Every web-data tool says it's "built for AI." I asked the AI.

I ran 198 real buyer questions through five AI engines, then validated against an independent dataset, to find out who actually gets cited for web scraping. The scoreboard surprised me twice — once when my own headline turned out to be wrong.

Rank trackers tell you where you stand on Google. Nobody can tell you where you stand inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or an AI Overview — which is inconvenient, because that's where your buyers moved.

So I built the tracker. Then I pointed it at a category with real money in it: web-data tooling — Firecrawl, Apify, Bright Data, ScrapingBee, and 22 other vendors who all describe themselves as the infrastructure layer for AI. Fine. Let's ask the AI.

To be clear: Firecrawl didn't ask for this. I picked them because they're the category's momentum story — the "everyone's favorite scraping tool for LLMs" — which makes them the perfect test of a question I keep asking clients: does AI-era buzz convert into AI-era citations?

Mostly yes. Partly no. The "no" is where it gets interesting.