Which AI engine recommends the most different tools?

GPT-OSS 120B named 115 distinct tools across 16 identical buying questions, the widest of the 8 engines measured. Llama 3.3 70B via Groq named 40, the narrowest. Both answered exactly the same questions, so the gap is a property of the engine rather than of the sample.

Does using live web search make an AI engine name more tools?

Not reliably. In this snapshot the 3 engines with live retrieval averaged 94 distinct tools and the 5 answering from model memory averaged 80. Retrieval changes which tools appear far more than how many.

If my tool is invisible to AI, which engine should I target first?

The one with the widest door. An engine that names 115 tools across 16 questions has room for a newcomer in a way an engine naming 40 does not. Breadth is not the same as traffic, so weigh it against where your buyers actually ask.

What does it mean when only one engine names a tool?

Across the 8 engines, 128 tools were named by exactly one of them on this shared question set. For a vendor that is a foothold rather than a win: you exist in one answer stream and are absent from the rest, so a single-engine visibility check would report success and a buyer on any other engine would never see you.

How was this measured?

Every engine was asked the same buying questions and every tool it named was recorded in order. Figures on this page use only the 16 questions that all 8 engines answered, because 32 further questions went to a subset and counting those would measure our sampling rather than the engines. Captured names are filtered to remove prose fragments; that filter rejected 2 percent of raw mentions.

AI Has Already Decided 3 of 16 Software Categories

By Vincent Couey. Published August 27, 2026. Original research · 9 min read

"AI engines disagree about the best tool" is true on average and useless as advice. Broken out by category, the picture splits. In 3 of 16 categories one tool takes 60% or more of every #1 recommendation. In 5 others the leader holds 35% or less.

Leader share runs from 28% to 82%. Before spending anything on AI visibility, that number tells you whether the slot you want is available.

Share of the #1 slot held by each category's leader

Leader's share of all #1 recommendations, by category

Scheduling82%

SEO tools76%

AI copywriting67%

Customer support59%

Landing page builders59%

Project management50%

Social media management50%

Lead generation50%

Marketing automation47%

Email marketing44%

Survey / forms40%

CRM35%

Product analytics35%

Sales engagement31%

AI chatbots31%

GEO / AI visibility28%

Grey bars mark categories where the leader holds 35% or less, meaning the top slot changes hands constantly. 77 distinct tools took a #1 position somewhere in this study.

These are two different markets wearing one label

Decided · 3 categories

82% to 60%

A single tool is the answer, across engines that otherwise agree on nothing.

Scheduling: Calendly at 82%
SEO tools: Ahrefs at 76%
AI copywriting: Jasper at 67%

Open · 5 categories

35% or less

No settled answer. The #1 slot is genuinely contestable.

CRM: 4 different tools took #1
Product analytics: 6 different tools took #1
Sales engagement: 6 different tools took #1
AI chatbots: 8 different tools took #1

The same eight engines produced both columns from the same question format. The difference is not the engines. It is whether the market underneath already has an obvious winner.

Every category, its leader, and how contested it is

Category	Leader	Share of #1	Distinct #1 winners	Runner-up
Scheduling	Calendly14 of 17	82%	4	CCeloxis1
SEO tools	Ahrefs13 of 17	76%	3	Semrush2
AI copywriting	Jasper10 of 15	67%	6	WordLift1
Customer support	Zendesk10 of 17	59%	6	FFreshdesk3
Landing page builders	Unbounce10 of 17	59%	6	WWebflow3
Project management	Asana7 of 14	50%	4	ClickUp5
Social media management	Hootsuite8 of 16	50%	4	Buffer6
Lead generation	Apollo.io8 of 16	50%	5	HubSpot5
Marketing automation	HubSpot7 of 15	47%	4	Marketo4
Email marketing	Mailchimp8 of 18	44%	6	HubSpot4
Survey / forms	SurveyMonkey6 of 15	40%	7	Typeform4
CRM	Salesforce6 of 17	35%	4	HCHubSpot CRM4
Product analytics	Amplitude6 of 17	35%	6	Mixpanel4
Sales engagement	Outreach5 of 16	31%	6	HubSpot3
AI chatbots	DDialogflow5 of 16	31%	8	CChatGPT4
GEO / AI visibility	Ahrefs5 of 18	28%	11	BBrightEdge3

Read the "distinct #1 winners" column as vacancy. A category where 11 different tools have been called the best has room in it. One where 4 have, and the leader takes 82%, does not.

What a leader share of 82% actually means for a challenger

Calendly takes 82% of the #1 recommendations in Scheduling. Its nearest rival takes 1. That position was not earned by publishing, and it will not be taken by publishing: the engines are reflecting a market where one product is the default answer to the question.

The honest read for a challenger in a decided category is that AI visibility work will get you INTO the answer, alongside the leader, rather than instead of it. Being named third in a list is a real outcome and worth having. Being named first is a market-position change that the content follows rather than causes.

In the open categories the arithmetic is different. A leader at 35% is not a default; it is the current occupant of a slot that has changed hands repeatedly within one snapshot.

What to do with your own category

First · look it up
Find your leader's share
The table above is the whole decision input. Above 60% you are choosing between joining the list and changing your positioning. Below 35% the top slot is a realistic target.
Decided category
Aim for the list, not the crown
Being named at all is the win. Measure whether you appear, per engine, rather than whether you rank, and stop paying for work sold on displacing the leader.
Open category
The slot is genuinely live
With 5 categories showing no settled answer, visibility work has somewhere to land. This is where a citation and coverage push has the most leverage.
Either way
Check per engine
These shares are aggregates across engines that disagree with each other. Your position on the engine your buyers use can differ sharply from the category average.

Which side is your category on?

The free AI Visibility check reports where you appear per engine, in your own category, with a snapshot date. That is the number this page's table cannot give you.

Run my free AI Visibility check ›

📊 Want the category-openness method? The query design, the #1-slot tally, and the name filter that keeps prose fragments out of the winner counts. Delivered instantly.

What this does not show

17 answers per categoryEnough to separate a 78% leader from a 28% one, not enough to rank the tail within a category. Read the leader share, not position five.

Share is not market shareThis measures how often engines name a tool first, which reflects what has been written about it. It is not revenue, users, or quality.

One snapshotAn open category can consolidate and a decided one can crack. The shares here describe the window we captured.

Prose fragments filteredWithout a name filter, phrases like "TOOLS: Calendly" register as separate winners, inflating the contested count. Filtered here, which is why some counts differ from a raw tally.

Bottom line

The useful question was never whether AI engines agree. It is whether YOUR category is one they have already settled. In 3 of 16 measured here they have, and in 5 they plainly have not.

Those two situations call for opposite strategies, and a blended "AI visibility score" cannot tell them apart.

Data: The AI Recommendation Audit (2026), CC-BY, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20767878. 261 recorded #1 picks across 16 categories and 8 engines. Related: whether engines agree at all, which engines cite sources, and how widely each engine casts.