Thinkific was the one name ChatGPT and Gemini kept returning: it appeared in 5 of the 6 answers we measured for online course platforms, more than any other product. We put six buyer questions to the two assistants on 3 August 2026, one live web search each, and recorded every product named and every source page behind the answers. Here is what came back, with the raw counts.
Four products tied one step behind Thinkific: Coursera, edX, Kartra and Teachable each landed in 4 of the 6 answers, or 67%. That is the real shortlist a buyer runs into. Between them, those five names hold most of the visible ground in this category, and none of it was bought. Each name was pulled from public web pages at the moment the question was asked.
The middle of the pack is a five-way tie at 3 of 6, or 50%: iSpring LMS, LinkedIn Learning, Skillshare, Udemy and Udemy Business each appeared in exactly half the answers. Udemy and Udemy Business are the same company under two labels, and the assistants named them separately, so we report two rows of 3 rather than merging them into a 6 the data never showed.
The wording changed the shortlist more than you would expect
The six questions read like paraphrases of one another, but the answers were not. Only Thinkific survived nearly every phrasing, at 5 of 6. It showed up for the bare "best online course platforms", for "small teams", for "what should I use", for "best free" and for "recommendations", then vanished from "most affordable". The most-named product in the whole category made the free list but not the budget one.
The bare "best online course platforms" question returned a business-and-creator set of eight: LearnWorlds, Thinkific, Udemy Business, iSpring LMS, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, edX and Kartra. LearnWorlds appeared in only 2 of 6 answers overall, and both were the "best" and "recommendations" questions, never a price-led one.
"Best free online course platforms" pulled in names that appear nowhere else in the data. Khan Academy, Shopify, Squarespace Courses and System.io each showed up in that one free answer and no other. The free list blended learner catalogs like Khan Academy, Coursera and edX with free-plan creator tools like Thinkific, Teachable and Shopify.
"Most affordable online course platforms" produced a nearly separate set again: FreshLearn, Systeme.io, Coursify and Kajabi each appeared only in that one affordable answer. Here is the finding worth pinning to the wall. "Best free" and "most affordable" sound like the same buyer intent, but the two lists shared exactly one product by name, Teachable. A vendor tuning for "free" and a vendor tuning for "affordable" are chasing two almost separate answers.
Only one product bridged the extremes: Kartra was the sole name to appear in both the bare "best" answer and the "most affordable" answer, at 4 of 6 overall. Everything else sat in one camp or the other.
Systeme.io is its own lesson about labels. The assistants wrote it as "System.io" in the free answer and "Systeme.io" in the affordable answer, so one company scored 1 and 1 across two questions instead of a cleaner 2. When an assistant cannot spell your name the same way twice, your visibility gets split. Ten of the twenty-one product names we recorded appeared in just one of the six questions, including isEazy for "small teams" only and Canvas for "what should I use" only. The long tail here is real, and it is entirely wording-dependent.
The pages behind the answers
Two sources fed every single answer: emailvendorselection.com and youtube.com each appeared in all 6 of 6, a 100% hit rate. A roundup blog and a video platform, not a review site, were the backbone of the category's AI answers. proprofstraining.com followed at 5 of 6, or 83%.
The next tier was three roundup and workflow sites at 4 of 6, or 67% each: dreamgrow.com, zapier.com and ispring.com. Community threads were present but not in charge: reddit.com and quora.com each fed 3 of 6 answers, or 50%, and a single facebook.com page appeared once. Fifteen distinct domains fed the six answers in total.
Here is the insight a vendor should not miss. ispring.com is iSpring's own domain, and it fed 4 of the 6 answers, more than Reddit or Quora. iSpring LMS was then named in 3 of 6. A vendor that also publishes comparison content got its own site cited in two thirds of the answers and its product onto three shortlists. Coursera ran a quieter version of the same play: coursera.org fed 1 answer and Coursera was named in 4. To the assistants, owning an authoritative page in your category is not a conflict of interest, it is a source.
What did not appear is as loud as what did. No G2 page. No Capterra page. Across all 6 answers and 15 source domains, the classic software review directories fed nothing. If your AI-visibility plan leans on your G2 rating, this data says the assistants were not reading it for these questions.
What we would do if we sold a course platform
The source list, not market share, decided who got named, so the plan is not "be a bigger brand", it is "be on those exact pages". From this data that means: earn a place in the roundups that fed every answer, emailvendorselection.com and proprofstraining.com, and in the 67% tier of dreamgrow.com and zapier.com. Build a real presence on YouTube, which fed all 6 of 6. Publish your own honest comparison content the way iSpring does, since its domain out-cited Reddit. And do not wait on G2 or Capterra to carry you here, because they did not show up once.
The second move is to pick your query. If you are a budget tool, remember that "free" and "affordable" returned almost entirely separate lists that shared one name. Winning "affordable", where FreshLearn, Systeme.io, Coursify and Kajabi live, is a different content job than winning "free", where Khan Academy, Shopify and Squarespace Courses live. You can measure which one already names you before you spend anything.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Thinkific | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Coursera | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| edX | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Kartra | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Teachable | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| iSpring LMS | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| LinkedIn Learning | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Skillshare | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Udemy | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Udemy Business | 3 of 6 | 50% |
Udemy and Udemy Business are the same brand recorded under two labels, each at 3 of 6, and we keep them as separate rows because that is how the assistants named them. Systeme.io shows the same split lower down, counted once as "System.io" and once as "Systeme.io". We do not add these pairs together, because the combined number is one the measurement never produced.
Glotier does not sell an online course platform, so we are correctly absent from all 6 of these answers. We did not slip ourselves in, and you should distrust any tool that does. What you just read is the exact check Glotier runs for a customer's own category: the same six-question fan-out, the same product counts, the same source map of pages to go earn. If you sell in this space, the check is free, takes about a minute, and needs no account. You will see which of the six answers already name you, and which ones you are not in yet.