How to Find the Software Roundups AI Engines Cite

Qvery, our sister company, sells AI visibility tracking software, so its buyers ask ChatGPT and Google AI Mode which tracker to buy. On 13 October we asked both engines ten of those questions, twice, and opened every “best tools” roundup their answers cited. There were 72. Qvery was on two of them, and both were on Qvery’s own blog.

Qvery is ours, so weigh what we say about it accordingly, and check us against the lists, which are all public. Most products start on none of the lists anyone else wrote, because nobody adds a product to a list it has never asked to join. Your SEO tool will export a thousand “best X” pages sorted by domain rating, and it cannot tell you which ten an engine reads.

Empact Partners joins B2B software companies’ own marketing teams as their go-to-market consultancy, and we run SEO as Search Everywhere Optimization: every surface a buyer searches. Our method here, Existing Article Outreach (EAO), puts a partner onto the roundups engines already cite. Every EAO list starts with this sheet. For Qvery it found:

You ask the engines your buyers’ questions, log every page they cite, weigh each page by how many questions cited it, and open each one to see whether you are on it. Before the first question, you need the following:

This builds the list of pages worth working. Getting onto them, which means asking each page’s editor, is the other half of EAO, and this page leaves it out.

Collect the Pages From the Engines, Not From Your SEO Tool

An SEO tool’s list of “best X” pages is a list of what ranks. The engines read a narrower set, and a different one on each engine, so the list has to come out of their answers.

Step 1: Write ten “best software” questions

Open a blank document and write ten questions a buyer in your category types when they want products to choose between. These are ours, for AI visibility tracking software. Swap the category words for yours:

What is the best AI visibility tracking software?
Best tools to track brand mentions in ChatGPT
What software shows how often AI search engines recommend my brand?
Best generative engine optimization tools for B2B SaaS in 2026
Affordable AI search visibility tools for a small marketing team
Which tools show the sources ChatGPT and Google AI Mode cite for my category?
Best AI share of voice tracking platforms for enterprise brands
Which AI rank tracker should a SaaS startup use?
Top LLM brand monitoring tools for teams managing several brands
Best tools to track brand visibility in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

Four rules held the set together:

Step 2: Make the sheet and its three tabs

Start a new Google Sheet and name its tabs Citations, Roundups and Targets. On Citations, click A1 and paste this header row:

Date	Engine	Question	Round	Cited URL

Click F1 and paste this formula. It writes a clean address for every cited link into column F, so the same page never counts twice. Some of our ChatGPT answers carried tracking codes such as ?gad=1 and ?trk= on their links, and the formula drops them:

={"Page";ARRAYFORMULA(IF(E2:E="",,IF(REGEXMATCH(E2:E,"youtube\.com/watch"),"https://youtube.com/watch?"&REGEXEXTRACT(E2:E,"v=[\w-]+"),REGEXREPLACE(REGEXREPLACE(REGEXREPLACE(E2:E,"[?#].*$",""),"/$",""),"^https?://(www\.)?","https://"))))}

Step 3: Ask ChatGPT, logged out, and open every source chip

Open a private window, go to ChatGPT, and stay logged out. Paste Q01 and press Enter. The answer is finished when the stop button beside the message box turns back into the send arrow.

Every line that leaned on a page ends in a grey source chip. Here is round two’s answer to Q01:

Under Profound, the chip reads “Technology... +1”. That is TechnologyAdvice’s roundup, and the +1 means a second page sits behind the same chip. Click each chip and log one row per page: the date, ChatGPT, Q01, round 1, and the page’s address in Cited URL.

What you will meet, and what each one means:

What Reddit says

“one thing worth checking, are you testing with search enabled or just the base model? because the results differ a lot depending on whether its browsing live or pulling from training data. that distinction changes how much weight you should put on this pattern”
r/SEO, October 2026

“If the two most-cited domains weren’t even in your seed sample, that’s a real blind spot for anyone building a comp set off SEO round-ups instead of off logged citations.”
r/GEO_optimization, July 2026

Step 4: Ask Google AI Mode, signed out

Open a new private window and go to Google AI Mode, signed out. Paste the same question and press Enter. Log nothing until Google’s closing line, “AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses”, is on screen: our Q01 took close to a minute once and under 15 seconds another time.

Here is round one’s answer to Q01, asked from a US connection:

Zapier’s chip sits on four of the six lines. Click Show all under the answer for the full list of pages behind it, and log each one with AI Mode in the Engine column.

Perplexity is the third engine worth a column. It asked us to sign in before it would answer anything, on every route we tried on 13 October, so our census counts two engines. If you have an account, its sources go into the same sheet with Perplexity in the Engine column.

Step 5: Ask all ten again later the same day

An hour after the first round, ask the ten again in fresh windows on both engines and log them as round 2. Our second round cited 44 roundups. Only 11 of them had appeared in the first round, and 33 were new.

That churn is why one round is not a census. Most roundups pass through a single answer and leave, and the pages that come back are the ones worth knowing. On AI Mode, the pages moved about as much between our two US rounds as between a US answer and a South African one.

Leon Claassen

Senior GTM Consultant @ Empact Partners

The long tail is where teams lose the quarter. Sixty of the seventy-two lists in Qvery’s category were cited for one question, so a team that works the sheet top to bottom spends most of its effort on pages an engine touched once. Two rounds and a weight column are what separate the lists that keep coming back from the ones that passed through.

Asking by hand every month is where a sheet stops scaling. Qvery asks the same kind of question set of ChatGPT and AI Mode every day, country by country across more than 200 of them, and keeps every citation from every answer it collects. It is ours, as above, and nothing on this page needs it.

Weigh Every Page by How Many Questions Cite It

Two rounds gave us 230 citations of 152 different pages. Before anyone opens a page, the sheet has to say which ones keep coming back.

Step 6: Build the weighted list

On the Roundups tab, click A1 and paste this formula. It lists every page once, with how many of your ten questions cited it, on how many engines, and how many times, heaviest first:

={"Page","Questions","Engines","Times cited";LET(p,UNIQUE(FILTER(Citations!F2:F,Citations!F2:F<>"")),SORT(HSTACK(p,MAP(p,LAMBDA(x,COUNTUNIQUEIFS(Citations!C2:C,Citations!F2:F,x))),MAP(p,LAMBDA(x,COUNTUNIQUEIFS(Citations!B2:B,Citations!F2:F,x))),MAP(p,LAMBDA(x,COUNTIF(Citations!F2:F,x)))),2,FALSE,3,FALSE,4,FALSE))}

Count questions before citations. A list cited six times for one question sits in one shortlist. A list cited once for each of six questions sits in six. In our run the Questions column was lopsided:

When both rounds are logged, select columns A to D, copy them, and paste them back with Edit, then Paste special, then Values only. The formula re-sorts as rows arrive, and anything you type beside it would end up next to the wrong page.

Step 7: Strike what cannot list you

Click E1, type Strike, and mark every page that can never list your product, by its address alone. Ours lost 58 of 152 pages this way:

Keep anything whose address says best, top, vs, alternatives or compared, even on a help or docs subdomain, and let the reading decide. Semly’s docs page at /best-ai-brand-visibility-tracking-tools-2026 looked like a roundup from its address and turned out to be a guide to naming rules.

Step 8: Have Claude read every page left

Turn on a filter with Data, then Create a filter, set Strike to show blanks, and copy the page addresses. Open Claude, paste the prompt below with ten addresses under URLs, and send it. Change three lines for your own product: My product, My category, and the spellings line.

I'm checking which "best software" roundups list my product. Open every URL below and read the page itself. Then give me one table with one row per URL, in the order I gave them, with these columns:

1. URL
2. Opened: yes, or no with the reason (blocked, error, no list on the page)
3. Roundup: yes if the page offers three or more products in my category as options to choose between, otherwise no
4. Products listed: how many products the page offers as options
5. My product: Listed or Absent
6. Proof: if Listed, copy the exact words from the page where my product appears; if Absent, write "not on page"
7. Publisher: who runs the site
8. Sells in my category: yes or no, judged from the publisher's own site
9. Last updated: the date shown on the page, or "none shown"

Rules:
- Mark Listed only if you can copy the page's own words naming my product. Otherwise mark Absent.
- If you could not open a page, or it opened without its list, say so in Opened and leave My product blank. Never fill a row from the title, the URL or what you already know about the site.
- Count these spellings as my product: Qvery, Qvery AI, qvery.ai
- Do not add pages and do not skip any.

My product: Qvery
My category: AI visibility tracking software

URLs:

We sent ours through Claude Sonnet with web access, in a clean profile so nothing of ours shaped the answers, ten pages at a time. A batch took from under a minute to three and a half minutes, and Claude read 87 of our 94 pages. Four of its rows, as it wrote them, named by publisher (its Opened and Roundup columns said yes on all four):

Copy each row’s answers onto the sheet beside its page. Paste this header into F1 first, so the columns line up:

Roundup	Publisher	Type	Sells a tracker	Products listed	Your product	Proof	Checked by	Last updated	DR

Claude is fast and says plainly what it could not do, which is what makes it usable. It is still a first pass. Before a list of ours goes to a partner, a consultant opens every row Claude could not settle, because an engine will cite pages a script cannot judge.

Step 9: Open every Absent, and every page Claude could not

Open each page Claude marked Absent or could not open, read its list, and search the page for your name and its spellings with Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac). Write Eye in Checked by for every value you set or confirm.

None of Claude’s Listed or Absent calls changed when we opened the pages. The time went on the pages it could not open, and on two details:

The Best Roundup Is the One Your Buyers’ Answers Keep Quoting

With the strikes made and every page read, 72 of our 94 pages were roundups. Sorting them by weight is the step that turns the sheet into a target list.

Step 10: Sort by weight and copy the roundups to Targets

Set the filter on Roundup to Yes. Sort by Questions, then Engines, then Times cited, each largest first, under Data, Sort range, Advanced range sorting options. Copy the rows to the Targets tab. These are the roundups our run cited for two questions or more:

The other 60 were cited for one question each, and Qvery’s two lists are among them.

A list cited for eight of your ten questions is worth more than sixty lists cited once, and nothing but the count tells you which list it is.

Domain rating is the sheet’s last column on purpose. Fill it last, from any free domain rating checker, and read it only as a tiebreaker between rows of equal weight. When our panel counted roundup citations across one B2B software category, 45% of those going to third-party roundups landed on sites rated below 40.

The verdict: Zapier’s list, then three more

The best roundup in this category, if the job is getting a tracker named, is Zapier’s “The 9 best AI visibility tools in 2026”. It was cited for eight of the ten questions and in half of AI Mode’s answers, and it was the only list both engines read.

Zapier sells automation software and no tracker of its own, so no rival of yours decides who is on it, and the list was last updated in September. Qvery is neither among its nine picks nor among the tools it says almost made the list.

The runners-up each come with a catch. TechnologyAdvice was cited for four questions, all on ChatGPT, and runs a Featured Partners block above its list, so ask whether a place there is editorial or bought. PalV’s DM, a consultant’s blog rated 9, was cited for three and outweighed Semrush’s list, rated 92. Benchmarq ties it, and sells a competing product.

Leon Claassen

Senior GTM Consultant @ Empact Partners

Most teams sort their list of roundups by domain rating and start at the top, which spends the first quarter on famous pages the engines barely read. Sort by how many of your buyers’ questions each page answers instead. In Qvery’s category that put one list above the other seventy-one and a consultant’s blog rated 9 above Semrush, and it showed that nearly two in three lists belong to rivals, which you read rather than chase.

Most of the rest are competitors’ lists. They are pages the engines read about you whether you are on them or not, and a rival’s list that left you out by omission rather than by rule deserves a second look before you write it off.

Qvery’s own two lists sit in the long tail, cited once each by AI Mode, and both put Qvery first, which is what a vendor’s own list does. One of them backed a sentence about Scrunch in an answer that never named Qvery: being cited and being named are different rows. Our own roundup of these tools, published in September, was cited by neither engine.

On a partnership, this table is the first page of the EAO work:

If you would rather a consultant ran this sheet on your category and worked the rows it finds, book a call with us.

Run It Again Next Month, and Watch the Top Row

Ask the same ten questions in a month and read the top row first. It tells you whether your heaviest list still carries most of the questions. A heavy list that drops away means the engines found a replacement, and the new top row is your new first target. An Absent turning Listed is the first evidence that the work landed.

The sheet cannot tell you that a listing will get you named. What we have is an association, the strongest we have measured: in our AI search citation statistics, ChatGPT named a vendor in 52.6% of its answers when a roundup the answer cited listed that vendor, and in 11.2% when the cited roundups left it out.

If your buyers are reading lists you are not on, book a call with us, and we will see together whether we could help.