Every quarter we run the same 200 buyer-intent prompts (“best [category] for [use case]”) across the four major AI search surfaces — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude — and tally how often each B2B SaaS brand on our watch list shows up. This is the Q1 2026 cut.
Headline numbers
- 27 of 50 brands appeared in fewer than 10% of relevant answers. Most of them have strong organic SEO. None of that translated.
- The top 5 share-of-answer leaders changed places vs Q4 2025. Two new entrants in the top 10. One brand dropped from #4 to #19 after a knowledge-cutoff issue.
- Reddit was the single most-cited domain across all four models. YouTube was second. The brand’s own homepage was rarely in the top three sources.
Why the bottom 10 surprised us
We expected the bottom of the list to be small, obscure brands. It wasn’t. Several Series B companies with $20M+ ARR landed in the bottom decile — usually because their public knowledge graph was inconsistent (different names on LinkedIn vs Crunchbase vs their own site), or because the model’s most recent training data still referenced an old product line they’d quietly sunset.
Tags Benchmark B2B SaaS Q1 2026