Markets ›small business payroll software 28 brands
Gusto is named most often — in 34 of 36 answers. 6 questions a buyer would type, asked of 2 assistants 3 times each.
2 brands in this market were named in none of the 36 answers: ADP Workforce Now, SuccessFactors.
Being a big website barely predicts being named here. The assistants are drawing on something other than raw web prominence.
↑how often assistants name it →how much traffic its website gets
Across is web prominence — the brand's domain in the Tranco ranking of the world's most-visited sites, on a logarithmic scale, so each step is roughly ten times more prominent. Up is how many of the 36 answers named it.
Every brand with a ranked domain is plotted, including the 4 whose domain is an imperfect stand-in — shared with sibling products, a subdomain, or registered abroad, drawn hollow — because a domain carrying a whole company still plausibly helps that company's products get named. The 3 least-named brands are left off so the rest can be labelled; the table above has every one of them. Not plotted, having no ranked domain: QuickBooks Payroll.
Rank correlation +0.16 across 16 brands — a description of this picture, not a claim about the market as a whole.
The questions
These belong to the market, not to any brand in it. Each was asked 6 times across two assistants. Questions naming a brand are excluded, since they hand that brand a free mention.
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Method
market small business payroll software
brands measured 28
run as subjects 2
questions 6
answers per brand 36
brand list version 393d70f8657d
Questions went to the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs with web search off, each in a fresh context with no history. That measures what the models already know about these brands rather than what they would find on the web today, so it is a floor on visibility rather than a replica of any one person's chat.
Repeated measurements of the same brand move within about 12 points, so a difference smaller than that is not meaningful. Brands closer together than that are shown tied rather than ordered.
How the table is ordered. By how many of the 36 answers named each brand. Brands on the same count share a rank and are shown in the order the assistants tended to list them. A brand counts once per answer, however many times it is named in it.
How close is close. Two brands share a rank only when their counts are identical. Beyond that, a gap smaller than about four answers is inside what this measurement moves between runs — so read near-neighbours as close rather than settled, which is why every row keeps its interval.