AI visibility for B2B software
The short version. Software queries are answered from the review and best-of layer far more than from vendor sites, so the lever is placement and accuracy on that layer, and the fastest wins are usually the lists you are already nearly on.
The answer slot in this category usually belongs to the best-of layer
- g2.com
- capterra.com
- trustpilot.com
- reddit.com
Where that layer holds the slot, the lever is placement in the best-of lists. These are the platforms our classifier already carries for this category, so a pool held by one of them is recognised as such rather than counted as a rival brand.
Ask an engine for the best tool in almost any software category and the sources under the answer are review platforms, comparison posts and community threads. The vendor's own site appears, when it appears, as a supporting citation rather than as the thing that decided the recommendation.
This makes the category unusually actionable, because the list layer is addressable. A best-of post that covers your category and omits you is a specific, named target with a specific author, and the product surfaces those targets ranked by how much the engines that matter to you actually cite them.
It is also the category most exposed to the surface split. What the ChatGPT consumer app recommends and what the OpenAI API recommends on the same prompt are close to different answer sets, and buyers are in the app. Pooling those two together produces a number that describes an answer nobody receives, which is why they are never averaged here.
What the product actually does here
01Citation targets, ranked and reachable
The lists and posts your engines cite are surfaced as targets with the contact route, so a placement attempt is a specific ask to a specific person rather than a content plan.
02Consumer and developer surfaces kept apart
The pooled line covers the surfaces a buyer can actually reach, and states which developer APIs it left out and how many answers that was. Each is also reported on its own.
03The competitive field, measured
Rivals discovered in your answers are surfaced for you to confirm or reject, and comparisons are computed from measured rates rather than written by a model.
What we will not claim here
- We do not write reviews or arrange for reviews to be written. Not as a policy, as a refusal.
- We do not sell AI-estimated search volume for prompts. Vendor figures for that are derived from autocomplete and related-question data, not from observed AI usage.
One thing to hold on to: none of the above is assumed about you. Your report classifies each of your money queries from your own measured answers, and if it disagrees with this page, the report is right. This page describes what categories like yours have tended to look like, which is a useful prior and a bad conclusion.
The measurement rules behind that are on the methodology page, and the enforcement page names the test behind each one.
Measure your own domain