When a buyer asks an assistant to recommend CRM for small business, it answers from the third-party pages that rank for that question — not from vendor homepages. We fetched all 5 of those pages and recorded every vendor each one names.
Share of the 5 sources that name each vendor, by outbound link or by name in the prose. The same test was applied to every vendor. Vendors named in only one source are omitted.
Freshworks is named in 100% of the pages an assistant would read on this topic.
That spread is not a measure of product quality. It measures which companies are present on the pages that get quoted. Some of the vendors near the bottom are excellent products that simply nobody has written into the comparison articles deciding this category.
| Source page | Freshworks | Activecampaign | Zoho | Pipedrive | Freshsales | Engagebay | Salesforce | Mondaycrm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Best HubSpot Alternatives (Free & Cost‑Effective CRMs) bigcontacts.com | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| 11 Best HubSpot Alternatives in 2026 for Businessnethunt.com | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| HubSpot Alternatives 2026: 7 CRMs Compared for SMBslayer3labs.io | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | · | ● | ● |
| HubSpot Alternatives for Small Business 2026saleoid.com | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | · | ● |
| 7 Best HubSpot CRM Alternatives in 2026salesflare.com | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | · |
● = the page names that vendor, by outbound link or by name in the prose. Showing the top 8 vendors by citation share; every source we read is listed below.
The numbers above are yours to use. If you want the detail — every source you appear in with the exact quote, the ranked list of pages naming competitors and not you, and what to do about each — that is what the AI Citation Report contains. $199, delivered in 3 business days, full refund within 14 days if it isn't useful.
If you would rather just fix it yourself using the source list above, please do. That is a completely reasonable outcome and the list is right there.
Pages were fetched one at a time by a crawler identifying itself honestly and respecting robots.txt. On each page we recorded every vendor named, by outbound link and by name in prose, applying the identical test to every vendor. A domain counts as a vendor only if a page gave it its own heading, several pages linked it, or three or more sources named it.
This rests on 5 sources. It is a strong signal about who gets named in this category, not a census of the web. Nobody controls whether an assistant names a given company on a given day, and we do not sell placements.
Citation Footprint · measured 16 August 2026 · hello@citationfootprint.com