 4
eesel.ai	39	3 of 4
guideflow.com	37	3 of 4
techradar.com	36	4 of 4
buffer.com	28	3 of 4
lindy.ai	28	3 of 4
toolradar.com	27	2 of 4

Who do the engines bring up instead?

These names were never in our sample — the engines volunteered them while answering about someone else. Google Gemini came up against 7 of the 30 brands we measured. If you are in this category, these are the brands you are being compared to whether you like it or not.

Not part of the sample; named by the engines on their own.

Every brand we measured

Visibility is the share of scored answers in which an engine named the brand. DaVinci Resolve led at 100%; DeepBrain came last at 0%.

Brand	Visibility	Answers naming it
DaVinci Resolve	100%	12 of 12
Rasa	92%	11 of 12
Grammarly	83%	10 of 12
Adobe Firefly	75%	9 of 12
Jasper	75%	9 of 12
Midjourney	75%	9 of 12
CapCut	67%	8 of 12
DataRobot	67%	8 of 12
Hugging Face	67%	8 of 12
ManyChat	67%	8 of 12
Runway	67%	8 of 12
Claude	58%	7 of 12
Descript	58%	7 of 12
Notion AI	58%	7 of 12
QuillBot	58%	7 of 12
Runway ML	55%	6 of 11
Copy.ai	50%	6 of 12
IBM Watson	50%	6 of 12
Rytr	50%	6 of 12
Stable Diffusion	50%	6 of 12
Sudowrite	50%	6 of 12
Synthesia	50%	6 of 12
Writesonic	50%	6 of 12
Ada	42%	5 of 12
ChatGPT	42%	5 of 12
HeyGen	25%	3 of 12
InVideo	25%	3 of 12
Pictory	25%	3 of 12
Lumen5	8%	1 of 12
DeepBrain	0%	0 of 12

What to do with this

1. Measure every engine, not one. The spread between the most and least generous engine in this study was 8.4 points. A check against a single engine tells you about that engine.
2. Check the role, not just the mention. 44.4% of mentions here put the brand in the alternative slot. Moving from alternative to first recommendation is a positioning problem, not a visibility one.
3. Follow the citations, not the keyword list. The engines quoted a wide spread of sources here; zapier.com was the single most cited. Earning a place on the pages an engine already reads is what changes an answer.
4. Zero is a starting point, not a verdict. 1 of 30 brands scored zero here. The first mention on any engine is the milestone that proves the sources are being read.

What this does not show

• Each brand was measured on the questions our generator writes for that brand, not on one shared question set, so this is an average of per-brand measurements and not a like-for-like ranking.
• Per-brand splits between engines rest on the few questions asked about that brand, not on the full sample of 30.
• These are measurements taken on 2026-09-12. AI answers change; a score here is a reading on that date, not a permanent property of the brand.

Reproduce this

The raw answers are stored per brand, per engine, per question. The figures above come from:

select "brandName", "stratum", "visibility", "mentionCount" from "StudyResult" where "studyId" = 'cmtypqjgh0001bj2ok6juyqr4' order by "visibility" desc

Want the same measurement for your own brand? The free check runs this exact pipeline.