Botpress and Tidio were the two most-named AI chatbot builders in this measurement, each appearing in all 6 of the 6 answers. On 2026-08-03 we put six buyer questions about AI chatbot builders to ChatGPT and Gemini, ran one live web search per question, and recorded every product named and every source domain cited. Botpress and Tidio tied at the top with 6 of 6. Landbot was the only other builder to clear half, at 5 of 6. After those three, the drop is steep: no other product was named in more than 2 of the 6 answers.
Three names carry the category
The distance between the leaders and everyone else is the headline. Botpress and Tidio each scored 6 of 6 (100%) and Landbot 5 of 6 (83%). Landbot's one miss was the "what ai chatbot builders should I use" question, where it was the only top-three name left out. The next tier is a cluster of five, Athena AI Agents, Botsonic, Chatbase, Manychat and Pandorabots, each named in exactly 2 of 6 answers (33%). Below them sit 17 products named just once each (17%). So three names do almost all the work, and a tail of 17 appears once and disappears.
How the shortlist changed with the question
The shortlist was not fixed. It moved with the exact wording of the question, and only Botpress, Tidio and Landbot survived all three of the phrasings we compare here: the bare "best," "best free," and "most affordable."
The bare "best ai chatbot builders" question returned 7 names: Botpress, Landbot, Tidio, Athena AI Agents, Chatbot Builder AI, Chatbase and Jotform. Two of those, Chatbot Builder AI and Jotform, showed up in this one question and nowhere else across the six.
Change one word to "best free" and the list reshaped. The free question returned 8 names and pulled in four that appear nowhere else in the run: HubSpot, Drift, Freshchat and Proprofs. These are the free-tier offers of bigger suites, and they only surfaced once a buyer said the word "free."
Swap "free" for "affordable" and those free-tier names vanish again. "Most affordable ai chatbot builders" returned just 6 names, and the only one unique to it was Zobot. Affordable re-used Pandorabots and Chatbase from other questions, but not one of HubSpot, Drift, Freshchat or Proprofs. To ChatGPT and Gemini, "free" and "affordable" are two different questions with two different answers.
The other three phrasings each grew their own one-off names too. "For small teams" was the only place Lyro AI, Microsoft Copilot and ProProfs Chat appeared. "What ai chatbot builders should I use" was the only place CustomGPT, Chatling and Chatlink appeared. "Recommendations" was the only place Chatfuel, Emergent, UChat and WotNot appeared. That is 17 products in total, each hanging on a single phrasing out of six.
The source map: who fed the answers
Behind the six answers sat 19 source domains, and three of them were cited in all 6: createaiagent.net (6 of 6), reddit.com (6 of 6) and zapier.com (6 of 6). If your product is missing from those three pages, you are absent from the sources behind every answer in this category.
Community threads did real work. Reddit was cited in all 6 answers (6 of 6) and Quora in 2 of 6. The roundup and review sites were the other half of the backbone: Zapier and createaiagent.net at 6 of 6 each, chatimize.com at 3 of 6, and PCMag at 1 of 6. A single YouTube page was cited once (1 of 6).
Here is the insight for anyone selling here: vendors that published their own pages got quoted back. Tidio's own domain, tidio.com, was cited in 3 of 6 answers, and Tidio was named in all 6. Five more vendors self-cited and were named: hubspot.com (2 of 6), jotform.com (2 of 6), wotnot.io (2 of 6), chatbotbuilder.ai (1 of 6) and microsoft.com (1 of 6). Your own honest comparison page can become a source the AI repeats.
One absence is worth naming. The standard software review directories, G2 and Capterra, did not appear once in the 19 domains. They fed 0 of 6 answers. In this category the AI reached for Reddit, Zapier and vendor blogs, not the directories most software vendors spend on.
What a vendor here would do to get named
The pattern is clear: the source list, not market share, decides who gets named. If you build AI chatbot software, the work is to be present in the exact pages these answers cite. Start with the three that fed all 6 answers: the relevant Reddit threads, Zapier's roundup, and createaiagent.net.
After those, target the roundups that recur, chatimize.com (3 of 6) and PCMag (1 of 6), and publish your own straight comparison, because six vendors here were named partly off their own domains, Tidio most visibly with 3 of 6 source citations and 6 of 6 answers. And notice what did nothing: G2 and Capterra fed 0 of 6 answers, so a directory-only strategy would have bought zero visibility in this run.
Where Glotier fits, and where it does not
Glotier is not an AI chatbot builder, so we are correctly absent from all 6 of these answers. We would be worried if we had shown up. But this measurement is exactly what we run for a customer's own category: ask the buyer questions, record which products the AI names and which sources it leans on, and hand back the gap. If AI chatbot builders were our market, this page would be our to-do list.
The same check runs on any category, including yours. It is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Botpress | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Tidio | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Landbot | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Athena AI Agents | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Botsonic | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Chatbase | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Manychat | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Pandorabots | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Proprofs | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| ProProfs Chat | 1 of 6 | 17% |
We list "Proprofs" and "ProProfs Chat" as two separate rows because that is how the answers labelled the same vendor: once as "ProProfs Chat" for the small-teams question and once as "Proprofs" for the free question. We do not merge them into "ProProfs: 2," because the data never shows that number. Fifteen other products were also named once each (17%) and are not listed above.