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The SaaS AI Visibility Index

Five SaaS categories, a frozen prompt set for each, measured monthly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot. Who gets cited, who gets mentioned, and which domains the citations come from. Free, public, with the raw responses attached.
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A senior marketer reviewing AI visibility across SaaS categories

Status: Methodology published, first report pending

The methodology and every prompt set are published on this page as of , before any measurement. The first report covers October 2026. There are no results on this page yet, and we would rather say that than show you a chart of something we have not measured.

Categories
5
Assistants
5, reported separately
Cadence
Monthly, on the first working day of the month
Method

Seven rules, published first

Metric definitions come from the AI Visibility Measurement Standard.

  1. 1

    Prompt sets are published before any measurement

    Every prompt in this index is on this page now, before the first report. Publishing the questions after seeing the answers is how an index becomes marketing, and it is the failure mode we are designing against.

  2. 2

    Brand sets are frozen per category

    Each category has a declared set of brands, fixed before measurement. Adding or removing a brand starts a new series rather than continuing the old one, and the change is recorded.

  3. 3

    Five assistants, reported separately

    ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot. Never averaged into a single score, because averaging platforms that behave differently destroys the information the reader needed.

  4. 4

    Each prompt runs five times per window

    Model outputs are non-deterministic. A single run is a screenshot. We report the rate across runs and record which model version produced each answer.

  5. 5

    Definitions come from the published standard

    Citation rate, brand mention rate, share of voice, brand accuracy and source concentration are as defined in the Surge45 AI Visibility Measurement Standard. Citation rate and mention rate are never blended.

  6. 6

    Surge45 clients get no special treatment, and are disclosed

    If a brand in any index category is a client, that is stated in the report next to its entry. We do not remove clients from the index and we do not hide the relationship.

  7. 7

    The raw data is published with the report

    The full response set for every prompt, so anyone can check the scoring rather than take it on trust. An index whose working is private is an advertisement.

Tooling

  • Profound, for prompt monitoring across assistants
  • Ahrefs Brand Radar, for citation and mention tracking
  • WriteWorks, for content and citation analysis
  • Direct API and interface runs, for the surfaces the above do not cover
The prompt sets

Every question, published before it is asked

These are frozen. If one changes, the change is recorded here and a new series starts.

CRM

12 brands · 6 prompts

The largest horizontal SaaS category by spend, with a well-defined competitive set and buyers at every company size.

  • “What is the best CRM for a small business?”
  • “Which CRM should a B2B startup use?”
  • “What are the alternatives to Salesforce for a mid-market company?”
  • “Which CRM has the best integrations with marketing tools?”
  • “What is the cheapest CRM that still does pipeline management well?”
  • “Which CRM is easiest to migrate to from a spreadsheet?”

Project management

12 brands · 6 prompts

High search volume, high assistant usage, and a category where community opinion visibly dominates the citation set.

  • “What is the best project management tool for a remote team?”
  • “Which project management software works best for software development?”
  • “What are the alternatives to Jira for a small engineering team?”
  • “Which project management tool has the best free tier?”
  • “What project management software integrates with Slack and GitHub?”
  • “Which tool should replace a spreadsheet for tracking a 20-person team?”

Observability and monitoring

10 brands · 6 prompts

A technical category, included to test whether assistant behaviour differs when the buyer is an engineer. We expect documentation to carry more citation weight here than anywhere else in the index.

  • “What are the best observability tools for a mid-sized engineering team?”
  • “Which monitoring tools work well with OpenTelemetry without vendor lock-in?”
  • “What are the alternatives to Datadog for a cost-conscious team?”
  • “Which observability platform is easiest to self-host?”
  • “What is the best APM tool for a Kubernetes environment?”
  • “Which monitoring tool has the most predictable pricing at scale?”

HR and payroll

10 brands · 6 prompts

A compliance-heavy category where accuracy failures carry real consequences, which makes brand accuracy the most interesting metric to track.

  • “What is the best HR software for a company of 50 people?”
  • “Which payroll software handles international employees well?”
  • “What are the alternatives to Workday for a mid-market company?”
  • “Which HR platform integrates payroll and applicant tracking?”
  • “What HR software works for a UK company hiring in the US?”
  • “Which HR system is easiest to implement without a consultant?”

Customer support and helpdesk

10 brands · 6 prompts

A category being actively reshaped by AI features, which makes the gap between what vendors claim and what assistants report unusually wide.

  • “What is the best helpdesk software for a SaaS company?”
  • “Which customer support tool has the best AI features?”
  • “What are the alternatives to Zendesk for a growing team?”
  • “Which support platform handles email, chat and a knowledge base together?”
  • “What is the best customer support tool for a team of five?”
  • “Which helpdesk integrates best with a product analytics tool?”

About the index

Your category is probably not in the index

The free AI Visibility Audit runs the same method on your category, against your competitor set, scored against the same published standard.

Request the free auditThe Assistant Citation Benchmark