Which expense management tools do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which expense management software to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 2 engines, 88 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 57 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Free to read, raw data included. What is for sale — $9.99/mo monitoring for a single vendor.

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 88 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The two 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/expense/#ramp.

Method

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

The engines

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 expense management software for a 50-person company?
2. Best spend management software for small business
3. We're a 30 person startup and expense reimbursements are a mess in spreadsheets. What expense software should we buy?
4. Recommend expense management software for a company with under 100 employees.
5. affordable expense management software for SMB
6. What expense software do small companies actually use?
7. best corporate credit card and expense management platform for startups
8. What software should a mid-sized company use to track employee spending and issue smart cards?
9. best expense reporting software for remote teams
10. We need software to automate employee receipt submission and approval workflows. What should we get?
11. Which expense tracking system integrates best with accounting software for a fast-growing agency?
12. best spend management software with automated receipt matching
13. What expense management platform is best for managing corporate cards and travel expenses?
14. We are a non-profit with 40 employees and need an easy way to submit and approve receipts on mobile. Recommendations?
15. best mileage and expense tracking software for sales reps in the field
16. Top rated corporate expense management systems for enterprise
17. What is the easiest expense reporting tool for employees who hate submitting receipts?
18. best expense management software for multi-currency international travel
19. We have 15 employees using personal credit cards for work purchases and reimbursing manually. What tool should we switch to?
20. best software for setting spending limits on corporate card issuance
21. What expense software handles per diem rates and corporate travel receipts automatically?
22. cheap expense reporting software for small teams
23. What software do accounting teams prefer for employee expense approvals and reconciliation?
24. best spend management software with OCR receipt scanning
25. We are a construction company with crews purchasing supplies daily. What expense management software works best for field workers?
26. modern spend management platform for tech startups
27. What expense software is best for enforcing corporate travel policy compliance?
28. best corporate expense software with real-time budget tracking and spending controls
29. What is the most popular expense reporting platform for mid-market companies?
30. We need spend management software that handles both corporate card controls and out-of-pocket reimbursements. What should we buy?
31. best expense software for automated accounting system integration
32. What software should a 200-person company buy to eliminate paper receipts and manual expense reports?
33. best cloud expense management software for multi-entity businesses
34. What expense tracking system do consulting firms use for billable client expenses?
35. easy to use expense management app for employees and managers
36. What expense management software has the fastest reimbursement payout times?
37. best enterprise spend management software with custom approval hierarchies
38. We need corporate card controls and automated expense matching for 75 employees. What software is best?
39. best expense software for tracking mileage, meals, and client entertainment
40. What software handles employee expense reports and corporate spend policies without manual data entry?
41. best spend control and expense reporting platform for growing finance teams
42. What software should a marketing agency use to track team credit card purchases against client budgets?
43. best mobile app for employee expense reporting and mileage logs
44. What software do CFOs recommend for corporate spend management and expense compliance?

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 88 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 expense management platforms, spend management tools, corporate credit card and expense reporting systems, and broader financial/payroll suites whose expense module was named. Excluded, even when named: core accounting software, standalone payroll platforms, accounts payable and bill-pay tools without expense tracking, corporate travel booking tools without expense management, traditional bank credit cards, mileage-tracking-only apps, receipt-scanner-only tools, enterprise ERPs named without an expense module, and companies named only as an example employer.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together — “Expensify”, “expensify.com” and “Expensify Expense” are one row, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. An edition name is folded into its product when the plain name is at least three times as common, so “Ramp Corporate Card” counts as Ramp and “SAP Concur Expense” counts as SAP Concur. 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.

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 two answer engines said on 3 Aug 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which expense management software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 88 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.