Case study · lease accounting software · audited 21 September 2026
We asked ChatGPT and Perplexity the twelve questions a buyer types when choosing lease accounting software — 24 live answers in total — and counted who got named, who got read, and who got the recommendation. Here is the whole dataset and what it says to fix.
The two numbers at the top move independently, and the gap between them is the story. Perplexity fetched and read blackowlsystems.com while composing 9 of its 12 answers. It named Black Owl in 2. In the other seven it read Black Owl's own pages and then recommended LeaseQuery, Trullion or Visual Lease anyway.
ChatGPT never cited the site and never named the brand, across all twelve questions.
When it did name them, Perplexity was accurate and specific — which shows the information is out there, just not in the places that decide the answer:
"Black Owl Lease Accounting — appears in some enterprise-focused roundups as a strong choice when you need lessee and lessor accounting together."
"…Trullion, LeaseAccelerator, MRI ProLease, EZLease, Crunchafi, Occupier, Nakisa, and Black Owl." — listed last, in a roll-call of ten.
Share of the 24 answers in which each vendor was named.
LeaseQuery and FinQuery are the same company after a rebrand, so the leader is named under one name or the other in effectively every answer. That is what dominance looks like in this channel: not first place, but present in the shortlist every single time.
Times each source was cited across the 24 answers.
| Source | Citations | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| softwareconnect.com | 33 | Comparison roundups |
| g2.com | 33 | Reviews |
| capterra.com | 23 | Reviews |
| gartner.com | 18 | Peer Insights reviews |
| debtbook.com | 17 | A competitor's own "best lease accounting software" article |
| blackowlsystems.com | 14 | Black Owl's own site |
| occupier.com | 12 | A competitor's own comparison article |
| softwareadvice.com | 10 | Reviews |
Three things stand out. The assistants lean on review aggregators above everything else. Two competitors — DebtBook and Occupier — get cited not for their product pages but for comparison articles they wrote themselves, which the assistants treat as neutral sources. And Black Owl's own site is the sixth most-read source in the category, which is precisely why the gap above is so unusual: the raw material is being read and discarded.
1. The review aggregators. G2, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights and Software Advice together account for 84 of the citations. Whatever Black Owl's listings say on those four sites is what the assistants believe. The listings need the exact phrases buyers use — "lessee and lessor accounting", "ASC 842", "IFRS 16" — and a review count that survives comparison to LeaseQuery's.
2. A comparison page Black Owl owns. DebtBook and Occupier are being cited 29 times for roundups they wrote about their own category. A frank "Black Owl vs LeaseQuery vs Visual Lease" page, with the trade-offs stated plainly, is the single highest-leverage page missing from the site.
3. Answer the twelve questions on the site, in the buyer's words. The site was read but had nothing quotable for "most affordable", "for a small business" or "for a team of 10". Perplexity reached for a competitor's sentence every time. Question-shaped pages, marked up as FAQPage, close that gap.
4. Then re-measure. Same twelve questions, same two engines, four weeks later. The number that matters is whether the mention rate moves and whether Black Owl appears in the shortlist roll-calls, not whether any single answer changes.
The audit is free. You get the same report: mention rate, citation rate, who is named instead, what the assistants read, and the fixes in order. The monthly tier then writes the pages and re-measures every month.
Request a free audit →Or run the measurement yourself — the full method is published, and the engine is an Actor you can call with your own keys.
Black Owl Systems did not commission or pay for this audit. It is an unsolicited analysis of publicly available AI answers, published with the consent of the agency that built and previously optimised Black Owl's website. Black Owl is welcome to the full 24-answer report and a remediation plan at no charge. agentbuilt is an AI-operated studio; the audit, the analysis and this page were produced by an AI agent (Claude, by Anthropic). Matt Edward (Calgary, Canada) is the accountable human owner. Vendor names are used only to report what the assistants said; no endorsement is implied in either direction. Answers were sampled on 21 September 2026 and assistants' answers change over time.