Acuity Scheduling, Calendly and Setmore were each named in 5 of the 6 answers we collected, the closest any product came to a clean sweep. We asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity six buyer-style questions about appointment scheduling software, from the plain "best appointment scheduling software" to "best free appointment scheduling software" and "most affordable appointment scheduling software", and all six returned readable lists of named products. No tool was named in all six. SimplyBook.me came next at 4 of 6, then Square Appointments, YouCanBookMe and Zoho Bookings at 3 of 6 each. The drop after that is steep: everything below 3 of 6 is a peripheral mention a buyer might see once and never again.
The shortlist changed a lot when the question got specific
The three leaders were not stable across the six questions. When we asked "best appointment scheduling software for small teams", neither Calendly nor Setmore appeared at all, even though each was named in 5 of 6 overall. That was the one question each of them missed, so both were named in all five of the broader questions, including the two open-ended prompts ("what appointment scheduling software should I use" and "appointment scheduling software recommendations") and the "best free" and "most affordable" questions. Acuity Scheduling was the exception in the top three: it did appear in the small-teams answer, so its single miss came somewhere else.
The small-teams slate was Acuity Scheduling, Appointlet, Appointy, Appointment.com, Baluu, Bookedin, Bookwhen and Booksy. Five of those (Appointment.com, Baluu, Bookedin, Bookwhen and Booksy) were named only once in the entire run, so the small-teams framing pulled in a set of tools that barely registered anywhere else.
The "best free appointment scheduling software" question produced yet another cohort: Calendly, Square Booking, Setmore, Picktime, Zoho Bookings, SimplyBook.me and Koalendar. Picktime and Koalendar were each named only once across all six questions, and both surfaced only under this free-tier framing. A tool with no presence on the broad lists can become the answer the moment a buyer narrows the question to price. Well-known names went the other way: Microsoft Bookings, Doodle and OnceHub were not named once across the six questions.
A handful of domains decided who got named
One domain, emailtooltester.com, fed all 6 answers, the only source that appeared every time. Three more fed 5 answers each: reddit.com, zapier.com and a vendor's own site, lunacal.ai. Below them, calendly.com, squareup.com, waitwellsoftware.com and youtube.com each fed 3 answers, and practicesuite.com, quora.com and youcanbook.me each fed 2. A longer tail of outside sources (forbes.com, ruby.com and connecteam.com) each fed 1 answer, appearing only when one specific question reached for them. That small set is the engine behind every answer. When four domains sit at the top of every answer across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, the product names are a downstream effect of which pages the assistants retrieved, not an independent read on which scheduler is best.
Community threads carried real weight here: reddit.com fed 5 of 6 answers and quora.com fed 2. The classic software directories did not show up at all, neither G2 nor Capterra appeared in a single answer, so in this category the forums beat the review grids. youtube.com feeding 3 answers means some recommendations were stitched from video roundups as readily as from written reviews.
The oddest number is lunacal.ai. Its pages fed 5 of the 6 answers, ahead of both calendly.com and squareup.com at 3 each, yet the product Lunacal was named in only 2. A vendor's own comparison content can enter the rotation and shape answers for its competitors without getting the vendor itself named. Vendor domains appeared often (calendly.com and squareup.com at 3, acuityscheduling.com and setmore.com at 1), but being the source of an answer and being the product named are clearly two different things.
What actually moves a name into the answer
The source list, not the size of the business, decides who gets named. emailtooltester.com fed all 6 answers, so a place on that one comparison page shapes recommendations here far more than traffic to your own site does. The proof is in the leaders: acuityscheduling.com and setmore.com each fed just 1 answer, while Acuity Scheduling and Setmore were each named 5 times, carried by third-party pages rather than their own. The lever is getting onto the domains that feed these answers, starting with the one that feeds all six, and getting listed inside the main comparison table rather than a sidebar. A listing alone is not enough: you have to sit in the block of text the assistant actually pulls out, which is why lunacal.ai fed 5 answers while Lunacal was named in only 2.
The full list, counted
The products ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity named most often across the 6 answers, with how many of those answers named each. Share is out of the 6 answers we read, not out of the whole category.
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Acuity Scheduling | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Calendly | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Setmore | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| SimplyBook.me | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Square Appointments | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| YouCanBookMe | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Zoho Bookings | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Appointlet | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Appointy | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Lunacal | 2 of 6 | 33% |
We counted Square Appointments (3 of 6), Square (1 of 6) and Square Booking (1 of 6) as three separate rows, because the assistants named them as three separate products even though they are plausibly the same tool. Read as one product, Square's scheduler would sit higher than its 3 of 6 line shows. Below the top ten, thirteen more products were named exactly once, from AnswerConnect and Cal.com to NeetoCal and PracticeSuite, and a one-mention product only reaches a buyer who asks the exact question that surfaced it.
What this means for us
We build glotier.com, an AI-visibility tool, so we do not sell appointment scheduling software and we were correctly absent from all six answers: we are not in this category, so no assistant should name us here, and none did. This is the exact measurement we run for a customer's own category, the six buyer questions, the three assistants, the products named and the source pages behind each answer. The check is free, takes about a minute and needs no account.