Buyers increasingly ask AI assistants what to use instead of searching Google. So we asked for them.
We ran five buyer questions about privacy-friendly web analytics through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini. Twenty answers total, all collected on the same day in July 2026. Then we counted every product each engine named, where it ranked, and which pages the engines cited as sources.
The result: Plausible owns this category
| Product | Mentions (of 20 answers) | Engines (of 4) | Best rank | Top-3 finishes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plausible | 15 | 4 | #1 | 15 |
| Matomo | 6 | 4 | #2 | 5 |
| Simple Analytics | 5 | 3 | #2 | 4 |
| Sleek Analytics | 5 | 3 | #1 | 5 |
| Peek | 3 | 3 | #1 | 3 |
| Sealmetrics | 3 | 3 | #1 | 3 |
Plausible was named in 15 of 20 answers, by every engine, and every single one of those mentions was a top-3 placement. When an AI assistant is asked about privacy-friendly analytics, Plausible is close to the default answer.
Matomo is the steady runner-up: named by all four engines, usually as the self-hosted option. Simple Analytics holds a consistent third. Below that sits a long tail of newer tools that only some engines know about.
The finding that matters: the winner is also the most-cited source
We also tracked which pages the engines cited while answering:
| Cited source | Citations |
|---|---|
| plausible.io | 12 |
| getsleek.io | 6 |
| github.com | 5 |
| reddit.com | 5 |
Plausible's own site was cited twelve times, twice as often as anything else. The engines are not just recommending Plausible; they are reading Plausible's own pages to write their answers. That is the loop: publish the pages the AIs lean on, get cited, get recommended.
Reddit and GitHub also show up as sources in a third of answers. If your product is discussed in neither place, some engines have very little to go on.
Method, honestly
Five buyer-intent prompts (for example "best privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative" and "GDPR compliant website analytics without cookie banner"), each asked once to ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini), Claude (Haiku 4.5), Perplexity (Sonar) and Gemini (2.5 Flash) with web search enabled, on the same day. Product names are as the engines stated them; we merged obvious duplicates. A single-day snapshot: these answers move week to week, which is rather the point of tracking them.