When we asked ChatGPT and Gemini the same six buyer questions about lead generation software, four products tied for the top and none of them was named in more than 2 of the 6 answers: Agile CRM, Apollo.io, HubSpot, and OptinMonster each showed up twice. On 2026-08-03 we ran one live web search per question through ChatGPT and Gemini, recorded every product each assistant named and every source domain behind the answers, and no product cleared a third of the six.
The top of this category is flat. Across the six questions the two assistants named 29 different products, and 25 of them appeared in just one of the six answers. The raw count also understates a couple of brands, because the assistants split them across labels: HubSpot is named twice as "HubSpot" and a third time as "HubSpot's free CRM," so the HubSpot brand actually touches 3 of the 6 answers. Salesforce splits into "Salesforce" and "Salesforce Marketing Cloud," Zapier into "Zapier" and "Zapier's free plan," and Calendly into "Calendly" and "Calendly's free tier." We kept every label exactly as measured rather than merge them, but the split is worth knowing when you read the counts.
How the shortlist changed with the wording
The single biggest lesson here is that the wording of the question decided the answer more than any product's reputation did. Of the 29 products named, 25 appeared in exactly one of the six questions, and only 4 (Agile CRM, Apollo.io, HubSpot, OptinMonster) appeared in two. Not one product appeared in three or more of the six.
The bare "best lead generation software" question and the "best free lead generation software" question shared zero products. "Best" returned Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Leadfeeder, UpLead, Intercom, Hunter, Demio, Overloop, and D&B Hoovers, 8 products in all. "Best free" returned a completely separate set of 6: HubSpot, Zapier, Calendly, Tawk.to, Mailchimp, and ConvergeHub. Same category, same two assistants, one word of difference, and no overlap at all.
"Most affordable lead generation software" produced a third distinct list of 6: OptinMonster, Skrapp.io, Agile CRM, HubSpot's free CRM, Zapier's free plan, and Calendly's free tier. Three of those are the free-tier versions of names the "best free" question returned under their plain brand: the affordability framing pushed the assistants to cite "HubSpot's free CRM" and "Zapier's free plan" where the free question had just said "HubSpot" and "Zapier." The intent behind the words reshaped not only which vendors appeared but how they were labelled.
"For small teams" returned its own 7 products, five of which appeared nowhere else in the study: ZoomInfo, Lusha, LeadFuze, CallPage, and AeroLeads. "What lead generation software should I use" surfaced Crunchbase, Leadpages, and Salesforce, none of which showed up in any other question. And "lead generation software recommendations," the loosest phrasing of the six, returned a single product: HubSpot, and nothing else.
For a vendor, that means there is no one "best lead generation software" list to win. There are at least six, and this measurement shows six almost non-overlapping shortlists inside a single category. A product that owns the "best free" answer can be invisible on "best for small teams," because the two questions pulled from different sources and returned different names.
Where the answers came from
Community threads fed these answers more than anything else. reddit.com was a source behind all 6 of the 6 answers, and quora.com was behind 5 of the 6. Every single lead generation answer these two assistants gave leaned on at least one Reddit thread.
After the community sites, the sources were mostly vendor and roundup blogs: salesforce.com fed 5 of the 6 answers, zendesk.com 4 of 6, and improvado.io, zapier.com, skrapp.io, and youtube.com each fed 3 of the 6. optinmonster.com sat behind 2 of the 6.
The most useful pattern in the whole measurement: seven vendors whose own domain was among the sources also got their product named. salesforce.com was behind 5 of 6 answers and Salesforce (plus Salesforce Marketing Cloud) got named. optinmonster.com sat behind 2 answers and OptinMonster tied for the most-named product in the study. skrapp.io fed 3 answers and its product Skrapp.io was named; zapier.com fed 3 and Zapier was named; hubspot.com, convergehub.com, and pipeline.zoominfo.com each fed 1 answer and HubSpot, ConvergeHub, and ZoomInfo were each named. Publishing the page the assistant reads, and being named in it, went together.
The classic software review directories did not feed these answers. G2 and Capterra appeared behind 0 of the 6 answers. gartner.com showed up behind just 1 of the 6. For a category where buyers are told to "check the reviews," the assistants were reading Reddit and vendor blogs, not the review directories.
What gets a vendor named here
If you sell lead generation software and want to be in these answers, the source list decides it, not your market share. None of the six questions asked which product has the most customers. The assistants named whoever appeared in the pages their one web search pulled, and those pages were led by reddit.com (6 of 6) and quora.com (5 of 6).
The practical shortlist from this data: be discussed in Reddit and Quora threads about lead generation, since they were behind 6 and 5 of the 6 answers. Get into the roundup blogs that ranked highest, salesforce.com (5 of 6) and zendesk.com (4 of 6). And publish your own comparison content, because 7 of the vendors that fed a source also got named. Spending on a G2 or Capterra profile would not have moved any of these six answers, since neither directory was read once.
One more concrete move: if you have a free plan, say so plainly on the pages that get cited. The "best free" and "most affordable" questions returned 12 product slots between them, and they went to names with an obvious free or low-cost story (HubSpot, Zapier, Calendly, OptinMonster, Skrapp.io) rather than to the enterprise names that won the bare "best" question.
The full list, counted
Here are the four leaders plus five of the products named once. After the top four, 25 products tied at 1 of 6; the rows below include five of them, chosen to show how the same brand gets split across labels.
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Agile CRM | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Apollo.io | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| HubSpot | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| OptinMonster | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| HubSpot's free CRM | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Salesforce | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Salesforce Marketing Cloud | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Zapier | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Zapier's free plan | 1 of 6 | 17% |
Read those rows with the label-splitting in mind: "HubSpot" and "HubSpot's free CRM" are one brand across 3 of the 6 answers, and "Salesforce" and "Salesforce Marketing Cloud" are one brand across 2 of them. We list them separately because that is how the assistants said them.
Where Glotier fits
Glotier does not sell lead generation software, so we are correctly absent from every one of these six answers. That is the point, not a miss: this page is a measurement of someone else's category, run exactly the way we run it for a customer's own.
If you work at one of the products above, or one that should be above, this is the thing worth tracking. Your AI visibility is a number you can watch move: which of the six phrasings name you, which Reddit and roundup pages feed the answer, and whether your own domain is being read. The check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.