Research
CRM AI Visibility Leaderboard: Which CRM Does AI Recommend? (August 2026)
We ran 10 buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, twice each, to score 20 CRM brands on AI visibility. Gemini declined to search on half of its calls, leaving 50 grounded responses. The results reveal a market that looks nothing like its traditional competitive landscape.
Key takeaways
- HubSpot is named in 94% of grounded responses; Zoho follows at 76% and Pipedrive at 72%.
- Seven brands, Insightly, Capsule CRM, Apptivo, Nimble CRM, Vtiger CRM, SugarCRM, and Zendesk Sell, scored zero across every grounded response on all three engines.
- Salesforce holds 23% market share but scores only 33.4 AI Visibility, and drops from 70% mention on ChatGPT to 40% on both Gemini and Perplexity.
- 15 of 20 brands score below 15, and the median AI Visibility Score across all 20 brands is 3.1.
In this article
51% of B2B buyers now start product research in an AI chatbot before visiting a vendor website (DerivateX / Demand Gen Report, 2026). That means when a sales manager asks ChatGPT “what's the best CRM for my team of 10,” someone wins and someone loses , before your website ever loads.
We ran 60 queries across three engines, 50 of them search-grounded, to find out who wins in the CRM category.
The leaderboard#
We scored 20 CRM brands on AI Visibility (0 to 100) using 10 buyer-intent queries on ChatGPT (gpt-5.4-nano with web_search), Google Gemini (gemini-3.6-flash with google_search), and Perplexity (Sonar). The scoring formula weights mention rate, top-3 appearance, and first-recommendation status.
Method note: every scored response is search-grounded. OpenAI runs gpt-5.4-nano with the web_search tool forced, Gemini runs gemini-3.6-flash with google_search, Perplexity runs sonar. Gemini declined to search on 10 of its 20 calls and those responses are excluded from the denominator rather than counted as an absence, so Gemini rates rest on 10 grounded responses against 20 each for OpenAI and Perplexity. Combined scores pool all 50 grounded responses rather than averaging the three engines equally, which means Gemini carries 20% of the weight in a combined score, not a third. This run replaces a June 2026 study whose OpenAI and Gemini legs were collected without a search tool and therefore measured model memory, not AI search. Canonical leaderboard →
| Rank | Brand | AI Visibility Score | Mention Rate | Top-3 Rate | First-Rec Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HubSpot CRM | 66.2 | 94.0% | 56.0% | 12.0% |
| 2 | Pipedrive | 51.2 | 72.0% | 48.0% | 4.0% |
| 3 | Zoho CRM | 49.2 | 76.0% | 36.0% | 2.0% |
| 4 | Salesforce | 33.4 | 52.0% | 22.0% | 4.0% |
| 5 | Freshsales | 17.8 | 32.0% | 6.0% | 0.0% |
| 6 | Close CRM | 12.2 | 22.0% | 4.0% | 0.0% |
| 7 | Copper CRM | 6.8 | 10.0% | 6.0% | 0.0% |
| 8 | Streak CRM | 6.2 | 10.0% | 4.0% | 0.0% |
| 9 | Bitrix24 | 5.2 | 8.0% | 4.0% | 0.0% |
| 10 | Nutshell CRM | 4.2 | 6.0% | 4.0% | 0.0% |
| 11 | Monday Sales CRM | 2.0 | 4.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 12 | Keap | 1.0 | 2.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 13 | Agile CRM | 1.0 | 2.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 14 | Insightly | 0.0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 15 | Capsule CRM | 0.0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 16 | Apptivo | 0.0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 17 | Nimble CRM | 0.0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 18 | Vtiger CRM | 0.0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 19 | SugarCRM | 0.0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 20 | Zendesk Sell | 0.0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
What the data actually shows#
1. HubSpot is the first AI answer to the CRM category question; no one else is close
HubSpot was named in 94% of all grounded responses. The next-closest brand: Pipedrive at 10%. Every other brand in the study: 0 to 3.3%.
HubSpot scored 100/100 on OpenAI, 76/100 on Gemini, and 66.5/100 on Perplexity. The gap between HubSpot (66.2) and Pipedrive (51.2) is structural. It is not the kind of gap that closes by writing a few more blog posts.
This is what GEO researchers call “brand-first indexing”: the brand has become the default answer to the category question, the way Google is the default answer to “search engine” and Stripe is the default answer to “payment API.” Dislodging it requires displacing HubSpot in the sources AI engines cite, not just ranking higher in Google. When a prospect asks an AI “what CRM should I use,” there is a 43% chance the AI says HubSpot first and a near-zero chance it says anything else first.
2. Salesforce is underperforming its market share in AI by a wider margin than you'd expect
Salesforce holds 23% global CRM market share (IDC, 2025) and $34B+ ARR. Its AI Visibility Score is 33.4, fourth in the rankings, behind HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho CRM. The per-engine breakdown is the real story: OpenAI scores Salesforce at 70.0 (competitive), but Perplexity scores it at only 22.0, less than a third of its OpenAI score.
Perplexity retrieves live web content; OpenAI relies on parametric training data. The divergence suggests Salesforce's citation footprint is heavy in older, training-data-indexed sources (analyst reports, legacy comparison pages) but thin in the current web content Perplexity actually retrieves. As buyers shift toward Perplexity, Salesforce's effective AI visibility is declining even as its SEO position holds.
3. Close CRM lives in Gemini, but barely exists on ChatGPT
Close CRM is named in 40% of grounded Gemini responses and only 10% on ChatGPT. This is a pattern we call “single-engine dependence.” Freshsales runs the same risk in the other direction, at 10% on Gemini against 35% on ChatGPT and 40% on Perplexity. A brand that reads as visible on one engine can be nearly absent on another.
For a $640M ARR public company (Freshworks), this is a meaningful risk: buyers who use Gemini, native to Google's own search results, effectively never see Freshsales. Single-engine dependence looks like strong AI visibility until your buyers migrate to a different engine.
4. Fifteen of 20 brands score below 15. Seven score zero.
The median AI Visibility Score across the 20 brands is 3.1. Seven brands: Insightly, Capsule CRM, Apptivo, Nimble CRM, Vtiger CRM, SugarCRM, and Zendesk Sell received zero mentions across every grounded response on all three engines. Monday Sales CRM (built by a $10B+ public company) was named in 4% of responses, scoring 2.0.
These are not obscure startups. They are established businesses with real customers, sales teams, and marketing budgets. Their invisible status in AI is not a product quality signal; it is a distribution signal. They have not built the citation infrastructure (structured content, comparison pages, ecosystem mentions, entity disambiguation) that causes AI models to reach for their name.
What the engine split reveals#
The ranking order shifts meaningfully between ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity:
Weights Zoho CRM heavily at 85% mention, second only to HubSpot on that engine, and ranks it above Pipedrive, which the other two engines prefer.
Surfaces Close CRM at 40% mention against 10% on ChatGPT, and is the only engine that names Monday Sales CRM at all, suggesting Google's crawlers feed Gemini a different source set.
Shows the sharpest divergence from the other engines: Salesforce drops to 35% mention rate (vs. 65% overall), while Pipedrive holds well at 75%.
Brands optimizing only for ChatGPT are building a fragile position. The AI search market is multi-engine, and the divergence between engines is growing, not converging.
The structural insight: why this gap exists and what creates it#
AI citation is not random. Models are trained on, and retrieve from, a specific set of source types. The research on what drives AI citation rates identifies a consistent pattern:
Structured content with FAQ schema is extracted at higher rates than unstructured prose (Princeton GEO research: 35.8% improvement in citation rates).
Third-party comparison mentions carry more weight than brand-owned content: 94% of AI citations come from earned media, not brand blogs (Muck Rack / Everything-PR).
Reddit accounts for 46.7% of Perplexity's top-10 citations (Discovered Labs), almost half of Perplexity's recommendation surface comes from a platform most brands don't actively work with.
HubSpot scores 66.2 not because it has the best product, but because it has:
These are infrastructure investments, not marketing campaigns. They take 4 to 12 weeks to build and begin influencing AI citation within 60 to 90 days of deployment.
See where your brand ranks with the same 60-query test. Get your free AI Visibility Score in 60 seconds.
Published by Noetio. Independent AI visibility research. Not affiliated with any CRM vendor listed in this study.
Methodology#
60 total queries (10 prompts × 3 engines × 2 repetitions), of which 50 came back search-grounded and were scored. Engines: OpenAI gpt-5.4-nano with the web_search tool forced, Google Gemini gemini-3.6-flash with google_search, Perplexity Sonar. Date: 2026-08-05.
Engine Score = (mention_rate × 0.50) + (top3_rate × 0.30) + (top1_rate × 0.20)Final AI Visibility Score = average of per-engine scoresLimitations