Canva was the most-named tool, appearing in 5 of the 6 buyer questions we put to ChatGPT and Gemini for graphic design software on 2026-08-06, a share of 83%. Nothing else cleared half. Six products tied one rung down at 3 of 6 (50%), five more landed at 2 of 6 (33%), and 11 names each surfaced in exactly one question. We asked both assistants the same six questions, gave each a single live web search, and logged every product named and every source domain behind it. No tool was named in all six, and nothing landed at 4 of 6, so Canva at 5 stands alone above the pack.
Adobe is the most-named brand, but it never shows up as one line. ChatGPT and Gemini named five separate Adobe products: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Express at 3 of 6 each, and Fresco at 2 of 6. We keep them as five rows because that is how the assistants named them, and we are not folding them into a single Adobe number the data does not contain. Counted that way, four Adobe products sit in the 3-of-6 tier, more than any other brand. Affinity works the same way: Designer at 2 of 6 and Photo at 1 of 6 are two products, not one.
How the shortlist changed across the six questions
The wording of the question rewrote the shortlist every time, and this is the most useful thing in the data. The bare "best graphic design software" returned an 8-tool list that was mostly Adobe: Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Fresco, and Express, plus Inkscape, Canva, and CorelDRAW. Ask for the best and you get the pro suite, 5 of the 8 slots going to Adobe.
"Best free graphic design software" swapped almost all of that out. The 8 named were Canva, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, PosterMyWall, Sketch, VistaCreate, and DesignWizard. Five of those, Scribus, PosterMyWall, Sketch, VistaCreate, and DesignWizard, appeared in no other question in the whole run. Canva was the only mainstream name to survive into the free list, and GIMP and Inkscape carried over from the open-source side.
"Most affordable graphic design software" was the shortest answer of the six, just 4 tools: GIMP, Inkscape, Affinity Designer, and CorelDRAW. The striking part: Canva, named in the other five questions, dropped out of the affordable answer entirely. Affordable flipped the shortlist to free open-source (GIMP, Inkscape) and cheaper one-time paid licenses (Affinity Designer, CorelDRAW).
"Best for small teams" produced the oddest long tail. At the top were Canva, Adobe Express, and Figma, and below them five tools that appear nowhere else in the run: PhotoScape, QuarkXPress, MYPACKBRAIN, PhotoPad, and DocHipo. The two most stable questions were "what should I use" and "recommendations," which both led with Canva, the Adobe trio of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, Figma, and Procreate; "recommendations" was the only place Affinity Photo showed up, at 1 of 6. Figma was named in 3 of 6 questions total, but never for the bare "best" or either price question.
The lesson for anyone in this category: one word, "free" or "affordable" or "for small teams," can rewrite who the assistant names, as the 4-tool "most affordable" list shows, where even Canva failed to appear. A product tuned only for "best graphic design software" would be invisible on the query where price is the ask.
Where the answers came from
Community threads and creator videos were the biggest input by far. Reddit and YouTube each fed all 6 of the 6 answers, and Quora fed 5 of 6. Editorial roundups came next: PCMag fed 4 of 6, Creative Bloq 3 of 6, and HubSpot's blog 3 of 6, with Zapier, Onesuite, Tortoise Labs, Bird Marketing, Eyefi, dsigns.com.au, and champlain.edu each feeding one answer.
Review directories did appear in this category, but they did not lead. G2, through its learn.g2.com pages, fed 4 of 6 answers, and Capterra fed 1 of 6. So the directories were present, and G2 was actually a heavy feeder at 4 of 6, but Reddit and YouTube at 6 of 6 and Quora at 5 of 6 each matched or beat them.
The key insight is Adobe's own domain. adobe.com fed 4 of the 6 answers, tying G2 and PCMag for the fourth-most-cited source, and Adobe products were named in 3 of those 4 answers. Adobe is the one brand in this run whose own website is a source and whose products also get named. That is the clearest lever on the page: if your own domain ranks for these buyer queries, it can feed the answer that names you. One honest caveat: in the "best free" answer, adobe.com was a source but no Adobe product made the list, so your own page can feed an answer without winning it.
What this means if you sell graphic design software
Naming tracks the source list, not market share. Canva leads at 5 of 6 because it sits in nearly every Reddit thread, Quora answer, YouTube roundup, and editorial list the assistants pulled, not because either model looked up a market-share figure. There is no market-share field in what the assistant reads; there is only the set of pages it fetched.
So the way to get named is to be present in those exact sources: Reddit (6 of 6), YouTube (6 of 6), Quora (5 of 6), PCMag (4 of 6), G2 (4 of 6), and your own domain if it ranks, which Adobe demonstrates at 4 of 6. A strong product absent from those threads and roundups will not be named. The five one-off tools in the small-teams answer and the five in the free answer are mostly names buyers have never heard of; they were named because they happened to sit in the single roundup or thread the assistant fetched for that phrasing.
And it moves. The source pages change week to week, so the named set changes with them; in this single run alone, 11 of the 23 products named were one-question appearances. That is the thing worth watching, per question, over time.
The full list, counted
Every product ChatGPT and Gemini named in more than one of the six answers:
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Canva | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Adobe Express | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Adobe Illustrator | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Adobe InDesign | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Adobe Photoshop | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Figma | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Inkscape | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Adobe Fresco | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Affinity Designer | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| CorelDRAW | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| GIMP | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Procreate | 2 of 6 | 33% |
Below this sit 11 more products named once each: Affinity Photo, DesignWizard, DocHipo, MYPACKBRAIN, PhotoPad, PhotoScape, PosterMyWall, QuarkXPress, Scribus, Sketch, and VistaCreate. Adobe appears as five separate products and Affinity as two; we list them exactly as the assistants named them rather than summing them into a brand total the measurement does not show.
Where Glotier fits
Glotier does not sell graphic design software, so we are correctly absent from all 6 of these answers, and we would not invent a mention. But this page is exactly the thing we run for a customer's own category: the six buyer questions, every product ChatGPT and Gemini named, and the source domains sitting behind each answer. If you sell one of the tools above, or compete with them, the same run tells you which of the 6 questions name you, which name Canva instead, and which pages you would need to appear on to change that. The check is free, no account, about a minute.