Wave was the only accounting tool that ChatGPT and Gemini named in all six of the buyer questions we ran, a clean 6 of 6. We put six questions to the two assistants, gave each one a live web search, and recorded every product named and every source cited. QuickBooks Online and Xero, the two biggest paid names in the category, each landed in 5 of 6 answers, then dropped off the instant a buyer asked for free software. Wave was one of only two names that made it into that free answer.
Three tools tied just behind Wave at 5 of 6, or 83%: QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Zoho Books. FreshBooks landed in 4 of 6 answers (67%), and Sage 50 Accounting in 3 of 6 (50%). After that the fall is steep, with NetSuite and Patriot each named in 2 of 6 (33%) and everything else appearing exactly once.
The six questions were not reworded versions of one phrase. They ran from the bare "best accounting software" through "best accounting software for small teams," "what accounting software should I use," "best free accounting software," "most affordable accounting software," and "accounting software recommendations." Six different questions produced six different shortlists, and the free one barely overlapped with the rest.
How the six questions produced six different shortlists
The "best free accounting software" question rewrote the list almost from scratch. Of the 8 tools it returned, 6 appeared in no other question: Akaunting, ZipBooks, Odoo, HomeBank, Manager.io, and KMyMoney. Only Wave and Zoho Books carried over from the paid-tool questions, which is why Wave's 6 of 6 stands out: it is the one brand that lives in both the paid and the free worlds.
The bare "best accounting software" question was the only place two names ever surfaced. Sage Intacct (1 of 6) and the label "Sage 50" (1 of 6) appeared here and nowhere else, next to the enterprise-leaning NetSuite. Ask the generic "best" and you get a wider, more enterprise-tilted list of 8 names; narrow the question and that tail drops off.
Patriot appeared in exactly 2 of 6 answers, and only when the question mentioned price: "most affordable accounting software" and "accounting software recommendations." That affordable question returned 7 names in total, and Patriot was the one that never showed up for the plain "best" query. A tool can be invisible to the headline question and still earn a place on the affordability one, which is the entire reason we ask more than a single question.
The tightest answer came from "what accounting software should I use," which returned just 3 names: QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Wave. When a buyer asks for a personal steer instead of a ranked list, the two assistants collapse to the three tools they are most sure of, and Wave is one of them.
The source map behind the answers
Community threads led everything. Reddit fed all 6 of 6 answers, the only domain to appear in every one, and Quora fed 4 of 6 (67%). Before a single vendor page or review site, the assistants were reading what people wrote in forums.
YouTube was the second most-cited source, feeding 5 of 6 answers (83%). Editorial roundups were thinner than you might guess: PCMag and the US Chamber of Commerce each fed 3 of 6 answers (50%), and Forbes just 1 of 6 (17%).
The review directories that soak up this category's ad budgets barely registered. G2 fed 2 of 6 answers (33%), and Capterra did not appear in a single one of the six. If you are paying for directory placement to sway AI answers about accounting software, this run suggests the money is not landing where you think.
Every vendor whose own domain was cited also had its product named. Wave's site (waveapps.com) fed 2 answers and Wave was named 6 of 6; Intuit's QuickBooks domain fed 3 answers and QuickBooks Online was named 5 of 6; Xero's own site fed 2 answers and Xero was named 5 of 6. The long tail held too: akaunting.com, zipbooks.com, and sage.com each fed 1 answer, and Akaunting, ZipBooks, and Sage each turned up in the results. A vendor page in the source set was a near-perfect predictor of getting named.
What a vendor in this category would actually do
Across all 6 questions, the source list, not market share, decided who got named. NetSuite is one of the biggest names in the category and it appeared in only 2 of 6 answers; Wave is free and it appeared in 6 of 6. The assistants named whoever their sources named.
So the job is to be present in those exact sources. Reddit is not optional here: it fed 6 of 6 answers, so a question where your product is missing from the relevant threads is a question where you are invisible to the model. YouTube (5 of 6) and Quora (4 of 6) are the next two to earn.
Your own domain was worth more than a directory slot in this run. Six vendor sites fed answers and all six of those vendors were named, while Capterra fed 0 of 6. A clear, factual product page an assistant can read and quote did more work here than a paid listing.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Wave | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| QuickBooks Online | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Xero | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Zoho Books | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| FreshBooks | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Sage 50 Accounting | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| NetSuite | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Patriot | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Sage 50 | 1 of 6 | 17% |
Two rows in that table are the same company. Sage 50 Accounting (3 of 6) and Sage 50 (1 of 6) are one product the assistants labelled two different ways, so we kept them as separate rows rather than fold them into a count the data never actually shows. Sage Intacct (1 of 6) is a genuinely different Sage product and stays on its own.
Below the top tier, eight tools were each named exactly once (1 of 6, 17%): Akaunting, HomeBank, KMyMoney, Manager.io, Odoo, Sage 50, Sage Intacct, and ZipBooks. Six of those eight came only from the "best free" question.
Glotier does not sell accounting software, so we are correctly absent from all six of these answers, and we would be surprised to see ourselves in them. But this measurement is the thing Glotier does: when a small-business owner asks ChatGPT or Gemini which accounting software to use and gets back three names, we show you whether yours is one of them and which sources decided it. The check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.