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.

Two conditions on every number below

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. 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

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, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 29 spellings onto 13 of the rows below: “BILL Spend & Expense”, “BILL Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy)” and “BILL Spend and Expense” are one row — the one the table prints as BILL Spend & Expense. 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 4 such names, among them “Brex for Enterprise” counts as Brex and “BILL Spend & Expense with BILL Travel” counts as BILL Spend & Expense. 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. 3 pairs of rows below carry that line in this run: Navan and TripActions, BILL Spend & Expense and Divvy, Fyle and Sage Expense Management. 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 two answer engines said on 3 August 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.

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. Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in its API response, on any of the 44 answers it gave. That is a fact about the engine, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 861 URLs across 197 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.