What the data shows
Five findings from 504 responses, 203 software products named, and 3,944 source citations.
Three companies own the answer
Ansys (Synopsys) scores 90.1 on equal engine weight, Siemens 84.5, and Dassault Systèmes 71.0. Ansys and Siemens are each named in 122 of the 126 prompts and Dassault in 114. Fourth place falls to 32.7, a gap of 38.3 points, and the three leaders take 55.7 percent of all company mentions. At product level the race is tight: Abaqus (41.3), Ansys Fluent (40.9), Ansys Mechanical (39.3), and Simcenter STAR-CCM+ (38.1) sit within 3.2 points of each other, two structural answers and two fluids answers.
SimScale outranks incumbents decades older
SimScale was founded in 2012 and is the only company in the top ten founded after 1990. It ranks fourth at 32.7, ahead of Autodesk, Cadence, PTC, and COMSOL, all founded in the 1980s. For companies under 100 people it scores 67.4, within 2.7 points of Siemens, and on CFD questions it places third, ahead of Dassault Systèmes. Its own site backs 72.7 percent of its mentions, the highest of any company in the top ten, so its position rests on content the engines find. Its gaps are ChatGPT and Copilot, where it is named in fewer than a quarter of prompts.
The engines describe a market that no longer exists
Products that changed owner between 2024 and 2026 account for 37.8 percent of all product mentions, and the engines rarely say so. Ansys products are named in 465 answers and Synopsys, their owner since July 2025, in 3. Former Altair products are named in 226 answers, and 182 of them give no sign that Siemens owns them. MSC Nastran, Marc, and Adams moved to Cadence in February 2026, yet 33 of the 75 answers naming MSC products credit Hexagon and never mention Cadence. Nastran itself appears in 140 answers, and in 51 of them the engine never says whose Nastran it means.
ChatGPT and Copilot read vendor sites. Google's engines read everyone else.
90.9 percent of ChatGPT's citations and 88.9 percent of Copilot's point to vendor-owned sites. On Google AI Mode the figure is 32.3 percent, and YouTube alone supplies 13.0 percent of its citations. That split decides who gets found and who gets remembered. Siemens is the most findable company in the category, with six of the eleven products whose visibility is driven by retrieval. Dassault leads every structural measure on memory: on Google's engines its own pages back 17 percent of Abaqus mentions, and ChatGPT and Copilot cite a university copy of the Abaqus manuals 24 times against twice for Dassault's own help site.
Physics, use case, and company size reshape the shortlist
On structural questions Dassault leads at 94.4. On fluids questions Ansys and Siemens lead, and SimScale and the open source projects both outrank Dassault. Early design is the one use case where the field opens up, with Ansys Discovery the leading product and PTC climbing from eighth overall to fourth through Creo Simulation. Design optimization is the one use case where Ansys does not rank first. For enterprises, Siemens moves to first and Cadence to a clear fourth at 41.0.