Which CRMs do AI answer engines recommend when the buyer names their industry?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which CRM to buy, having said what industry they are in and what systems they already run, 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 108 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/crmindustry/#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. We are a 10-person law firm and we already run our own file server and mail in the office. What is the best CRM software for us?
2. Best CRM for a small sales team at a defense subcontractor
3. We're a 15 person agency serving hospital systems, and today our lead records are all in spreadsheets on a server in our own office. It's a mess. What CRM should we buy?
4. Recommend a simple CRM for a small B2B consulting firm that works with central-bank and regulator clients.
5. affordable CRM software for small business
6. What CRM software do small businesses in regulated industries actually use?
7. Best easy-to-use CRM for non-tech-savvy sales reps at a credit union
8. We are a small forensic accounting practice, and our IT is one contractor who already maintains our server. 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 selling to national security customers?
10. Top CRM platforms for a growing medical billing service company
11. I run a small private investigation firm, and we already run our own mail server. What CRM should I pick for contact management and email tracking?
12. Best simple CRM for running a sales pipeline at a small company
13. We're a small biotech research services firm, and we already run our own document system. 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 immigration consultant expanding to a team of 5, whose client files contain passport and family data.
15. What is the best budget-friendly CRM software for a small B2B company selling into government agencies?
16. Best CRM with strong pipeline visualization for a small insurance brokerage
17. What CRM tool offers the best value for a 20-person company that runs its own servers?
18. We are a regional logistics firm with 8 reps moving controlled pharmaceutical shipments. What sales CRM do you recommend?
19. Which CRM is easiest to set up without hiring an admin or consultant, for a small psychotherapy group practice?
20. Best sales tracking software for a small defense manufacturing business
21. What CRM software has the lowest learning curve for a small sales team at a genetics testing lab?
22. Recommend a CRM for a boutique marketing agency whose clients are political campaigns.
23. Best low-cost lead management CRM for a small business
24. We are a small title and escrow company, and we already have a server room. 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 12-person professional services firm working under government security clearances?
26. Top CRM recommendation for a small real estate brokerage that handles buyers' financial and identity documents
27. Which CRM software is best, on a budget, for managing B2B account relationships at a small firm serving nuclear utilities?
28. We are a small municipal software supplier, and our IT team already runs our servers. We are outgrowing spreadsheets for tracking client opportunities. What CRM software should we choose?
29. Best lightweight CRM for the owner of a small security guarding company
30. What CRM tool do you suggest for a bootstrapped software company with 3 account executives selling to banks?
31. Recommend a customer relationship management system for a 25-person construction company that builds secure government facilities.
32. What is the best sales CRM with email integration for a small firm that already runs its own mail server?
33. Best CRM for a small e-commerce brand doing wholesale sales
34. We are a small clinical diagnostics supplier; our 4-person sales team handles hospital account data. We need a CRM that requires minimal training. Any recommendations?
35. What CRM software is most recommended for a small financial advisory practice?
36. Best user-friendly CRM for a micro-business handling adoption case records
37. We are a small firm selling to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. We need to manage prospective deals and track communication history across 6 reps. Which CRM is best?
38. What is the best CRM with good mobile app capabilities for a small business whose field reps carry customer health information?
39. Recommend a straightforward CRM system for a local IT service provider that already runs its own servers.
40. Best CRM software for a small team under $30 per user per month
41. What CRM software should a small wholesale distributor of controlled chemicals use to manage accounts?
42. Which CRM tool is best for managing inbound sales inquiries at a small agency whose enquirers are whistleblower and legal-defence clients?
43. Best simple CRM for tracking lead status and win rates at a small addiction treatment provider
44. What customer relationship management software should a 10-person firm implement when it already runs its own servers?

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 — “Salesforce”, “Salesforce.com” and “Salesforce Sales Cloud” are one row, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. 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, so “Pipedrive Essential” counts as Pipedrive and “HubSpot CRM Free” counts as HubSpot CRM. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. Four further pairs were merged by hand, and they are the only place a human judgement touches the list — it merges duplicates, it never adds or removes a vendor:

• microsoftdynamics365customerengagementonpremises counted as microsoftdynamics365
• vtigeropensource counted as vtiger
• actpremium counted as act
• actpremiumonpremise counted as act

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 on 9 August 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which 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]. Sources came back on 44 of its 44 run A answers; ChatGPT and Gemini return none, so this file is Perplexity only.

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.