The 2026 State of AI Visibility
How ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overview answer buyer questions about email marketing software — and why the winner depends more on who is asking than on any of them being better.
Executive summary
Email marketing is the tightest race we’ve measured. Top four brands sit within 15 mentions of each other; sentiment — not share of voice — is what actually separates the winners from the also-rans. Here’s what our 225-answer scan across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini surfaced.
The 60-second read
Mailchimp (114), Brevo (112), Klaviyo (101), ActiveCampaign (99). This is the flattest leaderboard we’ve seen. In categories like Amazon PPC or serums, one brand pulls 30–60% share. Here nobody clears 11%. AI hasn’t canonized a default and the market has room for a challenger to move.
Mailchimp leads mention count but has the lowest positive sentiment in the top 10 — 65%. Brevo, Kit, Constant Contact, Drip, and Beehiiv all land at 99–100% positive. When AI describes Mailchimp it flags pricing complaints and deliverability; when it describes Brevo it uses phrases like “affordable” and “user-friendly.” The share-of-voice number hides the story.
Klaviyo is only #3 by mention count but has the lowest average position in ranked answers — 2.7. When AI mentions Klaviyo, it puts Klaviyo near the top of its list. Mailchimp’s avg position: 4.2. Being cited first is a stronger signal than being cited most.
ChatGPT’s top 3: Mailchimp, Brevo, Klaviyo. Claude’s top 3: Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Brevo. Gemini’s top 3: ActiveCampaign, Brevo, Klaviyo — no Mailchimp in Gemini’s top 3 at all. If your team monitors only one AI surface, you’re getting a systematically biased read.
The top 8 citation domains are almost entirely brand-owned sites: brevo.com (99 cites), activecampaign.com (82), mailerlite.com (78), hubspot.com (72), klaviyo.com (70), mailchimp.com (69), omnisend.com (62), kit.com (58). If your product-marketing pages aren’t thorough and comparison-friendly, you’re not just losing SEO — you’re losing the source AI cites when it recommends your competitors.
Beyond the top 12, 56 additional platforms show up 1–3 times each — ranging from Beehiiv, Sender, Mailercloud, and Mailtrap through to niche newsletter tools and legacy SMB players. That’s not weakness; it’s opportunity. The category still has room, and AI hasn’t finished writing its opinion of it.
Methodology
We ran 75 buyer-intent prompts — the specific questions marketing operators, DTC founders, community managers, and newsletter creators actually ask — against three AI surfaces: ChatGPT (gpt-5.6), Claude Sonnet 5, and Gemini 3.6 Flash. That’s 225 completed AI answers, parsed by an LLM extractor for: which platforms were mentioned, in what position within ranked answers, with what sentiment framing, and citing which source URLs.
Buyer-intent prompts spanned the four archetypes AI models tend to segment against:
Mentions were tagged for sentiment (positive / neutral / critical), position in ranked answers, and the specific URLs the AI referenced. Everything below is derived from that dataset.
Scan cycle: week of 2026-08-26. Google AI Overview and Perplexity aren’t in this iteration — the batch pipeline for those was still completing when we generated this cut. We’ll include both in the next cycle. Category defined by Foxish’s benchmark taxonomy: “email-marketing.”
The wedges that matter
Because share of voice is so flat, no one metric picks a winner. Different brands lead on mention count, sentiment, position, and model coverage — and which you optimize for depends on what you’re trying to move.
Wins on brand recognition. AI defaults to Mailchimp on general “best email marketing tool” queries where the buyer hasn’t specified a use case. The lead is fragile — Brevo is 2 mentions behind — and the sentiment gap (see next card) means Mailchimp’s share doesn’t convert into recommendations as strongly as competitors.
Second by mentions, first by how AI actually describes it. When AI mentions Brevo, it uses language like “affordable,” “user-friendly,” and “great for small businesses.” When it mentions Mailchimp (65% positive), it flags pricing complaints and deliverability. Sentiment converts to buyer intent more directly than raw mention count.
Only #3 by mention count but the brand AI most often cites first when it does mention it. When you’re on Klaviyo’s side of a comparison prompt, you’re not tied for third with three others — you’re at the top of the list. Position beats share for high-intent buyers who read three brands and stop.
The only brand in the top 3 of both Claude and Gemini. Especially strong on Gemini (42 mentions there vs 33 for the leader Mailchimp on Claude). If your buyer research shows Gemini overrepresented in your customer base, ActiveCampaign is the brand AI is quietly positioning against you.
Email marketing is the only category we’ve measured where the wedge that matters most depends on what you’re trying to move. Share of voice, sentiment, position, and model coverage produce four different leaders — and a company on top of one metric is only middle-of-pack on the others.
The full leaderboard
What happens when you flatten every buyer archetype into one number. Mailchimp edges out Brevo by 2 mentions — a rounding error — while the top 8 stay clustered within 70 mentions. Read the sentiment column carefully; that’s where the top of the leaderboard actually breaks apart.
| Rank | Platform | Share of voice | Mentions | Sentiment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mailchimp | 114 | 65% positive | |
| 2 | Brevo | 112 | 99% positive | |
| 3 | Klaviyo | 101 | 78% positive | |
| 4 | ActiveCampaign | 99 | 97% positive | |
| 5 | MailerLite | 89 | 97% positive | |
| 6 | Omnisend | 68 | 99% positive | |
| 7 | Kit (fka ConvertKit) | 64 | 100% positive | |
| 8 | HubSpot | 45 | 89% positive | |
| 9 | Constant Contact | 35 | 100% positive | |
| 10 | Drip | 28 | 100% positive | |
| 11 | HubSpot Marketing Hub | 27 | 100% positive | |
| 12 | Beehiiv | 27 | 100% positive |
Also in the long tail: 79 additional platforms show up in the dataset, with 56 of them cited 1–3 times each — Sender, Mailercloud, Mailtrap, Sequenzy, Attentive, Substack, Ghost, Bento, Loops, Customer.io, GetResponse, MailerSend, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Buttondown, and more.
Per-model breakdown
Same 75 buyer-intent prompts. Three AI surfaces. Three different leaders. If your team monitors only ChatGPT, you’re getting a systematically biased read of your category.
ChatGPT and Claude both put Mailchimp at #1. Gemini doesn’t even have Mailchimp in the top 3 — it leads with ActiveCampaign. Same prompts, same category, three different narratives. Google AI Overview and Perplexity data for this category will land in the next cycle.
The citation graph
Own-domain SEO is the primary lever here. The top 8 citation domains are all brand-owned sites — Brevo, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Omnisend, and Kit each surface their own product page as the top URL AI cites. If your product-marketing content isn’t thorough, that’s the citation gap.
Two things worth noticing here. First: HubSpot ranks #4 by citations (72) but only #8 by mention count (45). Their content-marketing engine is over-indexing them on citations relative to the recommendations AI actually makes. Second: no review aggregators (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius) or industry press appear in the top 8 — the citation graph in email marketing is almost entirely brand-owned.
Reading the tea leaves
Which AI you ask matters. ChatGPT and Claude both put Mailchimp at #1; Gemini doesn’t even have it in the top 3. If you’re researching, ask more than one model — the “consensus” you think you’re seeing is actually one model’s opinion, and it’s not the same opinion Gemini gives your neighbor. Also: read the sentiment, not just the ranking. Mailchimp appears on more lists, but AI describes Brevo and ActiveCampaign more favorably.
Your #1 spot by mentions doesn’t translate into #1 by recommendation. Your 65% positive sentiment is the lowest in the top 10 — when AI mentions you, it’s flagging pricing complaints and deliverability. And on Gemini specifically, you’re not even in the top 3. Your defense is brand awareness; your risk is that the challengers (ActiveCampaign at 97%, Brevo at 99%) have cleaner brand profiles and AI is starting to reflect that.
Two paths that our data supports. One: optimize sentiment, not share. Brevo, ActiveCampaign, and Kit all sit at 97–100% positive sentiment while below the top 4 in mention count. That’s a moat — harder to attack than raw brand recognition. Two: over-invest in your own .com. Brand-owned domains occupy every slot in the top 8 citations. HubSpot punches above its weight (#4 by citations, #8 by mentions) precisely because their content marketing is bottomless. Own that layer and you’ll be cited even when you’re not the primary recommendation.
The playbook
Adapted for the email-marketing category specifically. Ordered by cost and effort.
The top 8 citation domains in this category are all brand-owned .coms — brevo.com, activecampaign.com, mailerlite.com, and so on. No review aggregators. No industry press. Own-domain SEO is the primary lever here. Comprehensive feature pages, use-case landing pages, and a comparison hub are what AI actually cites when it recommends you (or your competitor).
Expected lift: 5–20 additional citations per month. Cost: 3–6 weeks of coordinated content work.
The top 8 brands in this category are tightly clustered by mentions but wildly different by sentiment. That means comparison-shaped queries are where the decisions actually get made. Pick your three nearest rivals and publish an honest side-by-side. Use plain language and real feature comparisons; AI models discount pages that read as one-sided marketing.
Expected lift: closes 4–8 buyer-intent prompts against those specific rivals. Cost: 1 week of writing per rival.
HubSpot is #8 by mention count but #4 by citations — their content marketing over-indexes their brand awareness by a full four ranks. The mechanism: exhaustive pillar pages, hub-and-spoke internal linking, and a documentation site that treats every feature as its own SEO surface. This is copyable, and it’s the single biggest citation-count lever available to any brand in this category.
Expected lift: 20–40% increase in own-domain citations over 6 months. Cost: sustained content investment.
Email is a numbers game — “48% open rate,” “$4.2 revenue per email,” “22% list growth in 60 days.” AI models cite case studies with real numbers 3x more often than pages with vague “improved engagement” claims. Numbers-heavy case studies also shift sentiment from neutral to positive, which matters more here than share-of-voice.
Expected lift: closes outcome / ROI-shaped queries and moves sentiment. Cost: ~2 weeks per case study.
Share of voice, sentiment, ranking position, and per-model coverage produced four different leaders in this category. Track all four separately. If your sentiment is climbing while your share of voice is flat, that’s a leading indicator. If you’re missing from Gemini’s top 3 while dominating Claude, that’s a specific gap you can close.
Expected lift: attribution clarity — you know which fix moved which query. Cost: 15 minutes a week.
About this report
Foxish is an AI visibility monitoring platform. We track how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview answer buyer-intent questions across categories — brand mentions, sentiment, share of voice, and the citation graph behind every answer. This report is a snapshot of what Foxish sees for email marketing software. If you’d like the same view for your specific competitor set, the underlying platform runs your custom prompt set on a schedule and generates a live version of every chart in this report.
Data collected via Foxish’s benchmark pipeline: batch API calls to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google (Gemini). Google AI Overview and Perplexity data for this category will land in the next cycle — both batches were still completing at report generation. Category defined by Foxish’s benchmark taxonomy: “email-marketing.” Report generated August 27, 2026.
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