Which business password managers do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which business password manager 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 20 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/passwordmanager/#1password. 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 business password manager for a 50-person company?
2. Best password manager for small business team
3. We're a 30 person startup and employees share passwords in Slack. What business password manager should we buy?
4. Recommend a business password manager for a company with under 100 employees.
5. affordable enterprise password manager for SMB
6. What password managers do small companies actually use?
7. Best team password manager for remote tech company
8. What password management software is best for an IT department managing 200 users?
9. We need a password manager for our agency to share client logins securely. What should we buy?
10. Best secure password manager for SOC 2 compliance
11. What is the best enterprise password manager for a healthcare company with strict HIPAA compliance?
12. Top corporate password management solutions for small businesses
13. We are an accounting firm with 15 staff needing shared vaults for client credentials. Which software to buy?
14. What password manager should a growing startup choose for team credential sharing?
15. Best business password manager with admin control and employee offboarding features
16. We need to stop employees writing passwords on sticky notes. What password manager should we roll out?
17. What is the most secure enterprise password manager for a financial services company?
18. Best password vault for small engineering teams
19. We're a law firm with 40 lawyers. What password manager is best for sensitive client accounts?
20. Which team password manager has the best administrative controls and audit logs?
21. What is the best business password manager for non-tech-savvy employees?
22. Best password manager for MSPs to manage client credentials
23. We need a business password manager that supports custom role-based permissions. What should we buy?
24. What enterprise password management tool is easiest to deploy across 500 employees?
25. Best team password manager for a marketing agency managing multiple social media logins
26. We're an e-commerce company needing shared passwords across customer support teams. What password manager should we use?
27. Which corporate password manager offers the best balance of security and ease of use?
28. Best self-hosted password manager for business privacy
29. What is the best zero-knowledge password manager for businesses?
30. We need a business password manager with strong MFA enforcement and SSO integration. What should we choose?
31. Which password manager is best for a remote-first team spread across different timezones?
32. Best business password manager with biometric authentication and browser extension support
33. What password manager should a non-profit organization buy for team security?
34. We need to mandate password manager usage for 100 employees. Which product is best received by staff?
35. Best password vault for managing shared server and admin logins in a small IT team
36. What business password manager offers the best centralized billing and user management?
37. We are a software company looking for an enterprise password manager with emergency access recovery.
38. Best password management software for a 20-person consulting firm
39. What password manager should a digital agency use to share passwords securely with clients?
40. Which enterprise password manager provides the best dark web monitoring and breach alerts for employees?
41. Best business password manager for Windows and Mac hybrid work environment
42. What is the top-rated business password manager for startups on a budget?
43. We are scaling from 10 to 100 employees and need to secure company logins. What password manager to buy?
44. Which password manager is best for enforcing strong master password policies across a company?

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 business, enterprise, and team password managers, and broader identity suites whose password management module was named. Excluded, even when named: consumer-only password managers without team features, built-in browser password managers, standalone Identity Providers (IdP) and SSO tools, developer secrets managers (for code and API keys), Privileged Access Management (PAM) tools, standalone authenticator apps, hardware security keys, VPNs, 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 50 spellings onto 10 of the rows below: “1Password”, “1Password Business” and “1Password Teams” are one row — the one the table prints as 1Password. 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 10 such names, among them “1Password for Business” counts as 1Password and “Bitwarden Provider Portal” counts as Bitwarden. 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. No answer in this run wrote two rows below that way, so no row below carries that line.

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 business password manager 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 870 URLs across 170 distinct domains. Below are the 55 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.