Freshdesk was the only product ChatGPT and Gemini named in all six answers we measured on 2026-08-06, a clean 6 of 6 for the customer self-service software category.
We put six buyer questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, one for each way a shopper might phrase the search, and gave each question a single live web search. Zendesk came second, named in 4 of 6 answers, the only other product besides Freshdesk to clear half the questions.
Four products tied at 3 of 6 answers, 50% each: Help Scout, HubSpot Service Hub, Kustomer, and LiveAgent. Below them, four more tied at 2 of 6, or 33%: HubSpot, ProProfs Help Desk, Salesforce Service Cloud, and Zoho Desk. That HubSpot is the same brand as HubSpot Service Hub above it, recorded under a second label the assistants used, and we kept the two apart rather than merge them.
How the shortlist changed across the six questions
Ten of the twenty products named, exactly half the list, appeared in only one of the six questions. The shortlist was not one stable set: it reshaped itself around the wording of each question.
The bare question, best customer self-service software, returned eight names: Zendesk, Kustomer, Freshdesk, HubSpot Service Hub, Help Scout, Intercom, Stonly, and Custify. Three of those, Intercom, Stonly, and Custify, showed up in this question and nowhere else across the six, each at a single 1 of 6 mention.
Adding "for small teams" swapped out the tail. That question named Zendesk, Freshdesk, HubSpot Service Hub, Zoho Desk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Gladly, Help Scout, and Groove. Gladly and Groove appear only here, each at 1 of 6, two names the plain "best" question never surfaced.
"What customer self-service software should I use" pulled in DevRev and HelpCrunch, each named once and only in this question. Its full eight were DevRev, Freshdesk, Zendesk, HelpCrunch, LiveAgent, Help Scout, HubSpot Service Hub, and ProProfs Help Desk.
The "best free" question rearranged the board. It named ProProfs Help Desk, Freshdesk, LiveAgent, Kustomer, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, and Knack, with Zoho CRM and Knack appearing only under "free," each at 1 of 6. More telling: Zendesk and Help Scout, both strong on the general questions, dropped off the free list completely.
"Most affordable" returned the shortest shortlist of the six, just four names: LiveAgent, Featurebase, Freshdesk, and Zoho Desk. Featurebase shows up here and nowhere else, at 1 of 6. LiveAgent led this value framing, part of why it reached 3 of 6 overall even though it never appeared in either of the two most general questions.
The final question, recommendations, snapped back to the familiar names: Zendesk, Kustomer, HubSpot, Freshdesk, and Salesforce Service Cloud, five products with no first-timers among them. The sharpest fan-out lesson is Zendesk: named in 4 of 6 answers, it vanished the moment a buyer added "free" or "affordable," 0 mentions in each. A brand can own the general question and still be invisible on price.
Where the answers came from
Twenty-one distinct domains fed the six answers. The two most-cited were Stonly's own site and Zendesk's own site, tied at 6 appearances each, with Kustomer's site next at 5. Vendor blogs, not neutral reviewers, did most of the feeding.
Here is the key pattern: several vendors' own domains fed the answers and their product got named in them. Zendesk's site was cited 6 times and Zendesk was named in 4 of 6 answers. Kustomer's site was cited 5 times and Kustomer landed 3 of 6. ProProfs's own site fed 3 answers and ProProfs Help Desk was named twice. When you publish the roundup, you get cited as the source, and you tend to put yourself on the list.
Stonly is the exception that proves the rule. Its site was the single most-used source at 6 appearances, more than anyone, yet Stonly the product was named just once, 1 of 6. Publishing the roundup earns the citation, it does not on its own earn the recommendation.
Freshdesk won a different way. Freshworks, the maker of Freshdesk, had its own domain feed only 2 of the six answers, yet Freshdesk was named in all 6. Its 6 of 6 came from being the product nearly every other roundup includes, from Stonly's list to Zendesk's to thecxlead.com, not from self-publishing. Being on everyone else's list beat a loud home page.
Review directories barely registered. G2 appeared twice in total, once on g2.com and once on learn.g2.com, across the whole run, and Capterra and TrustRadius did not appear at all. If you sell here and pour budget into directory placement, note that these two assistants pulled almost none of their answers from directories on 2026-08-06.
Community threads were absent. Not one Reddit or Quora page turned up among the 21 domains. This category was answered almost entirely from vendor blogs plus two independent roundups, thecxlead.com at 2 appearances and zapier.com at 1, the opposite of categories where the assistants lean on forum discussion.
What this means if you sell customer self-service software
The source list, not market share, decided who got named. Groove and Gladly are far smaller than the leaders, yet each earned a 1 of 6 mention because each sat in the one small-teams roundup the assistants happened to read. The route to being named is being in the exact pages these answers cite.
For this category on 2026-08-06, those pages were vendor roundups on stonly.com, zendesk.com, kustomer.com, custify.com, and proprofsdesk.com, plus independent lists on thecxlead.com and zapier.com. Getting added to those specific lists would have moved your visibility more than any directory badge, since G2 fed just 2 mentions the entire run.
The Freshdesk result is the whole playbook: appear on everyone else's list. Freshdesk reached 6 of 6 without leaning on its own domain, purely by being the default inclusion in third-party roundups. One more roundup that names you is worth more than a tenth post on your own blog, which is the Stonly lesson turned around.
The full list, counted
Two rows below are the same brand under two labels the assistants used, HubSpot Service Hub at 3 of 6 and plain HubSpot at 2 of 6. We keep them separate and do not add them, because summing would invent a 5 of 6 figure the measurement never produced.
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Freshdesk | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Zendesk | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Help Scout | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| HubSpot Service Hub | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Kustomer | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| LiveAgent | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| HubSpot | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| ProProfs Help Desk | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Salesforce Service Cloud | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Zoho Desk | 2 of 6 | 33% |
Why Glotier is not on this list
Glotier is not customer self-service software, so it is correctly absent from all six answers. We would not expect ChatGPT or Gemini to name us in this category, and they did not.
What you just read is the entire thing we do, aimed at one category that happens not to be ours. We run your buyers' real questions through ChatGPT and Gemini as six phrasings, record every product named and every source cited, and hand you the same fan-out and source map you see above for your own category. The check is free, takes about a minute, and needs no account.