We put the six questions a buyer actually types when shopping for live chat software to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, gave each engine one live web search, and recorded every product it named. No single product was named in all six answers. Four were named in five of six (83%): Drift, Intercom, Kayako, and Zendesk. Measured on 2026-08-03, that four-way tie is the closest thing the category has to a default AI answer.
Across the six questions the three engines named 18 different live chat products, but the field thins fast. Only those four reached five of six answers. Only two more, Tidio and tawk.to, reached four of six (67%). Every other product was named in three answers or fewer. The AI shortlist for live chat is a top four with a short bench, not the crowded market the category's own advertising implies.
The four leaders share one blind spot, and it is the most important number on this page. Drift, Intercom, Kayako, and Zendesk were each named in five of six answers, and the one question every single one of them missed was the same: "best free live chat software." Add the word "free" and the entire paid top four drops out of the answer.
How the shortlist changed from question to question
The six questions are not one question wearing six hats. The bare "best live chat software" query returned eight names: the four leaders plus LiveChat, tawk.to, LiveAgent, and Re:amaze, and Re:amaze appeared there and in no other question. "Best live chat software for small teams" was the only place Pure Chat surfaced. "What live chat software should I use" was the only question that named LiveHelpNow. In each case the wording of the question, not the strength of the product, decided who made the list.
"Best free" and "most affordable" read like the same request to a human, but the engines treated them as separate worlds. The "best free" answer (7 names) was tawk.to, Crisp, Tidio, MyLiveChat, HubSpot Live Chat, ProProfs Chat, and 3CX. The "most affordable" answer (8 names) was tawk.to, Olark, Brevo Conversations, LiveAgent, Kayako, Intercom, Zendesk, and Drift. The two lists overlap on exactly one product: tawk.to. "Affordable" brought the four paid incumbents straight back; "free" shut them out.
Four products owe their entire appearance in this study to that one word, "free." Crisp, MyLiveChat, HubSpot Live Chat, and 3CX were each named once, all inside the "best free" answer and in no other question. If you sell a freemium live chat tool, that single query is your whole opening, and it is a door Drift, Intercom, Kayako, and Zendesk are not standing in.
Two names bridge the gap. Tidio and tawk.to were each named in four of six answers, and they are the only products that appear in both the free list and the mainstream lists. Tidio shows up under "small teams", "what should I use", "best free", and "recommendations"; tawk.to shows up under "best", "small teams", "free", and "affordable." AI treats those two as both a real free option and a serious general pick.
The source map: who fed the answers
The six answers were built from 14 domains, and four of them fed every question. kayako.com, proprofschat.com, reddit.com, and zapier.com were each cited across all six answers (6 of 6). If you want to know why these engines say what they say about live chat, those four pages are most of the explanation.
Community threads carried real weight. Reddit was a source in all six answers (6 of 6) and Quora in four (4 of 6). Between them, a forum thread sat behind every question we asked. For a category buyers argue about in public, the community post is not a footnote, it is a primary source the models pull from.
The rest was roundup and review content. zapier.com (6 of 6), getvoip.com (3 of 6), and tooltester.com (2 of 6) did most of the independent-list work, with getapp.com, qualaroo.com, oscarchat.ai, and ringly.io each appearing once. Worth saying plainly: the two review directories buyers assume own this category, G2 and Capterra, did not appear in a single one of the six answers. The one directory-style source that did, getapp.com, showed up once.
Here is the finding a vendor should act on: your own domain can be the source. kayako.com was cited in all six answers and Kayako the product was named in five, its own comparison and help content is effectively coaching the engines to recommend it. zendesk.com fed two answers and Zendesk was named in five. In the "best free" answer specifically, crisp.chat was a source and Crisp was named, mylivechat.com was a source and MyLiveChat was named. When your domain is in the retrieved set, your product tends to land in the answer.
It is not a guarantee, though, and the honest counter-example is right there in the data. proprofschat.com was also cited in all six answers, the same reach as kayako.com, yet ProProfs Chat was named in only two of them. Getting your page into the source set raises your odds, it does not buy the mention, because the roundups and the Reddit threads still get a vote.
What a vendor in this category would do to get named
The target is concrete: be present in those exact sources. Four domains decided most of this (kayako.com, proprofschat.com, reddit.com, and zapier.com at 6 of 6 each), Reddit sat behind all six answers, and G2 and Capterra behind none. That is a to-do list, not a mystery. Earn the roundup placements that actually get cited, show up credibly in the Reddit and Quora threads for live chat, and publish the comparison content on your own domain that the models can retrieve. In this measurement, market share did not decide who got named. The source list did.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Drift | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Intercom | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Kayako | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Zendesk | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Tidio | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| tawk.to | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| LiveChat | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Brevo Conversations | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| LiveAgent | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Olark | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| ProProfs Chat | 2 of 6 | 33% |
These are the 11 products named in at least two of the six answers. Seven more were named once each: Re:amaze, Pure Chat, LiveHelpNow, Crisp, MyLiveChat, HubSpot Live Chat, and 3CX. One note on counting: our scraper logged tawk.to under two spellings (tawk.to and Tawk.to); we treat them as one product, named in four of six.
Where Glotier fits (and where it does not)
One name you will not find in any of the six answers is Glotier, and that is correct. We do not sell live chat software, so no engine should recommend us for it, and none did (0 of 6). We are not going to dress up a page that pretends otherwise.
But the measurement above is the exact thing we run for the category you do sell in. The same six buyer questions, the same three engines, the same record of every product named and every source behind the answer, pointed at your product instead of live chat. The check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.