Qualtrics was the most-named product in this test, appearing in 5 of the 6 answers ChatGPT and Gemini gave when we asked them for the best market research software on 6 August 2026.
We put six buyer questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, gave each question one live web search, and logged every product the answers named along with every source page behind them. Across all 6 answers, 23 different products came up, but the field thinned fast: only Qualtrics reached 5 of 6, and just two more, Rival Technologies and SurveyMonkey, tied at 4 of 6 each. No product was named in all six answers.
Below the top three, the middle was crowded. Four products landed 3 of 6 mentions each: Forsta, Google Trends, GWI, and Statista. Another four sat at 2 of 6: Displayr, QuestionPro, Tableau, and Voxco. The remaining 12 products were each named only once, so more than half of everything these two assistants mentioned came up in just a single answer.
How the shortlist changed across the six questions
The most useful thing in this data is that the six questions did not return one stable list, they returned several. The "best free market research software" answer shared almost nothing with the rest: it named Google Trends, Statista, Tableau Public, Google Analytics, Independent Analytics, Consumer Barometer, Trendwatching, and Jotform, and 6 of those 8 (Consumer Barometer, Google Analytics, Independent Analytics, Jotform, Tableau Public, and Trendwatching) appeared in no other answer. Qualtrics, named in 5 of the other answers, was absent from the free one entirely.
"Most affordable" did not behave like "free." That answer returned the paid core, Qualtrics, Forsta, Rival Technologies, SurveyMonkey, Voxco, and Displayr, plus a single one-off, Perplexity, which was named here and nowhere else. So of the six questions, only the free query dropped Qualtrics; the affordable query kept it at the top. A buyer who types "affordable" and a buyer who types "free" get almost entirely different shortlists from the same two assistants.
The bare "best market research software" query pulled its own mix: Qualtrics, Google Trends, Tableau, Typeform, Loop11, Qualaroo, Statista, and GWI. Three of those, Typeform, Loop11, and Qualaroo, showed up in this answer only. And Rival Technologies and SurveyMonkey, both 4 of 6 overall, did not make the bare "best" list at all; they earned their high counts on the "small teams," "what should I use," "affordable," and "recommendations" phrasings instead.
Two more single-question products came from "what market research software should I use": ProProfs Survey Maker and Zoho Survey, each named only there. Add it up and 12 of the 23 products, 52%, hung on a single phrasing of what is really one buyer intent. If you only ever check the plain "best" query, you would miss most of what these assistants actually recommend.
Where the answers came from
The 6 answers cited 22 distinct domains, and four tied at the top with 5 citations each: reddit.com, rivaltech.com, gwi.com, and displayr.com. After that came lendio.com and voxco.com at 3 each, then getapp.com, liveplan.com, and quora.com at 2 each, with 13 more domains cited once.
Community threads carried real weight. Reddit fed a source into 5 of the 6 answers and Quora into 2 of 6, so a forum post sat behind most of what ChatGPT and Gemini said in this category.
Here is the insight we would flag for anyone selling in this category: three of the four top sources are vendor-owned sites, and each of those vendors got named. Rival Technologies' own domain, rivaltech.com, fed 5 of 6 answers and the product was named in 4. GWI's domain fed 5 answers and GWI was named in 3. Displayr's domain fed 5 answers and Displayr was named in 2. Voxco's domain fed 3 answers and Voxco was named in 2. When these assistants read a vendor's own roundup page, that vendor tended to end up on the list.
The review directories most buyers expect were mostly missing. G2 and Capterra did not appear once across the 22 domains. The directory-style sources that did show up were GetApp (2 citations), GoodFirms (1), and SourceForge (1), plus the industry site GreenBook (1). Small-business roundups did more work than the big directories: lendio.com was cited 3 times and liveplan.com twice.
What this means if you sell market research software
Being named tracked with being in the sources, not with market share. Rival Technologies is not the biggest name in this category, yet its own domain fed 5 of 6 answers and it was named in 4, one more than the far better-known Statista, GWI, and Forsta, each at 3 of 6. The source list, not the size of the company, decided who got recommended.
So the work is concrete. Get onto the exact pages these engines read: the Reddit threads behind 5 of 6 answers, the roundups on lendio.com (3 citations) and liveplan.com (2), and the vendor-style list pages that clearly get cited here. Publishing your own structured roundup is fair game, because vendor domains, rivaltech.com, gwi.com, displayr.com, and voxco.com, were four of the most-cited sources in the whole test. And pick your query: the "free" answer and the "affordable" answer pulled nearly separate lists, so winning one does not win the other.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Qualtrics | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Rival Technologies | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| SurveyMonkey | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Forsta | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Google Trends | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| GWI | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Statista | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Displayr | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| QuestionPro | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Tableau | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Voxco | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Tableau Public | 1 of 6 | 17% |
Two labelling notes. The measurement logged "Tableau" (2 of 6) and "Tableau Public" (1 of 6) as separate entries, and we keep them apart rather than summing to 3, because they are different products, one paid and one free, and Tableau Public appeared only in the "best free" answer. We include Tableau Public in the table just to show that split; the other 11 single-mention products sit below the cut. Google also reached the answers through two different tools, Google Trends (3 of 6) and Google Analytics (1 of 6), which we count separately for the same reason.
Why Glotier is not in these answers
Glotier does not sell market research software, so we were not named in any of these 6 answers, and that is exactly right: we would have no business on this list. But running the list is precisely what Glotier does for the category you do sell in. We put the same six buyer questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, record every product named and every source cited, and show you whether your name is in the answer and which pages would have to change for it to be. The check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.