AI share of voice · invoicing software · September 2026

When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for invoicing software, who gets named?

We asked both assistants the twelve questions a buyer types when choosing a vendor — 24 live answers — and counted how often each vendor was named, and which websites the assistants read to decide. No vendor was involved. The numbers are below; the method is at the bottom.

24live answers (12 ChatGPT, 12 Perplexity)
15vendors named at least twice
88%of answers name QuickBooks, the category leader
9sites cited in a fifth or more of answers

Share of answers that name each vendor

Aliases, product names and old names are merged. Percentages are of all 24 answers. Vendors named only once are omitted.

The default answers

QuickBooks88%
Zoho Invoice88%
Xero79%
FreshBooks75%
Square Invoices75%
Stripe Invoicing62%
Wave50%

The middle pack

PayPal Invoicing42%
Harvest25%
Invoice Ninja25%

Rarely named

Zoho Books17%
Chargebee12%
BILL8%
Bonsai8%
HoneyBook8%

The two assistants do not agree

ChatGPT and Perplexity build their answers from different pages, so the same vendor can be a default on one and near-invisible on the other. The largest gaps:

VendorChatGPTPerplexity
Stripe Invoicing92%33%
Harvest42%8%
PayPal Invoicing58%25%
Zoho Books33%0%
Chargebee25%0%
Square Invoices67%83%
QuickBooks92%83%
Zoho Invoice83%92%

What the assistants read to decide

Every answer came with source links. These are the domains cited most across all 24 answers. Presence on the top few (nerdwallet.com, forbes.com, learn.g2.com, cnbc.com) determines the category far more than anything on a vendor's own site.

SourceAnswers citing itWhat it is
nerdwallet.com11NerdWallet small-business roundup
forbes.com11Forbes Advisor roundup
learn.g2.com10G2's editorial roundups
cnbc.com10CNBC Select roundup
capterra.com8Review aggregator
mercury.com7A bank's own content (Mercury)
g2.com5Review aggregator
zoho.com5A vendor's own content
blog.hubspot.com5HubSpot's tool roundups
fitsmallbusiness.com4Small-business review site
quickbooks.intuit.com4A vendor's own content
bigtime.net4A vendor's own content
QuickBooks and Zoho Invoice are each named in 21 of 24 answers, followed by Xero, FreshBooks and Square. Stripe is mostly a ChatGPT pick (11 of its 12 answers vs 4 of 12 on Perplexity). Some sites are read far more than their owners are recommended: mercury.com was a source in 7 answers and Mercury was never named; bigtime.net was a source in 4 and BigTime was named once. Invoice Ninja, the open-source option, was named in 6.

Method

The twelve prompts: Best invoicing software for startups · Compare the leading invoicing software tools. · Recommend a invoicing software for a team of 10. · What are the top invoicing software options in 2026? · What invoicing software do professionals actually recommend? · What is a good alternative to the most popular invoicing software? · What is the best invoicing software? · What is the most affordable invoicing software? · What should I look for when choosing a invoicing software? · Which invoicing software has the best reviews? · Which invoicing software should a small business use? · Who are the leading providers of invoicing software?

Each prompt was sent live to ChatGPT and Perplexity (ChatGPT as gpt-5 with web search on; Perplexity as sonar) via the DataForSEO LLM Responses API on 26 September 2026 — 24 answers. Every answer was checked for each vendor name using case-insensitive matching with aliases and old names merged; vendors were drawn from the answers themselves, so a vendor that no answer named does not appear. Source links inside each answer were counted once per domain per answer (up to eight domains per answer, so citation counts are lower bounds). Answers were truncated at 4,000 characters before scoring. Assistants are non-deterministic: a single vendor's share can move several points between runs. Total cost of the data on this page: US$0.49.

We re-run categories monthly. If a vendor on this list wants the per-question breakdown for their brand — which questions they are named for, which they are not, and which sources carried the answers that omit them — it is free; write to audits@agentbuilt.dev. Want it every month, with the month-over-month trend? Brand Watch does that for one brand at $39 a month.

Want this for your own category?

Not on this list, or want to see today's answers for your own brand? The free AI visibility check asks ChatGPT and Perplexity two of these questions live, in about a minute. The free AI visibility audit runs the same twelve questions for any brand in any category and sends you the report. No card, no call. Other categories: appointment scheduling software, cold email software, CRM for small business, email marketing software, form builder, help desk software, landing page builder, lease accounting software, live chat software, password manager, podcast hosting platform, proposal software, rank tracking software, screen recording software, social media scheduling tool, time tracking software, uptime monitoring tool, video hosting platform, website builder, website heatmap tool.