Brevo and MailerLite were the only two products named in all six answers when we asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity six ways to recommend email marketing software. No other product swept the set. ActiveCampaign, Moosend and Sender each landed in 4 of 6. Mailchimp, the brand most people would expect to lead the category, was named in 1 of 6.
We asked, verbatim: "best email marketing software," "best email marketing software for small teams," "what email marketing software should I use," "best free email marketing software," "most affordable email marketing software," and "email marketing software recommendations." All six returned a readable list, no refusals. Klaviyo, ConvertKit and Drip, three products email marketers talk about constantly, were not named once, because none of the six questions asked about ecommerce or automation-heavy sending. Absence from these questions is not absence from the category.
The shortlist shifted from question to question
Brevo and MailerLite held across all six. Everything below them moved with the phrasing, and the distance from six to four is the distance between a default and a maybe.
The "best free email marketing software" answer dropped Mailchimp completely and filled with Brevo, Sender, GetResponse, Benchmark Email, MailerLite, AWeber, Mailjet and Zoho Campaigns. GetResponse, AWeber and Benchmark Email each earned their single mention here and in no other answer.
"best email marketing software for small teams" surfaced three names that appeared nowhere else: Hostinger Reach, Mailmeteor and Constant Contact. Mailmeteor's one mention here fits its Gmail-native positioning. Constant Contact was named in 2 of 6 total, this question and "most affordable email marketing software," and never in the broad "best" or "recommendations" sets.
Omnisend was named in 3 of 6, but never for small teams, "best free" or "most affordable." A product built for ecommerce showed up for the generalist questions and dropped out the moment a buyer named a constraint.
ActiveCampaign, Moosend and Sender each landed in 4 of 6. ActiveCampaign and Moosend took the four non-price questions ("best," small teams, "what should I use," and recommendations) and vanished on both price questions. Sender was the exception, the only one of the three named for "best free" and "most affordable." Mailjet and Zoho Campaigns were each named in 2 of 6, both times on those two price questions. Mailmodo (2 of 6) appeared for "best" and small teams; SMTPmart (2 of 6) for "best" and recommendations, a scatter with no clear thread. "what email marketing software should I use" returned a compact list of seven that included Maileroo.com, a name in no other answer, and HubSpot was named once, only in "best email marketing software."
Two review sites and Reddit fed every answer
Three domains fed all 6 answers: emailtooltester.com, emailvendorselection.com and reddit.com. The first two are dedicated review sites, the third is a forum of raw user opinion, and that trio was the spine of every recommendation the three assistants produced. zapier.com fed 5 of 6 and sells workflow automation, not email tools. mailtrap.io, an email testing service, fed 4. quora.com and ventureharbour.com fed 3 each; youtube.com and community.hubspot.com fed 2 each. G2 and Capterra, the software-review marketplaces a vendor would expect to matter here, did not appear in any source list. Because zapier.com and mailtrap.io sell adjacent things, automation and deliverability, a vendor's visibility here lives partly on sites that are not about email marketing at all.
We will say the mechanism once: a product's place in these answers is set by which of these thirteen pages name it, not by its market share or how many customers it has. Vendor-owned domains barely registered, and when they did, their own product was not the one named. constantcontact.com, hubspot.com, sender.net and zoho.com each fed exactly 1 answer. hubspot.com fed the "best free email marketing software" answer, yet HubSpot was not among the products named for that question. sender.net was a source for "most affordable email marketing software," but Sender the product missed the small-team and recommendation answers. Getting your domain cited is not the same as getting your product named.
No domain owned by Brevo or MailerLite appeared in any source list, and both were still named in all 6 answers. Their clean sweep was built entirely on what third parties wrote about them. The assistants never read a Brevo pricing page or a MailerLite feature list; they read emailtooltester.com, a Reddit thread and ventureharbour.com, and repeated the names already there. Because the sources are this concentrated, one methodology change on emailtooltester.com or emailvendorselection.com could move a product from six mentions to one.
What gets a product named
Mailchimp shows the mechanism. It spends more on brand recognition than almost anyone in the category, and it was named in 1 of 6 answers, only the open-ended "email marketing software recommendations." Its brand did not overcome its absence from the rankings that fed every question, and Klaviyo, ConvertKit and Drip, all unnamed, are the same story: the pages did not carry them, and product quality does not substitute.
So the route in is editorial, not technical. A product that is not on those pages cannot be recommended, however good it is and however much AI-readable copy sits on its own site, because the assistants did not pull from vendor homepages. In practice that means earning a place in the comparison tables on emailtooltester.com and emailvendorselection.com, getting into the roundups on zapier.com (5 of 6) and mailtrap.io (4 of 6), and being one of the products people actually test and name on Reddit.
Reddit is downstream of those same review sites. It fed all 6 answers, but the threads the assistants surfaced tend to cite emailtooltester.com and emailvendorselection.com back, so if you are off those two pages you are usually off the Reddit comments that repeat their names. A team that assumes AI answers need a new kind of AI SEO has it backwards: the barrier is a human editorial slot on roughly half a dozen pages, and there is no second way in.
The full list, counted
Named in is out of the six answers we read, not out of the category. The full list ran to 20 products; these are the top eleven, and the five at 2 of 6 are all shown rather than cut arbitrarily.
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Brevo | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| MailerLite | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| ActiveCampaign | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Moosend | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Sender | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Omnisend | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Constant Contact | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Mailjet | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Mailmodo | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| SMTPmart | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Zoho Campaigns | 2 of 6 | 33% |
Glotier does not sell email marketing software, so it is correctly absent from these answers, and we will not pretend otherwise. This is the exact measurement we run for a customer's own category: the same six-question sweep across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, the products named and the source pages behind each answer. The check is free, no account, about a minute.