Which small business CRMs do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which CRM to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 3 engines, 132 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 63 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Free to read, raw data included.

Two conditions on every number below

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 132 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The three right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/crm/#hubspot. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

ChatGPT (gpt-5.5), Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

1. What is the best CRM software for a 10-person small business?
2. Best CRM for a small sales team
3. We're a 15 person agency managing sales leads in spreadsheets and it's a mess. What CRM should we buy?
4. Recommend a simple CRM for a small B2B consulting firm.
5. affordable CRM software for small business
6. What CRM software do small businesses actually use?
7. Best easy-to-use CRM for non-tech-savvy sales reps
8. We need a cheap CRM to track deals and client interactions. What are the top options?
9. What is the best sales pipeline management tool for a 5-person startup?
10. Top CRM platforms for a growing service company
11. What CRM should a small business owner pick for contact management and email tracking?
12. Best simple pipeline CRM for small business sales teams
13. We're losing track of sales follow-ups in our email inboxes. What CRM software should we implement?
14. Recommend an all-in-one CRM for a solo entrepreneur expanding to a team of 5.
15. What is the best budget-friendly CRM software for small B2B companies?
16. Best CRM for small business with strong pipeline visualization
17. What CRM tool offers the best value for a 20-person company?
18. We are a regional logistics firm with 8 reps. What sales CRM do you recommend?
19. Which CRM is easiest to set up without hiring an admin or consultant?
20. Best sales tracking software for a small manufacturing business
21. What CRM software has the lowest learning curve for small sales teams?
22. Recommend a CRM for a boutique marketing agency to track prospective clients.
23. Best low-cost CRM for small business lead management
24. We need a customer database tool to organize our contacts and deal stages. What should we buy?
25. What is the best CRM for a professional services firm with 12 employees?
26. Top CRM recommendation for small real estate brokerages
27. Which CRM software is best for managing B2B account relationships on a budget?
28. We are outgrowing spreadsheets for tracking client opportunities. What CRM software should we choose?
29. Best lightweight CRM for small business owners
30. What CRM tool do you suggest for a bootstrapped software company with 3 account executives?
31. Recommend a customer relationship management system for a 25-person construction company.
32. What is the best sales CRM with email integration for small businesses?
33. Best CRM for small e-commerce brands doing wholesale sales
34. We need a CRM that requires minimal training for our 4-person sales team. Any recommendations?
35. What CRM software is most recommended for small financial advisory practices?
36. Best user-friendly CRM for micro-businesses
37. We need to manage prospective deals and track communication history across 6 reps. Which CRM is best?
38. What is the best CRM for small business with good mobile app capabilities?
39. Recommend a straightforward CRM system for a local IT service provider.
40. Best CRM software for small teams under $30 per user per month
41. What CRM software should a small wholesale distributor use to manage accounts?
42. Which CRM tool is best for managing inbound sales inquiries for a small agency?
43. Best simple CRM for tracking lead status and close rates
44. What customer relationship management software should a 10-person firm implement?

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 132 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, sales pipeline managers, and broader business suites whose CRM or sales module was named. Excluded, even when named: email marketing platforms, help desks and support ticketing software, accounting and ERP packages, standalone project management tools, B2B lead enrichment databases, appointment schedulers, e-commerce platforms, cold-email tools, e-signature tools, social media tools, and companies named only as an example user.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 30 spellings onto 12 of the rows below: “HubSpot CRM”, “HubSpot” and “HubSpot CRM (Starter or Pro Plan)” are one row — the one the table prints as HubSpot CRM. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded 17 such names, among them “HubSpot Sales Hub” counts as HubSpot CRM and “Pipedrive Advanced” counts as Pipedrive. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. 2 pairs of rows below carry that line in this run: Salesforce Starter and Essentials, Chime and Lofty. What each one quotes is what an engine wrote, not a judgement of ours about who owns what.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what three answer engines said between 3 and 6 August 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which small business CRM to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 132 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 44 of its 44 answers. ChatGPT and Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in their API responses, on any of the 44 answers each gave. That is a fact about the engines, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 860 URLs across 231 distinct domains. Below are the 56 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 44 answers cited it at all.

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.