Method

How we test.

Most buying guides are written from a desk. Ours start with a measurement: what do AI assistants tell a buyer today, and does it hold up?

Why start with AI

A growing share of B2B buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a shortlist before they visit a single vendor website. Those answers are built from a small set of pages, and they are often confident, sometimes outdated and occasionally wrong.

We treat those answers as the starting point, not the conclusion. They show us who buyers are hearing about, and the sources show us why.

The questions

Every guide is built around a buying question written in the buyer's own words, for example "best employee scheduling software for restaurants". Where region, team size or budget changes the answer, we ask separate questions for each.

The runs

• Each question is asked in fresh, unpersonalised sessions, with no memory and no prior conversation.
• Each question is asked many times, because a single answer is a sample, not a result.
• We record every company named, its position, and how it was described.

The sources

We trace the pages each answer relied on, and flag answers that rest on a single review site, an outdated listicle or a vendor's own marketing. Those flags shape where we look hardest.

The ranking

The editorial ranking is ours. It weighs fit for the stated buyer, pricing transparency, documented capability and independent reviews. Being recommended by an AI assistant earns a look, not a place.

Every entry includes who it is not for. If a guide has no honest drawbacks, it is not finished.

Updates

Each guide shows the date it was last tested. We re-run the questions on a schedule and update the guide when the answers or the facts change.