Which survey tools do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which survey 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 120 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Run 3 Aug 2026 Questions 44 Answers 88 Vendors named 120 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

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/surveys/#surveymonkey.

#VendorAnswers ShareGeminiPerplexity
1SurveyMonkey#4955.7%2029
2Qualtrics#4045.5%2218
3Typeform#3944.3%2118
4Google Forms#2326.1%1112
5Jotform#2022.7%137
6QuestionPro#1112.5%29
7SurveySparrow#1112.5%56
8Survicate#1112.5%65
9Alchemer#910.2%72
10Zoho Survey#89.1%35
11Tally#78.0%34
12Tally.so#78.0%70
13Medallia#66.8%33
14Microsoft Forms#66.8%33
15Refiner#66.8%15
16Culture Amp#55.7%32
17Delighted#55.7%32
18Fillout#55.7%41
19KoboToolbox#55.7%32
20LimeSurvey#55.7%32
21ProProfs Survey Maker#55.7%14
22Lattice#44.5%22
23Pollfish#44.5%04
24Sogolytics#44.5%04
25Sprig#44.5%31
26SurveyPlanet#44.5%04
27BlockSurvey#33.4%03
28Chattermill#33.4%03
29Fairing#33.4%21
30Formstack#33.4%30
31Forsta#33.4%21
32KnoCommerce#33.4%21
33Officevibe#33.4%30
34ProProfs#33.4%03
35REDCap#33.4%21
36SurveyCTO#33.4%12
37SurveyGizmo#33.4%30
38SurveyLab#33.4%03
3915Five#22.3%02
40Canny#22.3%20
41Confirmit#22.3%20
42CustomerGauge#22.3%02
43EvaluationKIT#22.3%11
44Featurebase#22.3%02
45FeedbackPulse#22.3%02
46Gainsight#22.3%11
47Grapevine#22.3%11
48InMoment#22.3%20
49Instabug#22.3%11
50Leapsome#22.3%02
51Pendo#22.3%20
52Perspective AI#22.3%02
53Productboard#22.3%11
54Qualaroo#22.3%02
55Slido#22.3%11
56Sprinklr#22.3%11
57SurveyHero#22.3%02
58Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys#22.3%11
59Workleap#22.3%02
60Zigpoll#22.3%11
61Zonka Feedback#22.3%02
62AllVoices#11.1%10
63Anthology Course Evaluations#11.1%01
64Anthology Evaluate#11.1%10
65ArcGIS Survey123#11.1%01
66Blue by Explorance#11.1%10
67Campus Labs#11.1%10
68Churnkey#11.1%10
69ChurnZero#11.1%01
70Clappia#11.1%01
71Class Climate#11.1%10
72Cognito Forms#11.1%10
73Decipher#11.1%10
74Disclosurely#11.1%01
75Enquire Labs#11.1%10
76Enterpret#11.1%01
77EUSurvey#11.1%01
78Explorance Blue#11.1%01
79EZ Report#11.1%01
80FaceUp#11.1%10
81Feature Upvote#11.1%01
82FeedTrail#11.1%10
83Gleap#11.1%01
84Gravity Forms#11.1%01
85Helply#11.1%01
86IntegrityCounts#11.1%01
87Intercom#11.1%10
88involve.me#11.1%01
89Jellyform#11.1%01
90JISC Online Surveys#11.1%01
91KoboCollect#11.1%10
92Nicereply#11.1%01
93ODK#11.1%10
94ODK Collect#11.1%10
95Open Data Kit#11.1%10
96Pendo Listen#11.1%01
97Pendo Mobile#11.1%10
98Pointerpro#11.1%10
99Responster#11.1%01
100Retently#11.1%10
101Salesforce Service Cloud with Feedback Management#11.1%01
102Sawtooth Software#11.1%10
103Simplesat#11.1%01
104SmartEvals#11.1%10
105Snap Surveys#11.1%01
106SpeakUp#11.1%01
107Suggestion Ox#11.1%10
108Survey Anyplace#11.1%10
109SurveyJS#11.1%01
110SurveyKing#11.1%01
111Survio#11.1%01
112Thematic#11.1%01
113UserLeap#11.1%10
114Vantage Pulse#11.1%01
115VideoAsk#11.1%10
116Whispli#11.1%10
117WhistleBlower Security#11.1%01
118Workday Peakon#11.1%01
119Workleap Officevibe#11.1%01
120Zendesk#11.1%10

What is free, and what is for sale

Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 88 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.

What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $199 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →

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 survey software for a 50-person company?
  2. Best online survey tool for small business
  3. We're a 30 person startup and want to collect customer feedback after purchases. What survey tool should we buy?
  4. Recommend survey software for a company with under 100 employees.
  5. affordable survey tool for SMB
  6. What survey software do small companies actually use?
  7. Best online questionnaire software for market research
  8. What is the best enterprise survey platform for customer experience research?
  9. We need to run employee engagement surveys twice a year for 200 staff. What software should we get?
  10. best form builder with skip logic and branch conditioning
  11. Which survey platform offers HIPAA compliance for healthcare patient feedback?
  12. What survey software is best for non-profits on a budget?
  13. We're an e-commerce brand looking for post-purchase survey tools. What should we buy?
  14. Best software to run Net Promoter Score NPS surveys
  15. top survey tools for academic research and data collection
  16. We need a secure survey tool that supports multilingual questionnaires for global customer research.
  17. What is the best survey tool for collecting product feedback from SaaS users?
  18. easy to use survey software for quick customer feedback
  19. Best survey app with offline response collection for field research
  20. Which survey software has the best custom branding and white-label options?
  21. What tool should a B2B SaaS company buy to measure customer satisfaction CSAT?
  22. best survey software for large scale market research studies
  23. We are tired of ugly feedback forms. What is the modern survey software with high completion rates?
  24. Which survey tool connects best with webhooks and automated workflows?
  25. best customer feedback collection tool for product managers
  26. What survey software do higher education institutions use for student evaluations?
  27. We need a questionnaire builder with advanced statistical analysis and data export features.
  28. best free or low cost survey tool for small teams
  29. What survey software should a marketing agency use for client research?
  30. Which online survey tool has the best mobile response experience?
  31. best enterprise feedback management platform for large organizations
  32. We need an in-app microsurvey tool for our mobile app users. What software is recommended?
  33. best questionnaire software for event feedback forms
  34. What survey tool should we buy for measuring employee pulse and eNPS?
  35. secure survey software SOC2 compliant
  36. Which survey platform handles complex matrix questions and conjoint analysis?
  37. best survey builder with conversational UI and single question per screen
  38. We need to collect anonymous whistleblower and feedback submissions from employees. What tool to use?
  39. What survey software supports file uploads and digital signatures?
  40. best customer experience XM platform for enterprise retail
  41. Which survey software offers unlimited responses on a flat monthly plan?
  42. We want to embed short surveys directly into our HTML marketing emails. What tool allows this?
  43. best survey tool for market research with built-in data visualization
  44. What survey software is best for B2B churn feedback and exit surveys?

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 survey tools, form builders, online questionnaire platforms, customer/employee feedback platforms, and broader suites whose survey or feedback module was named. Excluded, even when named: email marketing platforms, CRM tools, product analytics software, session replay tools, usability testing platforms, market research respondent panels, review management platforms, website popup widgets, HR performance review software, and companies named only as an example user.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together — “SurveyMonkey”, “Survey Monkey” and “SurveyMonkey Enterprise” 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 “Typeform Pro” counts as Typeform and “Qualtrics CoreXM” counts as Qualtrics. 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?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 44 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 9/10 identical. What moved: Zoho Survey (10 in run A) dropped out of run B's ten and Microsoft Forms (8 in run B) took that place. by position, QuestionPro was 6 in run A and 7 in run B; SurveySparrow was 7 in run A and 10 in run B; Survicate was 8 in run A and 6 in run B. Run B named 121 vendors over 88 answers against run A's 120. The tail moves; the head does not.

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 survey 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.