Five form builders tied at the top of this measurement: Fillout, Google Forms, Jotform, Tally and Typeform were each named in 5 of the 6 buyer questions we asked, an 83% hit rate. No single product was named in all six.
We ran this on 3 August 2026. We put six buyer-style questions about form builders to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, gave each model one live web search, and recorded every product it named and every source domain it cited. Across those 6 answers, 24 different products came up, so the models are clearly not reading from one tidy list.
The drop after the top five is steep. Microsoft Forms was next at 3 of 6 answers (50%), then AidaForm and Zapier Forms at 2 of 6 each (33%). Zapier Forms, for instance, showed up only in the "small teams" and "what should I use" answers. Everything else, 16 separate products, was named in exactly 1 of the 6 answers (17%).
Put another way: of the 24 products named across the whole run, 16 of them (two thirds of the field) appeared in just one answer. The consensus at the top is real, but the tail underneath it is long and thin.
The shortlist changed with the question
Here is the part most vendors miss. The answer moved a lot depending on which of the six questions we asked, even though all six are the same buyer trying to pick a form builder.
The bare "best form builders" question returned 8 products, and 4 of them appeared in no other answer: HubSpot, Formstack, Paperform and Zoho Forms. Tally, one of the five most-named products overall, was not in the plain "best" answer at all.
"best free form builders" returned a different 8. It kept the core consensus (Jotform, Google Forms, Fillout, Tally, Typeform) but this is where Microsoft Forms and AidaForm entered, and where forms.app appeared and nowhere else across the 6 answers.
"most affordable form builders" was the outlier, and this is the single most useful finding on the page. Of its 8 named products, 5 appeared in no other answer: Wufoo, NinjaForms, MakeForms, Mailchimp and Cognito Forms. Only Google Forms, Microsoft Forms and Tally carried over from the broader list.
Read that the other way: Fillout, Jotform and Typeform, three of the five overall leaders, all disappeared the moment the buyer added the word "affordable." A product can be a top-five name in the category and still be missing from the shortlist a price-sensitive buyer actually sees, and in this data three of the five were.
The one-off names make the same point from the other direction. Formester appeared only under "what form builders should I use." FormNest and "Deformity forms" appeared only under "best form builders for small teams." ActiveCampaign and Survey Monkey appeared only under "form builders recommendations." Each of those was one question away from never being named at all, out of the 6.
One small tell: the models returned both "Makeform" and "MakeForms" as separate names in two different questions. When the same likely vendor comes back under two spellings across the 6 answers, it is a hint that the answer is stitched together from loose web text, not pulled from a clean product database.
Where the answers came from
Every one of the six answers leaned on a community thread. Reddit was cited in 6 of 6 answers (100%) and Quora in 4 of 6 (67%). If there is one takeaway about form-builder visibility in AI answers, it is that a Reddit thread fed every single answer we saw.
The biggest roundup source was emailtooltester.com, cited in 5 of 6 answers (83%), followed by Zapier's blog roundups in 4 of 6 (67%). After those two the roundups thin out fast: ventureharbour.com, perspective.co and zite.com at 2 of 6 each (33%), plus eight more blogs at 1 of 6 apiece.
Review directories barely registered. G2 appeared in 2 of 6 answers (33%), and Capterra did not appear in a single one of the 6. For a category where buyers are usually pointed at the G2 grid, the models mostly went somewhere else.
Here is the insight we care about most: several vendors were cited through their own domain in the very answer that named them. Jotform's own site fed the "best free" answer that named Jotform; Typeform's site fed the plain "best" answer that named Typeform. forms.app and FormNest are the sharp cases. Each was named in only 1 of 6 answers, and in that one answer the sources included their own domain (forms.app and theformnest.com). Their own page appears to be doing the work of getting them mentioned.
What this means if you sell a form builder
The named list is set by the source list, not by market share. Across all 6 answers the products that recurred were the ones with the most coverage on the pages the models read, not the ones with the most customers. Fillout is named in 5 of 6 answers and is not the biggest brand in the table below; it is the best-covered one.
So the work is concrete. Be present, by name, in the exact sources that fed these answers: the Reddit threads (6 of 6), the large roundups like emailtooltester (5 of 6) and Zapier (4 of 6), and your own domain, which demonstrably got FormNest and forms.app named on their single mention. Note what is not on that list: being the market leader.
And watch the sub-question your buyers actually type. If they search on price, the "affordable" answer is a separate contest with a different five names, and three of the category's overall leaders (Fillout, Jotform, Typeform) were not in it.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Fillout | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Google Forms | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Jotform | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Tally | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Typeform | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Microsoft Forms | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| AidaForm | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Zapier Forms | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| 16 more (incl. HubSpot, Formstack, Paperform, Wufoo, Cognito Forms) | 1 of 6 | 17% each |
We do not sell a form builder, so Glotier is not in any of these answers, and it should not be. We measured this one category to show the method on neutral ground, across 6 real buyer questions.
But this is exactly what we do for the category you do sell in. We ask the buyer questions, record which products ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name across all 6, and show you the source pages behind each answer so you can see whether you are in them. The check is free, there is no account, and it takes about a minute.