The methodology, and why it is published
No vendor names in the prompts
The vendor list in every index is an output of what the engines said, never an input to what we asked. No prompt contains a company, product, or brand name. This is what separates a ranking from a survey of names we already had in mind.
Buyers and use cases, not averages
A single ranking for a whole category describes nobody. An aerospace supplier under AS9100 and a fifty-person hardware startup ask about the same software and get entirely different answers back. We divide each category the way its market divides, by buyer persona or by use case, and run a full prompt set against every segment. The MES and visualization indexes use six to eight buyer personas, and the simulation index uses six use cases, from early design exploration to scaling simulation across a team. Each index publishes its segment leaderboards alongside the overall ranking, and the gaps between them are usually the most useful part.
Every engine reported separately
The major engines often disagree with each other in terms of which products are mentioned. In the MES index one product appeared in 12.5 percent of Perplexity prompts and none of the ChatGPT prompts. In the visualization index Lumion was named in 53.2 percent of ChatGPT prompts and 12.7 percent of Gemini prompts, while Unreal Engine ran the other way at 20.6 and 46.8. In the simulation index Gemini named PTC in 30.2 percent of prompts and Copilot in 8.7 percent. Compositing hides that, so every table reports each engine on its own alongside the combined score.
Source analysis reported
Being named and being cited are different things. We capture every source URL behind every answer and classify it, which makes it possible to tell whether a company is visible because the model learned it or because content exists and gets retrieved. In the visualization index, products released before 2015 were backed by a citation to their own vendor's site in 44.6 percent of mentions, against roughly 60 percent for newer products. Long-established vendors are carried by memory. Newer ones have to be found. The engines differ here too: in the simulation index, 90.9 percent of ChatGPT's citations pointed to vendor-owned sites, against 32.3 percent on Google AI Mode.
What it measures
Whether AI answer engines name a product, how often, on which engine, and for which buyer or use case. Every ranking here is built from what the engines said in response to a fixed set of buying questions.
What it doesn't measure
Product quality, competitive position, revenue, or market share. A vendor can be widely deployed and rarely named, and the reverse is equally possible. In the MES index, one vendor competing actively for real deals appeared in 2 of 112 prompts. In the simulation index, Keysight, which owns the former ESI Group crash, casting, and acoustics portfolio, appeared in 2 of 126. In the visualization index, Autodesk sells Revit, the most-named product in the entire study, and still ranks sixth among visualization vendors. Read every placement here as a statement about AI visibility, and treat questions of fit and quality as separate work.