We asked ChatGPT and Gemini the six ways a buyer actually shops for customer success software, and five products tied for the top: ChurnZero, ClientSuccess, Custify, Planhat and Totango were each named in 5 of the 6 answers. No single tool swept all six, so the effective ceiling in this category is 5 of 6, and five different products reached it.
The run is small and repeatable: six buyer questions, one live web search each, put to ChatGPT and Gemini on 2026-08-03. We logged every product each assistant named and every source domain it drew from. That is the entire dataset behind this page, 6 answers, 15 distinct products named and 13 distinct source domains. Every figure below comes from those 6 answers and nothing else.
The category's most famous name did not make the top tier. Gainsight was named in 4 of the 6 answers, one behind the five leaders, and it was missing from two specific questions: "most affordable" and "customer success software recommendations." For the brand most people would say first in this category, losing 2 of 6 answers is the first clue that being well known is not the same as being retrieved.
Vitally sat alone in the next band at 3 of the 6 answers, ahead of everyone else but named less than half the time. After it came a cliff: every one of the remaining eight products was named exactly once, 1 of 6 each. So the whole category sorts into a five-way tie at the top, then Gainsight, then Vitally, then a long tail of single mentions.
How the shortlist changed with the question
The shortlist was never one list. It rebuilt itself for each of the six questions, and the swings were large. "Best free customer success software" returned the widest set, 8 products in a single answer, and it held all five leaders plus Userpilot. "Most affordable customer success software" returned the narrowest, just 4 products: Custify, Totango, ClientSuccess and ZapScale.
The word "affordable" knocked the market leaders out. Gainsight, ChurnZero, Planhat and Vitally all appear in the 8-name "best free" answer, and not one of them survives into the 4-name "most affordable" answer. A buyer who types "free" sees Gainsight and Planhat; a buyer who types "affordable" does not. Same category, same day, two overlapping words, and the establishment disappears from one of them.
The bare query "best customer success software" returned 6 products, and every one was an incumbent: Gainsight, ClientSuccess, ChurnZero, Totango, Vitally and Planhat. Custify, which tied for the overall lead at 5 of 6, does not appear in that bare-best answer at all. It earned its 5 by showing up for "small teams," "what should I use," "free," "affordable" and "recommendations," every phrasing except the generic one.
Eight products were named in exactly one of the six questions, and which question they landed in explains them. "Best for small teams" surfaced three names found nowhere else: Weav, Successifier and Hiver. "What customer success software should I use" was the only home for Gong. "Best free" was the only place Userpilot was named as a product. "Most affordable" was the only appearance of ZapScale. And "recommendations" was the only question that pulled in two support tools, Freshdesk and Help Scout. Change the wording, change the shortlist.
The sources behind the answers
Two domains fed all six answers: gartner.com and reddit.com, each cited in 6 of 6. An analyst directory and a community thread site carried identical weight here, which is the pattern we keep seeing: the assistants lean on the crowd and the analyst about equally.
The next two heaviest sources were vendor domains, not neutral ones. clientsuccess.com and userpilot.com each fed 5 of the 6 answers. That is the mechanic in one line: publish the roundup, and you are inside the answer.
Here is the key insight. ClientSuccess is both a top source and a top-named product. Its own domain fed 5 of 6 answers, and its product was named in 5 of 6. It is the clearest case in this dataset of a vendor getting cited by feeding its own comparison content into the pool the assistants read from. Userpilot ran the same source-side play, feeding 5 answers, yet its product was named only 1 time, so owning the source lifts you but does not by itself buy the top tier.
Review directories showed up unevenly. G2 was cited in 2 of the 6 answers, and Capterra did not appear once. Independent roundups did more work than the directories: thecxlead.com and usepylon.com fed 3 answers each, workona.com fed 2, and Quora was cited in 2 of 6. So the thing to be listed on in this category is not a Capterra grid, it is a Gartner page, a couple of Reddit threads and a short stack of vendor and independent roundups.
What we would do to get named here
If we ran a product in this category, we would treat the source list as the target list, not the leaderboard. The 13 domains that fed these 6 answers are the real map: get into the Gartner listing, earn mentions in the Reddit and Quora threads, and land on the roundups at The CX Lead, Userpilot, Pylon and Workona. That is where the names are coming from, every one of them.
Market share is not what decides this. Gainsight is the most recognized brand in customer success and it still lost 2 of the 6 answers to phrasing, while ClientSuccess tied for first partly by feeding its own domain into 5 of 6. The assistant is not ranking companies by size; it is reading a page and repeating what the page says. If your product is not on those pages, you are not in the answer, however big you are.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ChurnZero | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| ClientSuccess | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Custify | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Planhat | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Totango | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Gainsight | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Vitally | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Freshdesk | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Gong | 1 of 6 | 17% |
Freshdesk and Gong are shown as two of eight products that were each named in exactly one answer. The other six one-timers, all at 1 of 6, were Help Scout, Hiver, Successifier, Userpilot, Weav and ZapScale.
Glotier does not sell customer success software, so we are correctly absent from all 6 of these answers, and we would not want to fake our way in. What we do is measure the answers. This entire page is one run of the check we do for a customer: pick your real category, ask the six buyer questions, and see which products ChatGPT and Gemini name and which sources they pulled to get there. The check is free, no account, about a minute.