The website AI links to most is usually a vendor's own

Ask an AI assistant which password manager to use, and there's a good chance the answer links to bitwarden.com. It did in 16 of the 30 answers we collected.

The pattern held in every category we checked. In accounting software, CRM, email marketing, password managers and project management, the most-linked domain belonged to a company selling in that category.

Both ties were between vendors: asana.com and clickup.com in project management, mailerlite.com and sender.net in email marketing.

One top domain is a small sample. To see the wider pattern, we coded every domain linked in at least 3 of a category's 30 answers. That gave us 54 domains.

34 belonged to vendors in the category. 15 were publishers: review sites, magazines and comparison blogs. The other 5 were software companies outside the category, such as Zapier, or ones we couldn't place cleanly, such as Shopify in email marketing (it sells an email product too).

In four categories, vendor sites drew most of the frequent links. Password managers went the other way. 8 of the 12 frequent domains were publishers, and they drew 37 links to the vendors' 35.

security.org and passwordmanager.com each appeared in 8 answers. PCMag appeared in 5 and Tom's Guide in 4. CyberInsider, The New York Times, TechRepublic and Wired appeared in 3 each.

We can guess why. Security is a purchase where people want a second opinion, and the answers went and got one. Our data can't test that guess. It does show that in this category, a vendor's own site is only part of the story.

Here's the part that's easy to misread. Sequenzy's site appeared in 6 email marketing answers. Sequenzy was presented as an option in 2. So by the Index's count, at least 4 answers linked to Sequenzy while recommending other tools.

Mailercloud's site appeared in 3 email answers, and Mailercloud was never presented as an option. ONES, a project management tool, was linked in 3 answers and presented as an option in 1.

The Index keeps domains, not pages, so we can't see which page was linked. A vendor's own comparison post or "best tools" roundup is a likely candidate. If that's what happened, those vendors wrote the evidence for answers that picked someone else.

It works the other way too. bitwarden.com was linked twice as often as 1password.com (16 answers to 8), yet 1Password was named first 16 times to Bitwarden's 6. Being linked and being picked are different counts.

We saw the same pattern in our study of 1,000 software-buying answers, where vendor sites were sometimes linked beneath a competitor's recommendation.

Some vendor links went to documentation rather than marketing pages. support.1password.com appeared in 6 password manager answers. help.brevo.com appeared in 5 email marketing answers.

Four more help and docs sites appeared twice each: help.clickup.com, support.atlassian.com, support.dashlane.com and docs.customer.io.

A help center answers specific questions in plain language, which is exactly what a buyer's question needs. If your help center is out of date, the answer that relies on it is out of date too.

1. Treat your pricing, comparison and help pages as evidence. Keep them accurate, dated and specific.
2. Write the comparison page you'd be happy to see quoted. It may be linked under a competitor's recommendation, so being fair also protects you.
3. In categories where buyers want a second opinion, such as security, earn independent reviews. Your own site won't carry the answer alone.
4. Don't treat links as a score. Check whether you're named, and whether you're named first.

Accuracy matters here: in our software pricing audit, 18 of 200 AI claims about software prices and features contradicted the official source. Each category's sources, rankings and questions are in the AI Visibility Index. To see how assistants describe your own brand, run a free check.

• Data: the AI Visibility Index run of September 28, 2026. Five software categories, 10 buyer questions each, asked once each of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini with web search. 150 answers.
• Links: a domain counts when it appears in an answer's cited sources or as a URL in its text, once per answer. Subdomains count separately, and 1password.com and support.1password.com can't be added together, because one answer may link both.
• Coverage: the Index keeps the 25 most-linked domains per category and no page URLs.
• Coding: on October 23, 2026, we coded by hand the 54 domains linked in at least 3 of a category's answers, by who owns them. Zapier, and Shopify and Salesforce in email marketing, were coded as other software, which keeps the vendor count conservative.
• Recommendations: "presented as an option" comes from the Index's brand extraction, done by a model (openai/gpt-6-luna). A brand the extraction missed would look like a link without a recommendation.