Three tools tied at the top of spend management software: Brex, Expensify and Zoho Expense were each named in 5 of the 6 answers we collected. We put six buyer questions to ChatGPT and Gemini on 3 August 2026, gave each assistant one live web search, and recorded every product it named and every source page it cited. This page is built from that measurement and nothing else.
After those three, the field drops off fast. Ramp was named in 4 of 6 answers, then Airbase and SAP Concur at 3 of 6 each. Mercury, Payhawk and Spendesk each landed 2 of 6. Another 15 products showed up exactly once. So while 24 product names appeared in total, the real working shortlist is nine names deep: the nine tools named in more than one of the six answers.
The word "free" changed the entire answer
The four general business questions mostly agreed with each other. "Best spend management software," "best for small teams," "what should I use," and "recommendations" all leaned on the same core of Brex, Expensify, Zoho Expense and Ramp, each of which appeared in at least 4 of 6 answers. If you sell a corporate-card or expense tool, that is the list you are fighting to join.
Then "best free spend management software" returned an almost entirely different world. Its eight names were Mint, Goodbudget, FreshBooks, EveryDollar, Rocket Money, NerdWallet, YNAB and Expensify, and 7 of those 8 appeared in no other question. These are consumer budgeting apps, not business spend platforms. One qualifier, "free," swapped the whole answer.
"Most affordable spend management software" produced a third shape again: Zoho Expense, Spendesk, Rippling, Mesh Payments, BILL Spend & Expense, Airbase and Brex. Three of those, Rippling, Mesh Payments and BILL Spend & Expense, each scored 1 of 6 and appeared only in this single affordable question.
The narrower questions each added their own one-off names too. The bare "best spend management software" was the only place Coupa and Navan appeared. "Small teams" was the only question to name Fyle. "What should I use" was the only one to name OFX. Each of those products scored 1 of 6, carried entirely by one phrasing of the question.
Only two tools bridged these separate worlds. Zoho Expense (5 of 6) is the one product to appear on both the affordable list and the general lists, and Expensify (5 of 6) is the only one to appear on both the free consumer list and the business lists. That is why they sit at the top: they are the tools that survive whichever way a buyer phrases the question.
Reddit was in every answer, Capterra in none
reddit.com was the single most-used source, cited in all 6 of 6 answers. The other community site, quora.com, appeared once (1 of 6), only on the free question. If your spend tool is not discussed on Reddit, you are missing the one source every one of these answers reached for.
The analyst and roundup layer showed up, but partially. gartner.com was cited in 4 of 6 answers and g2.com in 3 of 6. Capterra, the other big review directory, was cited in 0 of 6. So the classic "get listed on the directories" advice only half-describes what these assistants actually read.
The most useful finding is about vendor sites. 9 of the 19 cited domains were the websites of products that the same answers named, led by mercury.com (5 of 6), payhawk.com (4 of 6), spendesk.com (4 of 6), ofx.com (4 of 6) and brex.com (3 of 6). The assistants treat a vendor's own "best spend management software" roundup as a citable source.
The clearest version of that: brex.com fed 3 of 6 answers and Brex the product was named in 5 of 6, the most of any tool. The company that publishes the comparison content is also the company that gets recommended. Payhawk and Spendesk show the same loop on a smaller scale, each cited 4 of 6 and named 2 of 6.
There is a twist worth noting. mercury.com was the second most-cited domain at 5 of 6, but Mercury the product was named in only 2 of 6. Mercury's own roundup is feeding answers that mostly recommend its competitors. Publishing the content gets you cited; it does not automatically get you named.
Getting named is a sourcing problem, not a market-share problem
The whole answer was assembled from 19 domains, led by reddit.com at 6 of 6. What decides whether a product appears is whether it lives in those specific pages, not how big it is. Coupa is a well-known enterprise name and it landed 1 of 6, because it surfaced in just one source set.
So the job for a vendor in this category is concrete. Be present where these answers are built: Reddit threads (6 of 6), Gartner (4 of 6), G2 (3 of 6), and publish your own comparison page the way brex.com (3 of 6) and payhawk.com (4 of 6) already do. Those are the pages the assistants quoted back.
And match the qualifier you care about. The free question's seven sources included none of Gartner, G2, mercury.com, payhawk.com, spendesk.com or brex.com, so ranking for "best spend management software" does nothing for the buyer who typed "free." Each phrasing is a separate race with its own six-source shortlist.
Where Glotier fits
Glotier does not sell spend management software, so we are correctly absent from all 6 of these answers, and we would never add ourselves to a list the assistants did not produce. This category is not ours to be named in.
But the measurement on this page is exactly what we do for a customer's own category: run the buyer questions, record which products the assistants name across the answers, and map the domains behind them. For spend management the headline was three tools at 5 of 6 and Reddit at 6 of 6. For your category the numbers will be different, and worth knowing.
If you want to see where you stand in your own category, the check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Brex | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Expensify | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Zoho Expense | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Ramp | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Airbase | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| SAP Concur | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Mercury | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Payhawk | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Spendesk | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| SAP Concur Expense | 1 of 6 | 17% |
SAP Concur was recorded under two labels, "SAP Concur" in 3 of 6 answers and "SAP Concur Expense" in 1 of 6. We show both rows rather than adding them into a 4, because the assistants never gave a combined number and we are not going to invent one.