Apollo.io was the only product ChatGPT and Gemini named in all 6 of 6 answers when we asked them for the best sales intelligence software on 6 August 2026. We ran six buyer questions, gave each assistant one live web search, and recorded every product named and every source domain behind the replies. Apollo.io came back every single time. Nothing else did.
ZoomInfo was named in 5 of 6 answers, the clear runner-up. There is one wrinkle we are not going to hide: in the sixth answer it appeared as "ZoomInfo Sales" rather than "ZoomInfo," so our tracker logged that as a separate name with a count of 1. Read as one brand, ZoomInfo was actually present in all six answers too. We keep the two labels apart in the table below instead of quietly merging them, because that split is exactly the sort of thing a vendor should be able to see.
Cognism and Lusha tied for third, each named in 4 of 6 answers. Below them, four tools landed in exactly half the answers at 3 of 6 each: 6sense, LeadIQ, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Seamless.AI. A name we did not recognise, Cay, was named in 2 of 6 answers, which put it ahead of established brands like HubSpot Sales Hub, Demandbase and InsideView that each appeared only once.
How the shortlist changed across the six questions
The six questions read like synonyms to a person, but they did not return the same list. Only Apollo.io (6 of 6) and ZoomInfo (present in all six across its two labels) survived every phrasing. Everything beneath them moved with the wording, and eleven of the twenty product names we logged appeared in only one of the six questions.
The bare "best sales intelligence software" question returned 8 names, and one of them, Momentum, appeared in that question and nowhere else in the six.
"Best free sales intelligence software" produced the shortest list at just 5 names. Two of them, SMARTe and Findthat, showed up only under the free framing. Add the single word "free" and two tools you would otherwise never see turn up.
"Most affordable sales intelligence software" returned 8 names and behaved almost like a different category. Four of them appeared in that question alone: Salesgenie, HubSpot Sales Hub, Chorus and GTM Workspace.
Here is the part worth sitting with. "Best free" and "most affordable" sound like the same request. Their answers shared only two names, Apollo.io and ZoomInfo. The other three names in the free answer and the six other names in the affordable answer did not overlap at all. Two questions a buyer would use interchangeably produced nearly opposite shortlists. The rest of the fan-out followed suit: InsideView surfaced only in the "small teams" answer, Demandbase only in "what should I use," and Bombora only in "recommendations."
Where the answers came from
The single most-cited source was not a review site or a Reddit thread. It was pipeline.zoominfo.com, ZoomInfo's own content hub, cited in all 6 of 6 answers. ZoomInfo the product was also named in all six. A vendor's owned domain sat behind every answer, and that vendor got named in every answer. That is the whole story in one line.
Community threads were the next force. Reddit fed 4 of 6 answers and Quora fed 1 of 6. In a category this commercial, buyers' own discussions were cited more often than almost any single vendor page.
Review directories were thinner than most people assume. G2 fed 4 of 6 answers. Capterra did not appear at all. One other directory, GetApp, showed up once, in the "best free" answer. So the directory presence buyers imagine is dominant was really one site, G2, in four of six answers.
The owned-domain pattern repeated below ZoomInfo, and it is the key insight of this whole page. Cognism's own site fed the "most affordable" answer that named Cognism. SMARTe's own domain fed the "best free" answer that named SMARTe, the one place SMARTe appeared at all. Apollo's own domain fed one answer too. Where a vendor's own page got cited, that vendor tended to get named. The clean counter-example was Amplemarket, whose content fed 2 answers while its product was never named once, proof that a citation helps but does not guarantee a mention. Roundups and editorial filled the remainder: avoma.com in 3 answers, monday.com in 2, and single appearances from technologyadvice.com, uschamber.com, salesman.com and clari.com.
What a sales intelligence vendor would do to get named
Across 40 source citations in these six answers, the pattern is blunt: the source list, not market share, decides who gets named. ChatGPT and Gemini named the tools that the pages they read named, nothing more.
So the work is to be present in these exact places. ZoomInfo's owned hub was in 6 of 6 answers, and ZoomInfo was named in 6 of 6. If you sell in this category, the equivalent asset on your own domain, kept current and genuinely useful, is the highest-leverage thing you can build.
After owned content comes the community and roundup layer. The Reddit threads cited in 4 of 6 answers, the G2 category page cited in 4 of 6, the roundups on avoma.com (3 of 6) and monday.com (2 of 6): being named, reviewed and talked about on those specific pages is what put tools on these shortlists. You do not need all 21 source domains. You need the handful that showed up more than once.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Apollo.io | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| ZoomInfo | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Cognism | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Lusha | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| 6sense | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| LeadIQ | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| LinkedIn Sales Navigator | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Seamless.AI | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Cay | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| ZoomInfo Sales | 1 of 6 | 17% |
ZoomInfo appears twice on purpose. It was named as "ZoomInfo" in 5 answers and as "ZoomInfo Sales" in 1. We list both labels exactly as the assistants returned them rather than folding them into a single number the measurement never produced.
Glotier does not sell sales intelligence software, so we are correctly absent from all six of these answers. We did not invent a mention for ourselves, and you should distrust any tool that does. But this measurement, six buyer questions with every product named and every source counted, is exactly what we run for a customer's own category. If you sell in this space, your product's standing with ChatGPT and Gemini is a number you can watch, not a mystery you have to guess at. The check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.