AI Visibility Index DACH 2026 — SaaS Management Platforms (SMP)
SaaS Spend Management, Shadow IT & Procurement: Who appears in AI answers, who doesn't, and why
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The average IT manager today uses more than 100 SaaS tools — and has no idea about a third of them. Someone in marketing signed up for Canva. Someone in sales added another CRM plugin. The license agreement has been running for nine months and nobody has looked at it. That is the everyday reality SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) are built to fix.
It is also the everyday reality in which purchasing decisions are made differently than they were three years ago. When someone needs a solution to this problem, they increasingly skip asking colleagues — they ask ChatGPT. Get four names back. Google two of them. Have a longlist before they have sent a single demo request.
Which four names those are has nothing to do with the best product. It depends on which brands appear in the sources AI systems use to build their answers. That is what we measured.
What We Measured
Together with Profound, we ran prompts from real SMP buying processes across three platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Region: Germany. Period: April 2026. Every prompt run multiple times.
Five topic areas: SaaS Costs & Spend Management, Shadow IT & Software Visibility, Software Procurement & Purchasing, License & Contract Management, and Vendor Management & Negotiation — the five core areas that define the SMP market.
The Visibility Score shows how many prompts a brand appears in — as a percentage. 30% means: in almost every third relevant question. We also measured average position within the answer and evaluated which sources AI systems draw on when they mention a brand.
Overall Ranking
349 vendors were identified in AI answers during the measurement period. Most appear once, sporadically, with no recognizable pattern. These are the 20 that show up consistently.
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SAP at number one is not surprising — but the reasons are. SAP has no AI visibility strategy. SAP benefits passively from the fact that no article about software procurement, e-procurement, or license management is written without mentioning SAP. That is the result of decades of market presence, not deliberate content work.
More interesting are the positions behind it. Zylo, Torii, Zluri — three US-based SaaS management vendors with no dominant operational role in the DACH market, but so deeply embedded in English-language trade media, comparison portals, and review platforms that AI systems reliably surface them in response to German-language queries. European vendors who compete directly against these players in day-to-day sales do not appear in half of the buying moments.
Three Platforms — Three Different Rankings
The overall ranking is an average. What lies behind it looks different on every platform.
ChatGPT
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zylo | 34.1% |
| 2 | Zluri | 28.7% |
| 3 | Torii | 24.0% |
| 4 | Flexera | 22.5% |
| 5 | CloudEagle | 18.6% |
| 6 | Spendbase | 14.0% |
| 7 | Coupa | 13.2% |
| 8 | SAP | 8.5% |
| 9 | Sastrify | 8.5% |
| 10 | Microsoft | 7.0% |
Google AI Overviews
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SAP | 23.1% |
| 2 | Zylo | 18.9% |
| 3 | Coupa | 18.9% |
| 4 | Microsoft | 17.5% |
| 5 | Torii | 14.0% |
| 6 | Spendbase | 10.5% |
| 7 | Sastrify | 8.4% |
| 8 | Flexera | 6.3% |
| 9 | CloudEagle | 4.9% |
| 10 | Zluri | 4.2% |
Perplexity
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SAP | 28.3% |
| 2 | Flexera | 15.2% |
| 3 | Torii | 13.0% |
| 4 | Microsoft | 10.9% |
| 5 | Spendbase | 8.7% |
| 6 | CloudEagle | 8.7% |
| 7 | Zluri | 4.3% |
| 8 | Zylo | 2.2% |
| 9 | Coupa | 0.0% |
| 10 | Sastrify | 0.0% |
Zylo: rank 1 on ChatGPT at 34.1%, rank 8 on Perplexity at 2.2%. Coupa: rank 3 on Google AI Overviews, invisible on Perplexity. Same week. Same vendor.
Any company in this market that has built AI visibility on a single platform loses every buyer who happens to open a different one tomorrow. That is not a theoretical risk — it is the current state of most vendors in this ranking.
Who Wins Which Buying Moment?
SaaS Costs & Spend Management
"How can I reduce my company's SaaS spending?" — "Recommend a SaaS Management Platform for mid-sized businesses" — "How do I find out how much my company spends on software subscriptions?" — and others.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zylo | 37.7% |
| 2 | Torii | 35.7% |
| 3 | Spendbase | 32.6% |
| 4 | Zluri | 26.0% |
| 5 | Spendflo | 19.6% |
This is the most common entry point in the buying process for this category. The five vendors that appear dominantly here all share one thing: their source base sits primarily in English-language media. European vendors that solve exactly this problem do not appear in any of the top five positions.
Shadow IT & Software Visibility
"How do I find out which software tools my employees are using without IT approval?" — "Recommend a SaaS discovery tool for IT and finance teams in Germany" — "Recommend a tool for detecting shadow IT and unauthorized software subscriptions" — and others.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flexera | 43.3% |
| 2 | Torii | 35.7% |
| 3 | Microsoft | 22.9% |
| 4 | Zylo | 22.5% |
| 5 | Zluri | 19.8% |
Flexera is not a SaaS Management Platform in the strict sense. Flexera is software asset management — a different product category, a different buyer, a different price point. Yet Flexera leads this category at 43.3%. The reason is straightforward: over the past several years, hundreds of articles about shadow IT have been written, and most of them reference Flexera. AI reads those articles. And answers accordingly.
Software Procurement & Purchasing
"Recommend a platform for structured software procurement in mid-sized companies" — "Which tool automates software procurement and approval workflows?" — "Recommend e-procurement software for Germany" — and others.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SAP | 62.4% |
| 2 | Precoro | 46.9% |
| 3 | Coupa | 38.4% |
| 4 | Spendesk | 22.5% |
| 5 | Oracle | 19.2% |
Precoro at rank 2, just behind SAP. Precoro has a few hundred customers. SAP has a few hundred thousand. And yet Precoro appears in nearly every other AI answer about software procurement. That is because Precoro is consistently present in procurement trade media, comparison articles, and category listicles — not because the company is large, but because the journalists and authors writing for those outlets know it. Market size and AI visibility regularly diverge in this ranking.
License & Contract Management
"Which platform helps identify unused software licenses?" — "How do I manage SaaS contracts centrally?" — "Recommend a software asset management tool for Germany" — and others.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ManageEngine | 31.2% |
| 2 | USU | 21.6% |
| 3 | Flexera | 17.6% |
| 4 | LOGINventory | 16.7% |
| 5 | Zylo | 15.6% |
The only category in the entire report where German vendors feature prominently. USU at rank 2 with 21.6%, LOGINventory at rank 4 with 16.7%. Both are strongly embedded in German-language IT trade sources — exactly the sources Google AI Overviews draws on for localized queries. On ChatGPT and Perplexity the picture changes, because there English-language sources determine the outcome. But in this category, regional source presence still works — at least on one of three platforms.
Vendor Management & Negotiation
"How do I save on SaaS contracts without in-house procurement experts?" — "Recommend a tool for professional vendor management and software negotiations" — "How do I negotiate better SaaS terms?" — and others.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | HubSpot | 31.5% |
| 2 | CloudEagle | 29.9% |
| 3 | Zendesk | 28.6% |
| 3 | Adobe | 28.6% |
| 5 | VendorBenchmark | 23.8% |
HubSpot has no vendor management product. Neither does Zendesk. Adobe even less so. Yet they jointly lead this category. When someone asks how to negotiate SaaS contracts more effectively, AI pulls articles written about supplier relationships, contract management, and business communication — and those articles reference HubSpot and Zendesk because they are embedded in thousands of general business context pieces. Specialized vendor management vendors are not competing against better products here. They are competing against volume of coverage.
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How AI Processes Questions
Before ChatGPT formulates an answer, it searches. Not once — multiple times. A user's question is internally broken down into several related search queries, the results aggregated, and only then does the answer get written. These internal queries are called fanout queries.
For the prompt "Recommend a tool for detecting shadow IT and unauthorized software subscriptions," an average of 2 such queries were generated per run. The most common were "detect unauthorized software subscriptions" and "tool for detecting shadow IT" — each accounting for 25% of all generated queries. What also appeared: "software for detecting shadow IT and unsanctioned SaaS subscriptions", "tools for detecting Shadow IT and unauthorized software subscriptions".
The question was asked in German. The internal search ran in English.
That is the point where many DACH vendors structurally lose. A brand anchored exclusively in German-language sources becomes invisible on every prompt where ChatGPT or Perplexity searches internally in English. Google AI Overviews behaves differently — it weights German-language sources more heavily. That explains how the same company can land at rank 7 on Google AI Overviews and at zero on Perplexity.
What AI Actually Reads
Visibility scores show the result. The citation analysis explains why.
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Nine of the fifteen most-cited domains are brand sites — the vendors' own websites. That sounds like good news for anyone investing in SEO. It isn't, at least not in the conventional sense. usu.com does not appear because of its product page. spendesk.com does not appear because of its homepage. They appear because of the articles they have published — comparisons, guides, listicles that name other vendors. AI cites that content regardless of whether the brand's own name is front and center or mentioned in passing.
The most-cited individual page in the entire dataset makes this concrete: omt.de/online-marketing-tools/saas-management-software/ reaches 1.1% citation share — a straightforward listicle page listing dozens of vendors. AI systems on all three platforms consistently reference it. Any vendor that appears there benefits, regardless of where they sit in the list. The product pages of vendors ranked much higher in the overall standings come in at a fraction of that.
OMR, at 2.43% citation share, is the only German-language editorial outlet that appears as a source equally across all three platforms. No other German media achieves that. Presence in OMR comparison articles and category reviews translates into visibility across platforms — in the DACH market, that is an exceptional position.
YouTube comes in at rank 4 with 1.98% — well ahead of LinkedIn (0.75%) and Reddit (1.02%, though with considerably lower quality of cited pages). YouTube rarely features in AI visibility strategies. The data says something different.
Conclusions: Who Stands Where — and What Does That Tell Us?
SAP — 20% overall, 62.4% in Software Procurement. That is not a campaign. It is gravity: so many articles, so many comparisons, so many industry pieces written over so many years that AI can barely answer a procurement question without naming SAP. For every competitor in this category, SAP is not a target to overtake — it is the context within which you need to become visible.
Zylo — 34.1% on ChatGPT, 2.2% on Perplexity. Zylo has built a strong source base in English-language SaaS media, and ChatGPT rewards that. Perplexity draws on different sources — and Zylo is barely represented there. For DACH vendors wondering where room still exists: competition on Perplexity in this category is considerably thinner than on ChatGPT.
Torii is the only vendor in the report that consistently lands in the top 3 or top 5 across all three platforms and in four of the five categories. No platform dependency, no category concentration. For anyone trying to understand what a broad source base looks like in practice, Torii's media presence is the reference — English-language trade media, comparison portals, review sites, YouTube. Nothing exotic, but applied consistently across categories and languages.
Spendbase — rank 7 overall, second most-cited domain in the dataset at 2.6% share. Spendbase is not a well-known name in the DACH market. Yet the brand appears more frequently in AI answers than Coupa. Spendbase continuously produces comparison content — articles comparing other vendors, explaining categories, positioning its own brand as a reference point. AI systems draw on that content. That is how you generate disproportionate visibility without a disproportionate budget.
Spendesk — rank 18 overall, but rank 4 in Software Procurement at 22.5%. Spendesk has built a strong source base in one topic and not carried it into the other four categories. The result is a vendor visible in one buying moment and absent in all the others. For a company that also addresses SaaS costs, shadow IT, and vendor management, that is a gap — because the buyer who enters through procurement will encounter a completely different shortlist on the next prompt about license management.
Vertice — 8.3% overall, 18.6% in Vendor Management, 0% on Perplexity. Vertice specializes in contract optimization and SaaS price negotiation — exactly the topics most in demand in vendor management queries. The source base is sufficient for presence on Google AI Overviews and partial coverage on ChatGPT, but not Perplexity. Building presence in the English-language procurement media that Perplexity draws on for this category requires starting from scratch there.
Sastrify — rank 20, 5.6%. Strongest category is Vendor Management & Negotiation at 16%, rank 10. On ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews the brand is measurably present — on Perplexity it is not. Sastrify has customers like Auto1, Personio, and Celonis. The brand is known in the market. In the sources AI systems use to construct their answers, not yet enough — and that explains the 5.6% score more accurately than any product critique.
For DACH vendors broadly: the problem is rarely the company's own website. It is the third-party sources — OMR, omt.de, appvizer.de, cloudmagazin.com, international trade media — where the brand is absent or appears too rarely. And it is the English-language sources that ChatGPT and Perplexity draw on even when the user's question was asked in German.
What Recon Rise Does
This report shows the category. We show where your brand stands within it — and then build what's missing.
An AI Visibility Audit measures current visibility on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity, broken down by topic, platform, and position. After that comes the operational work: building the sources AI draws from for your category. Placing earned media, developing comparison content, setting up data structures — the infrastructure that ensures your brand appears in the right answers. Sustainably, not as a one-off.
To find out what this looks like for your brand: Get in touch now
Methodology
Profound AI Visibility Monitoring · Prompts across 5 topic areas: SaaS Costs & Spend Management, Shadow IT & Software Visibility, Software Procurement & Purchasing, License & Contract Management, Vendor Management & Negotiation · Measurement period: April 2026 · Platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity · Multiple executions per prompt and platform · 349 unique brands identified · Region: Germany · Category per Gartner: SaaS Management Platforms (SMP)
AI Visibility Index DACH 2026 — SaaS Management Platforms (SMP) Recon Rise GmbH · Düsseldorf · reconrise.ai © 2026 Recon Rise. All rights reserved.
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