One B2B software category has a 4x higher floor for complete AI invisibility. Here is why.
We ran buyer-intent AI queries across 270 B2B software brands in three categories. The brands had similar median visibility scores. But in one category, brands were more than four times more likely to be completely invisible. The category you compete in sets your starting difficulty before any content strategy begins.
What we measured
For each brand, we ran 10 buyer-intent prompts across four web-grounded AI engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. We recorded the mention rate for each brand: the share of responses where the brand name appeared at all. We excluded branded queries. All results are from buyer-intent questions a real prospect would ask ("what project management software should I use for agencies," "best HR software for startups," etc.).
The 270 brands span three software categories: project management software (173 brands), customer support software (58 brands), and HR software (39 brands). All were run on live search-grounded endpoints in June 2026.
Category mention rate distribution
| Category | Brands | Zero-mention (0%) | Low (1-10%) | Mid (11-40%) | High (>40%) | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer support software | 58 | 3.4% | 12.1% | 77.6% | 6.9% | 28% |
| HR software | 39 | 2.6% | 15.4% | 79.5% | 2.6% | 20% |
| Project management software | 173 | 11.6% | 13.3% | 70.5% | 4.6% | 20% |
Why the medians are similar but the floors are not
The median mention rate across project management and HR software brands is identical at 20%. Customer support comes in at 28%. These numbers suggest roughly similar terrain for most brands in each category.
But the zero-mention floor tells a different story. In project management software, 20 of the 173 brands (11.6%) received zero mentions across all 40 queries. In HR software, only 1 of the 39 brands (2.6%) hit zero. In customer support, 2 of 58 (3.4%).
The difference is not about how well the average brand performs once it has any foothold. It is about how many brands have no foothold at all. In PM software, the probability that a brand starts from zero is more than four times higher than in HR or CS software.
Why project management software has a harder floor
Project management software is one of the most crowded SaaS categories. The market has accumulated hundreds of tools over two decades, ranging from large enterprise platforms to narrow vertical-specific schedulers. Many of these tools occupy nearly identical positioning and compete for coverage on the same editorial sources.
When AI engines build responses to buyer-intent queries, they draw from sources that have already made choices. A roundup that covers "best project management software" will name 6 to 10 tools. There are 173 brands in this study alone. The engines are not surfacing the field. They are surfacing the editorial consensus about the field, which concentrates on a small number of dominant brands: Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Notion, Monday.com. A brand outside that cluster, with no strong editorial presence on the pages the engines weight, shows up nowhere.
Customer support and HR software are narrower categories with more specialized use cases. "Help desk for e-commerce," "HR software for construction companies," or "customer service tool for startups" all pull different editorial sources and create more surface area for brands with vertical or use-case focus to earn mentions. The category structure itself creates more variety in what gets surfaced.
What this means if you compete in project management software
If your mention rate is zero today, the path is not simply to "create more content." Most PM brands are creating content. The constraint is editorial authority on the pages the engines actually pull from. The pages that produce AI recommendations in this category are predominantly comparison sites (G2, Capterra, GetApp), editorial roundups at high-authority publications, and community threads where practitioners recommend tools. Getting onto those pages, in a primary position rather than a list entry, is what moves the needle.
The median PM brand at 20% mention is getting some of this coverage but is not a primary recommendation anywhere that matters. The brands above 40% mention in this category are consistently appearing in the sources the engines weight, positioned as the answer rather than one of ten options.
What this means if you compete in customer support or HR software
The zero-mention floor is lower in these categories, but that does not mean AI visibility is easy. The higher median for customer support (28%) reflects more competitive coverage among the brands that are visible. And both HR and CS have their own dominant clusters (BambooHR, Rippling in HR; Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom in CS) that absorb the majority of AI recommendations.
The practical difference is that the starting point for a brand entering these categories is less likely to be zero. There are more viable paths to initial editorial coverage because the query space is less saturated. A brand with strong use-case focus in HR for startups or CS for high-growth SaaS companies has a clearer route to being recommended in at least some subset of prompts.
The implication for any content or GEO strategy
Category determines your baseline difficulty. A 20% mention rate means something very different depending on whether you are in a category where most brands start from zero versus one where most brands already have some foothold. Knowing your category's distribution tells you whether you are performing at the median, above it, or below it, and what the realistic improvement trajectory looks like.
If you are in a high-floor-zero category like project management software and your current mention rate is above 20%, you are already outperforming the median. If you are at zero, you are in a common but solvable situation: the challenge is getting onto the pages that matter, not the size of the category itself.
We run a full visibility panel for your brand: 40 buyer-intent queries across four AI engines, your mention and recommendation rate vs. your top competitors, and an annotated breakdown of which sources are driving those results. The audit tells you where you stand in your category and what to do about it.
Get the AI Visibility Audit, $490Methodology note
All 270 brands were run on live, search-grounded AI endpoints in June 2026 using search-enabled versions of ChatGPT (OpenAI Responses API), Gemini (with grounding), Perplexity (Sonar), and Claude. Each brand received 10 buyer-intent prompts generated for its specific category. Mention scoring was applied by the same automated scorer across all brands. Branded queries were excluded. Only organic buyer-intent results are included.