Email marketing software: what AI recommends, November 2026

2Where the AIs disagree

Among the top 15, the brands with the largest gap between the AI that recommended them most and the AI that recommended them least.

Do the AIs recommend themselves?

Some of the products recommended here are made by the AIs answering. Each row is one AI recommending one AI maker’s products: in how many of its decision answers, how often it had searched the web, and how often the maker’s own site was among its sources. Rows where an AI recommends its own maker come first.

3How each AI answers

Gemini answered 16 of 60 questions without running any web search. That is the model Citewake asked, gemini-3.1-flash-lite, through its API with search available. Across all four AIs, 708 searches were run; 30.5% of them included a year. Every page Gemini reported was one it cited, so its pages found and cited match.

5Agreement

On 44 of the 60 questions all four AIs recommended a brand first; they named the same brand first on 8.

6Method in brief

• Questions. 60 scored questions in three tiers (head, mid, tail), written as a buyer would ask them and never naming a brand: 46 decision questions and 14 informational. See the list. A further 15 validation questions are kept private.
• Asking. Each question was asked once of each AI through its official API, with its own web search on and no location sent. Models: ChatGPT: gpt-6-luna; Claude: claude-haiku-5-5; Gemini: gemini-3.1-flash-lite; Perplexity: perplexity/sonar.
• Collection. 29 October 2026, 09:19–09:36 UTC. 239 valid answers of 240 planned: 221 named at least one brand, 18 named none, 1 were refused or off topic.
• Reading. One grand master model (Claude Opus 5.5) read the four answers to each question side by side and marked each brand as recommended, mentioned or negative. A brand counts only if its name appears word for word in the answer.
• Measure. Recommendation rate is the share of decision answers in which the AI recommended the brand. The overall rate weights each AI and each tier equally, so it can differ slightly from a raw count. Intervals are 90%, from a cluster bootstrap that resamples whole questions. Here the base is 183 decision answers (46 decision questions).
• Method. v0.8, benchmark v1, scoring run 20261029T101936587Z. The full method: citewake.com/methodology.

7Limitations

• One run. Each question was asked once of each AI, in one 17-minute window. AI answers vary from run to run; the intervals cover variation across questions, not repeat runs.
• English, no market. Questions were in English and no location was sent, so the results describe no particular country.
• Spellings merged. stripoemail was counted as Stripo; migmaai was counted as migma.
• Benchmark figures, not market share. These are benchmark visibility figures across a fixed bank of questions with equal weight per tier, not estimates of market share.
• Some how-to questions tagged as decisions. In benchmark v1, 1 how-to questions in this category were tagged as decision questions. Recommendation rates count every decision question, so these slightly lower all brands' rates alike.
• Self-recommendation sources. Whether the pages an AI found named a product is read from their fetched text where Citewake has it, and otherwise from the page’s address and title alone (the two are counted apart); where none of an AI’s pages can be read, it is shown as not known, never as zero. Decision answers only; cross-category questions are left out.
• Top picks are rare. Most answers do not name a single best choice. Even Brevo was the top pick in only 6.8% of decision answers, so this report ranks by recommendation rate.

8Disclosure

Citewake is operated by the team that also builds aipozi, Biotree and livedot. Biotree and livedot appear in these categories. They were measured by the same method as every other brand, with no adjustment. None of them was named in this category.

9The questions

Each question links to its page, with the four answers in full, the brands read from them and the pages they cited.

10Data

• Every answer: all 240 in full, with the searches each AI ran, the sites it found and cited, and the brands readCSVJSON
• All 197 brands, every measureCSVJSON
• The reportPDF

Licence: CC BY 4.0. Use and share with credit to Citewake.

11How to cite

Citewake. (2026). Email marketing software: what AI recommends, November 2026 (Edition 1) [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23763258

@techreport{citewake202611emailmarketingsoftware,
  author      = {{Citewake}},
  title       = {{Email marketing software: what AI recommends, November 2026}},
  institution = {Citewake},
  type        = {Edition 1, data set},
  year        = {2026},
  month       = oct,
  version     = {1},
  doi         = {10.5281/zenodo.23763258},
  url         = {https://citewake.com/editions/2026-11/email-marketing-software},
  note        = {Licensed CC BY 4.0}
}