Three products tied at the top of the incident management software category: incident.io, Jira Service Management, and PagerDuty were each named in 4 of the 6 buyer questions we ran. We put six ways of asking for the best incident management software to ChatGPT and Gemini, gave each assistant one live web search, and wrote down every product they named and every source domain behind the answers. Those three led the field, but none of them ran the table. 4 of 6 was the ceiling, and no product was named in all six questions.
Across the six questions, ChatGPT and Gemini named 25 different incident management products and pulled from 21 different source domains to do it. That spread is the real story: a buyer who types one phrasing sees a very different shortlist than a buyer who types another, even though both of them think they asked the same question.
The leaders, and the drop behind them
incident.io, Jira Service Management, and PagerDuty each landed in 4 of the 6 incident management answers, a 67% hit rate and the highest any product reached. They got there by covering different questions, not the same ones: incident.io showed up for the plain "best", small teams, free, and "recommendations" phrasings, while Jira Service Management showed up for small teams, "what should I use", free, and "most affordable". There was no single tool both assistants reached for every time.
Opsgenie and ServiceNow followed at 3 of 6 answers each (50%), then a cluster of Rootly, Xurrent IMR, and Zendesk at 2 of 6 (33%). Everything else, 17 products in total, was named exactly once. So beneath the three leaders this category is a long, thin tail: two thirds of the products AI mentioned appeared in a single phrasing and were absent from the other five.
How the shortlist changed with the wording
The wording of the question rewrote the shortlist. The "best free incident management software" question returned 8 names, and 6 of them appeared in no other answer: AlertOps, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, SafetyCulture, Salesforce Service Cloud, NinjaOne, and xMatters. Add the single word "free" and three quarters of the list becomes products that never came up anywhere else in the category.
The "most affordable incident management software" question was the opposite. It returned the shortest list of all, just 4 names: Xurrent IMR, Jira Service Management, SpiceWorks, and PagerDuty, and SpiceWorks appeared in no other answer. Here is the part a buyer would never guess: "free" and "most affordable", two ways of asking about money, shared exactly one product between them, Jira Service Management. Eight names on one list, four on the other, one in common.
The other four phrasings each brought their own newcomers. The bare "best incident management software" question returned 8 names and was the only place CQ Incident Management and Better Stack appeared. The "for small teams" question surfaced four products seen nowhere else: Squadcast, Grafana Incident, Freshservice, and Sentry. "What incident management software should I use" returned only 5 names and was the sole home of Resolver and EHS Insight. And "incident management software recommendations" was the only question that named FireHydrant and Atera.
Put it together and that is the fan-out: one category, six near-identical questions, 25 products, and 17 of them (68%) living in exactly one phrasing. If you only ever checked whether AI recommends you for "best incident management software", you would miss five other questions your buyers actually type, each with a different cast of names.
The source map: who the answers were built from
These answers were not built from a balanced survey of the market. One domain, xurrent.com, fed all 6 of 6 incident management answers, the single most-cited source in the whole run. Reddit was right behind it at 5 of 6, one community forum doing the heavy lifting that a review site usually gets credit for. No Quora page appeared at all.
After those two, atlassian.com fed 4 of 6 answers, and compliancequest.com, isms.online, rootly.com, and salesforce.com each fed 3 of 6. The roundup and listicle sites sat lower: thectoclub.com and augmentcode.com at 2 of 6 each, monday.com at 2 of 6. Review directories did appear, but modestly: G2 fed 2 of 6 answers and Capterra just 1 of 6, both below Reddit and below several vendor blogs.
Here is the insight that matters most if you sell in this category: the top source was a vendor's own website. xurrent.com is Xurrent's domain, it fed every one of the 6 answers, and Xurrent IMR was named in 2 of them. It was not alone. atlassian.com (Atlassian owns both Jira Service Management and Opsgenie, which we count as the two separate products the measurement lists) fed 4 of 6 while those two products were named 4 and 3 times. rootly.com fed 3 of 6 while Rootly was named twice, and incident.io's own domain fed 2 answers while the product itself was named in 4. Being the page the assistant reads is a direct path to being the product it names.
What a vendor here would actually do
If you sell incident management software and want to get named, the lever is not market share, it is the source list. ChatGPT and Gemini named whoever was written up in the pages they retrieved. That points to three concrete places to be: the Reddit threads that fed 5 of 6 answers, the roundups that fed the middle of the pack (thectoclub, isms.online, augmentcode, monday.com), and your own domain done as well as xurrent.com did it to earn 6 of 6. G2 and Capterra help too, but at 2 of 6 and 1 of 6 they were a minor input here, not the deciding one.
None of this requires being the biggest name in the category. Better Stack, Squadcast, and Grafana Incident are not the market leaders, and each still got named once, in 1 of 6 answers, because they were present in the specific page an assistant pulled for a specific phrasing. Presence in the source, not size in the market, is what put a product in the answer.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| incident.io | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Jira Service Management | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| PagerDuty | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Opsgenie | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| ServiceNow | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Rootly | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Xurrent IMR | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Zendesk | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| AlertOps | 1 of 6 | 17% |
AlertOps is one of 17 products that were each named a single time. The eight products above it are every tool ChatGPT and Gemini named in more than one of the six questions.
Where we fit, honestly
Glotier is not incident management software, so we are correctly absent from all 6 of these answers, and we would never fake our way in. What you just read is the thing we actually do: run the buyer questions for your own category against ChatGPT and Gemini, record who gets named and which pages fed each answer, and show you the gap between the two. The check is free, there is no account, and it takes about a minute.