GetIntel published its AI Software Index on Wednesday. The study asked roughly 80 buyer-phrased questions in each of 126 software categories, covering 1,825 brands. The questions went to the live ChatGPT and Gemini consumer apps rather than the developer APIs. That produced 9,978 usable answers, all collected on 6 August.
The headline result is a coin toss. In one category out of every three, the two assistants name a different number one. Which chatbot a buyer happens to open decides which company gets recommended.
Look at what the assistants actually cite. The most-cited domain across the whole study was techradar.com, with 1,114 citations. Reddit came second on 807 and Zapier third on 418. G2, Capterra and TrustRadius together accounted for 5% of all citations.
That is an industry being routed around. Those three sites exist to be the reference layer for software buying. A consumer tech magazine and a forum are now doing that job instead. Gartner managed 238 citations, fewer than Zapier.
Reddit sitting second is its own problem. The platform is already cracking down on brands seeding fake opinions for chatbots to repeat. It says it now catches 25,000 such posts a day. The assistants are leaning hardest on the source that is hardest to keep clean.
