How AI assistants recommend SEO tools
A small business that asks an AI assistant for an SEO tool gets a short list of products, and the list can differ from country to country. Here is what the assistants answered in every country the AIGROW Index asked, and what a product can work on.
- Countries asked
- 20
- Names in the rankings
- 35
- Products named per country
- 13
- Names repeated on a rerun
- 78%
- Answers that name the leader
- 81%
The first two rows are counts; the rows under them are medians over the ranked pages. Every question was asked without a location or a chat history.
Asked for SEO tools in 20 countries, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini named about 13 products per country, and 14% of those names came up only once. Each assistant builds its list from what is published about a product. What a vendor controls is that public record: its features, its pricing and its reviews.
What a customer asked, and who came first
One place of the 20, as an example: United States. Every place was asked the same questions in its own language, and its page in the Index has the full ranking.
- What is the best SEO tool for a small business in the US?
- Our bakery's website in the US barely shows up in search results unless you type our name. Which SEO tool would you recommend so I can fix that myself?
- Which SEO software would you recommend to a small company in the US?
- Which SEO tool is easiest for a beginner running a small business website in the US?
- Semrushnamed in 86% of the answers
- Ahrefsnamed in 72% of the answers
- Moznamed in 67% of the answers
The names that recur
7 different businesses came first across 20 rankings, and 21 names were listed in three places or more. These are the most frequent.
- Ahrefs20 places
- Semrush20 places
- Ubersuggest20 places
- SE Ranking18 places
- Yoast SEO15 places
- Rank Math14 places
Counted by spelling: two businesses with the same name in different places count as one.
What an owner can work on
No one can promise a place in an assistant’s answer. What an owner controls is what is published about the business, and these are the parts the questions above point to.
Answer the bakery
One question came from a bakery whose site barely shows up in search unless you type its name, and whose owner wants to fix that without help. A page that walks through a first fix, step by step, matches that buyer.
Make it easy for a beginner
Another asked for the easiest tool for a beginner. Say what the tool tells a user to do next, in plain words, and show a sample report.
Say what size you suit
A third asked about SEO software for a small company. Say what size of site and team the product is built for.
Every ranking for this trade
The AIGROW Index publishes the ranking of each place with every answer, and how it was measured.
See what the assistants say about your business.
The free checker asks the questions a customer would ask and shows who gets named. The audit goes further: your own questions, four assistants, and the fixes in the order they matter.
The audit: $190 once · within 5 working days or refunded