AI Visibility Index DACH 2026 — Spend Management
Who appears in AI answers, who doesn't, and why
A finance manager at a mid-sized company is sitting at his laptop in the evening. The corporate card solution the company has been using for two years doesn't integrate cleanly with DATEV. The CFO has asked for a review. Instead of booking three sales calls for Monday, he types into ChatGPT: "Recommend corporate credit card that automatically exports to Lexware and DATEV." He gets four names back. Clicks on two of them. Has a mental shortlist before a single conversation has taken place.
That's the moment we measure. Not Google rankings, not impressions, not brand surveys. The question is: which brands appear in that one conversation? And which don't? That's AI Visibility — a brand's presence in the answers of generative AI systems, measured at the point where purchasing decisions are being prepared today.
The spend management market is a particularly revealing category to measure, because almost all of the relevant vendors are European. Pleo from Copenhagen, Moss from Berlin, Spendesk from Paris, Payhawk from Sofia and London, Qonto from Paris. DATEV in the background as the dominant German accounting platform, SAP and Oracle in the enterprise segment. US vendors like Ramp, Brex, or Expensify barely feature in AI answers for the DACH market. Whoever wins here, wins against direct European competitors.
What we measured
Together with Profound, we ran 25 prompts from real spend management buying processes across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Region: Germany. Period: April 5–12, 2026. Each prompt was executed multiple times and every response evaluated.
The prompts cover five buying moments: Corporate Cards, Invoice Processing, Spend Management, Accounting Integration, Competitive Comparison.
A total of 304 different vendors appeared in the answers. Most of them only once, with no recurring pattern. The top 20 account for around 58% of total share of voice; the remaining 42% is spread across 284 brands with sporadic mentions. A classic long-tail picture: a few dominant names, a very wide tail behind them.
Three metrics were at the center of the analysis. The Visibility Score indicates what percentage of the 25 prompts a brand appears in. 30% means: present in roughly every third relevant answer. Average Position shows how far forward in the answer a brand appears. And Citations reveal which sources AI systems actually draw on when formulating a recommendation.
Overall ranking
Visibility Score across all three platforms, averaged over the measurement period.
0.4 percentage points separate rank 1 from rank 2. That's the tightest race we've seen in this series so far. In HR software, Personio was present in more than twice as many prompts as the runner-up. In the SMP market, SAP had an insurmountable lead. In spend management, that kind of lead doesn't exist.
Behind the top two, DATEV, Spendesk, Payhawk, and Qonto form a dense midfield between 26% and 31%. The gaps are small enough that the order could shift within a few weeks if a single substantial article appears in one of the relevant source types.
The Visibility Score alone doesn't tell the full story. Equally important is how far forward in the answer a brand appears — whether it's the first or the fifth recommendation.
| Vendor | Avg. Position | Share of Voice |
|---|---|---|
| Moss | 2.6 | 5.67% |
| DATEV | 2.8 | 5.49% |
| Pleo | 3.1 | 5.63% |
| Spendesk | 3.3 | 5.04% |
| Payhawk | 3.4 | 4.83% |
| Qonto | 3.5 | 4.42% |
The top six vendors are between position 2.6 and 3.5 — less than two spots apart. In other categories in this series, the gap between the leaders and the rest was considerably larger; top vendors sat at position 2, everything else beyond 4. Not here.
That has consequences. Someone scanning a ChatGPT answer primarily registers the first two or three names. From position 5 onward, things get difficult. With gaps as small as those in this category, very little determines whether a brand lands in the attention zone or just below it — sometimes a handful of additional citation sources is enough.
Three platforms — three different rankings
None of the three platforms mirrors the overall ranking. The deviations aren't cosmetic; they're structural.
ChatGPT
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pleo | 36.6% |
| 2 | Spendesk | 34.2% |
| 2 | Moss | 34.2% |
| 4 | Payhawk | 26.7% |
| 5 | SAP | 24.2% |
| 6 | Circula | 21.7% |
| 7 | Qonto | 20.5% |
| 8 | DATEV | 19.3% |
| 9 | Ramp | 16.8% |
| 9 | American Express | 16.8% |
Google AI Overviews
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pleo | 50.7% |
| 2 | Moss | 44.6% |
| 3 | Payhawk | 41.2% |
| 4 | Qonto | 40.5% |
| 5 | Spendesk | 35.8% |
| 6 | DATEV | 27.0% |
| 7 | Circula | 25.0% |
| 7 | Lexware | 25.0% |
| 9 | Candis | 18.2% |
| 10 | American Express | 16.2% |
Perplexity
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | DATEV | 46.3% |
| 2 | SAP | 40.3% |
| 3 | Moss | 24.2% |
| 4 | Spendesk | 22.1% |
| 5 | Payhawk | 19.5% |
| 6 | Oracle | 18.1% |
| 6 | Lexware | 18.1% |
| 6 | Qonto | 18.1% |
| 9 | Pleo | 16.8% |
| 9 | NetSuite | 16.8% |
Pleo sits at rank 1 on Google AI Overviews with 50.7%. On Perplexity, the same brand, in the same week, lands at rank 9 with 16.8%. That's a 34 percentage point difference.
DATEV shows exactly the opposite: barely visible on ChatGPT (rank 8, 19.3%), clear leader on Perplexity with 46.3%. For a finance manager, that's a real difference. Open ChatGPT and you'll barely notice DATEV. Open Perplexity and DATEV is the first name that comes up — ahead of Moss, ahead of Pleo, ahead of everyone else. That's neither coincidence nor measurement noise. Perplexity weights German-language specialist portals and reference sites more heavily, and DATEV has been embedded in those sources for years.
SAP shows the same pattern, slightly less pronounced: rank 5 on ChatGPT, absent from the top 10 on Google AI Overviews, rank 2 on Perplexity. Same vendor, three different rankings.
Building an AI strategy around a single platform creates systematic blind spots on the others. In a market like this — where Moss, Pleo, Spendesk, and Payhawk are largely targeting the same mid-market customers — platform coverage plays a considerable role in determining which brand a buyer notices in the first place.
Who wins which buying moment?
The overall ranking shows who appears most frequently. What it doesn't show: which specific questions a brand is present for, and which ones it misses.
Corporate Cards
"Recommend corporate credit card for startups and scale-ups in Germany?" — "Where can I find corporate cards that integrate seamlessly with our accounting and ERP systems?" — "Which corporate card solutions are worth it in 2026 for mid-sized companies with multiple locations?" — et al.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Moss | 58.8% |
| 2 | Qonto | 48.7% |
| 3 | Pleo | 46.5% |
| 4 | Payhawk | 46.4% |
| 5 | American Express | 42.2% |
The only buying moment in the entire report where a spend management specialist leads. Moss ahead of Qonto and Pleo. American Express landing at rank 5 is unsurprising — the brand appears in thousands of articles about business travel, credit cards, and B2B payments, regardless of how well the product fits the specific query.
What stands out most is the density. Five vendors between 42% and 59%, with no one dominant at the top. Getting onto this shortlist means winning the entry point into the buying process. Staying off it means becoming invisible — even if the product is objectively superior.
Invoice Processing
"Recommend a system for automatically reviewing, approving, and paying invoices?" — "Recommend automated invoice processing with OCR and posting suggestions" — "Which software digitizes and processes incoming invoices automatically?" — et al.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SAP | 40.9% |
| 2 | DATEV | 39.4% |
| 3 | DocuWare | 25.4% |
| 4 | Microsoft | 24.6% |
| 5 | Lexware | 23.6% |
Not a single spend management vendor in the top 5. Instead: SAP, DATEV, DocuWare, Microsoft, Lexware. Four legacy vendors plus an ERP ecosystem. For AI systems, the concept of "invoice processing" is firmly associated with enterprise software and tax platforms — not modern spend management tools.
That's not because Moss, Pleo, or Spendesk lack the functionality. They all have it. It's about the sources AI draws on. Articles about invoice processing have been written in German specialist press for twenty years, and the names that appear there are SAP and DATEV.
For the newer vendors, this is a buying moment that's lost before a single product feature gets compared.
Spend Management
"Which tool gives me a central view of all company expenses in one dashboard?" — "Recommend a comprehensive spend management platform for mid-sized companies in Germany" — "Recommend a spend management solution with GDPR compliance and German servers" — et al.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Spendesk | 50.2% |
| 2 | Circula | 33.7% |
| 3 | Payhawk | 31.1% |
| 4 | Moss | 30.6% |
| 5 | Pleo | 25.6% |
The category that names the product segment — and Spendesk leads with a clear margin. 50.2% versus 33.7% for Circula in second. The paradox here: whoever owns the category name wins the category, but only if they actually appear under that name in specialist articles and comparisons. Spendesk has built that name-level presence over years. Most other vendors are stronger in specific buying moments — corporate cards, invoice workflows — than under the generic umbrella term.
Structurally, this means the "Spend Management" parent category functions almost like its own brand in AI answers, with Spendesk as the dominant association. Becoming visible under that label requires appearing in texts that carry exactly that term — not articles about individual features.
Accounting Integration
"Recommend expense management with direct DATEV integration?" — "Recommend a corporate credit card that automatically exports to Lexware and DATEV?" — "Which spend management tool has the best accountant integration?" — et al.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | DATEV | 54.2% |
| 2 | Lexware | 45.9% |
| 3 | Pleo | 33.3% |
| 4 | Payhawk | 33.2% |
| 5 | SAP | 31.7% |
The only category dominated by German vendors — but not the modern ones. DATEV and Lexware lead with 54.2% and 45.9%. Both are the platforms that spend management tools need to integrate with, and that's exactly what's embedded in the sources. Ask about "accounting integration" and you get the accounting platform named first, then the tools that connect to it.
Pleo at rank 3 with 33.3% shows that a specialized vendor can absolutely become visible here — through consistent presence in German specialist content covering DATEV and Lexware integrations. Competitors who haven't built that presence land outside the top 5 despite having comparable technical integrations. The articles written about DATEV-compatible corporate cards mention only a subset of the vendors that technically qualify. A source gap, not a product gap.
Competitive Comparison
"Pleo vs Moss vs Spendesk — which spend management tool to recommend for German SMEs?" — "European spend management alternative to US vendors for GDPR-compliant use" — "Which spend management solution offers the best price-performance ratio for SMEs right now?" — et al.
| Rank | Vendor | Visibility Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Moss | 59.0% |
| 2 | Pleo | 53.0% |
| 3 | Qonto | 49.6% |
| 4 | Spendesk | 40.2% |
| 5 | Payhawk | 28.2% |
This category contains two fairly different question types, and it's worth looking at them separately.
Directed comparisons like "Pleo vs Moss vs Spendesk — which spend management tool to recommend for German SMEs?" reflect a buyer who already has a shortlist and wants to validate it. The three brands named in the prompt all appear with 100% — the question itself names them. What's interesting here is something else: which names does the AI add unprompted? In this case DATEV (19%), Qonto (16.7%), and Lexoffice (9.5%). That's the moment when a brand not yet on the list can break onto an existing shortlist. For DATEV, Qonto, and Lexoffice, that position is genuinely valuable: they're named even though the user explicitly asked about others.
Open comparisons like "Which European spend management alternative to US vendors" or "Which all-in-one financial platform for startups" measure something different. Here the shortlist forms from scratch. The rankings look quite different:
- "European alternative to US vendors": Pleo 52.4%, Moss and Qonto tied at 41.3%.
- "Price-performance ratio": Qonto 62.7%, Payhawk 60.3%, Pleo and Spendesk at 56.3% each.
- "All-in-one financial platform for startups": Qonto 66.7%, Finom and Pleo at 52.4% each.
The aggregated category score blends both question types. That's not a methodological weakness, but a pointer for anyone working with the data strategically: the real information sits at the prompt level. A brand can dominate directed comparisons and not appear at all in open ones, or vice versa. Both positions matter, but they arise at different points in the buying process and are driven by different sources.
How AI processes questions
When ChatGPT receives a question, it doesn't answer directly from memory. Instead, it internally generates several related search queries and aggregates the results. These internal queries are called fanout queries. An AI system "fans out" the user's question into multiple sub-queries and assembles a more comprehensive answer from the results.
In our dataset, fanouts averaged 1.78 queries per execution on ChatGPT and 1.33 on Perplexity. Each of our prompts effectively represents a whole cluster of sub-questions. A brand that appears for "corporate credit card for startups" will very likely also appear for "corporate card for scale-ups", because the AI searches the same source pool. What we measure is therefore less the visibility at a specific exact phrasing than the structural presence within an entire question family.
This also explains part of the platform differences. ChatGPT fans out more broadly, draws on more sources, and weights international comparison portals more heavily. Perplexity fans out more narrowly, stays closer to the original phrasing, and weights specialized German-language specialist sources more heavily. One and the same product can therefore rank high on one platform and barely appear on another. Not because of different product quality, but because of different source architecture.
What AI actually reads
The Visibility Scores show who's in front. The citation analysis explains why.
The dataset covers over 4,440 citations from 666 distinct domains. Earned media in the traditional sense — business press, specialist media, founder portals — accounts for around 19% of cited sources. Social sources, overwhelmingly YouTube, around 6%. Wikipedia and institutions combined around 1.5%. The by far largest block, just over 73%, falls on a mix of vendors' own content hubs and neutral specialist content. That's the most notable finding: in this category, AI systems draw heavily on vendor-owned editorial content as a source.
Eight of the top 10 domains are brand sites from vendors in this category. Not as product pages — as active content hubs. payhawk.com, qonto.com, circula.com, klippa.com, agicap.com, pleo.io, spendesk.com, and lexware.de appear in the citations because these companies regularly publish guides, comparison articles, and listicles that name other vendors. The AI cites this content regardless of which brand is featured most prominently. Running a hub like this earns citations for yourself and simultaneously supplies the raw material from which AI derives rankings of your competitors. That's the central pattern of this category: your own content infrastructure isn't marketing material — it's a source that AI systems draw from directly.
payhawk.com and qonto.com are practically tied at the top, at 4.17% and 4.16%. Both have built content hubs that are cited disproportionately in buying-process queries — Payhawk's advice section on spend management, expense management, and corporate cards; Qonto's extensive blog on business finance and startup topics. These are the two domains AI systems reach for most often in this category. Vendors without comparable infrastructure depend on competitor hubs for roughly half of their citations.
omr.com at rank 11 with 1.92%. Alongside Handelsblatt and fuer-gruender.de, one of three German editorial sources in the top 15. What distinguishes OMR from the other two: on Perplexity, OMR ranks 4th among cited domains — considerably further ahead than any other editorial outlet in the DACH market. For vendors specifically building Perplexity visibility, OMR is one of the most important sources available.
fuer-gruender.de at rank 10 with 1.98%. A startup and founder resource that carries particular weight on Google AI Overviews — rank 6 among cited domains there. Brands that want to be named in a startup and early-stage context essentially can't avoid this outlet.
handelsblatt.com at rank 12 with 1.68%. Traditional business press, with stable presence across all three platforms. The strength here is less a peak value on any one platform than consistency across all three.
YouTube at rank 3 with 3.76%. That may seem surprising at first, but it makes sense on reflection. Video content with product relevance is a meaningful source for AI systems — well ahead of LinkedIn or Reddit. YouTube rarely appears in AI visibility strategies in practice. Three of the last four reports in this series show the same pattern.
Review portals are absent from the top 20. That's a structural characteristic of this category. Spend management products are researched less through review portals like Capterra or G2, and considerably more through specialist articles, founder media, and vendors' own content hubs.
Conclusion: Who stands where — and where does potential go unrealized?
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Pleo leads the overall ranking with 34.7% and dominates Google AI Overviews with 50.7%. On Perplexity the brand drops to rank 9 with 16.8%. That's simultaneously the strongest single-platform position and the sharpest Perplexity weakness in the entire report. The most direct lever for Pleo lies in the German-language specialist media and reference sources that Perplexity preferentially cites.
Moss — rank 2 overall with 34.3% and rank 1 in Corporate Cards with 58.8%. The average position in the dataset is the best of any brand (2.6); when Moss appears, it tends to appear near the top of the answer. Visibility is almost entirely dependent on third-party sources, however — the brand's own domain contributes just 1.01% citation share, considerably less than the content hubs of Payhawk or Qonto. Outside of Corporate Cards and Competitive Comparison, Moss is absent from the top 5. Invoice Processing and Accounting Integration are the natural expansion points.
DATEV — rank 3 overall, leads Perplexity with 46.3%. That's not a campaign and not an AI strategy — it's simply the gravitational pull of four decades of German-language tax and accounting specialist press. For every spend management vendor, this means DATEV isn't the competitor to overtake; it's the context you need to appear in. Accounting Integration with DATEV at 54.2% is the anchor category — vendors absent from it are almost inevitably bypassed at a critical point in the buying process.
Spendesk — rank 4 overall, leads Spend Management with 50.2%. Spendesk owns the category name in AI answers, and for a company explicitly positioning itself as a spend management platform, that's exactly the right foothold. The other side: presence in Corporate Cards (rank 6, 33.7%) and Competitive Comparison (rank 4, 40.2%) is weaker. Owning the parent category sometimes means losing the entry-level questions buyers actually ask first.
Payhawk — rank 5 overall, in the middle of the pack across all categories, not dominant in any single one. The pattern of a vendor with broad, consistent presence but no peak position. In a market where buyers switch between platforms and buying moments, that's a stable but slow position. A breakthrough would come from actively occupying a category where gaps currently exist — Invoice Processing or Accounting Integration would be realistic targets.
Qonto — rank 6 overall, rank 2 in Corporate Cards with 48.7%, rank 3 in Competitive Comparison with 49.6%. Strong in the entry categories, noticeably weaker in the parent Spend Management category (rank 8, 21.1%). For a vendor that comes from business banking and is expanding toward spend management, that's the expected configuration — and simultaneously the strategic challenge. Selling corporate cards means you also need to be perceived as a spend management platform, or you'll miss the upsell moment.
SAP — rank 7 overall, rank 1 in Invoice Processing with 40.9%. That's not active positioning in this market — it's the gravitational pull of a vendor absent from virtually no article on invoice processing, ERP integration, or enterprise software. For spend management vendors, SAP in this category is not the target but the context. The 40.9% shows how far that gravity reaches.
Lexware — rank 8 overall, rank 2 in Accounting Integration with 45.9%. Like DATEV, an integration platform rather than a spend management solution. Its presence in the AI ranking comes from its role as a target system that spend management tools export into.
Circula — rank 9 overall, rank 2 in Spend Management with 33.7%. Circula has a stronger position in its core category than the overall ranking suggests — a German vendor that beats three of the top-5 brands in the overall standings within its home segment. In the adjacent categories — Corporate Cards, Accounting Integration, Invoice Processing — Circula is largely invisible. Any query that shifts slightly in those directions, and the brand drops out.
Pliant — rank 11 overall, rank 7 in Corporate Cards with 29.5%. A German corporate card vendor with clear category traction but no presence outside it. Similar pattern to HRworks in the HR Software Report: strong in one category, non-existent in all others. Expanding into Spend Management or Accounting Integration would require a considerably broader source base in those topics.
Candis — rank 14 overall, rank 6 in Invoice Processing with 19.5%. Candis is visible in precisely the category where spend management vendors on average barely appear. That's a deliberate focus, and it works: a brand that specializes in a single buying moment can remain visible in exactly that moment even with a smaller overall score. The strategic cost is invisibility in broader spend management queries.
finway — rank 19 overall with 6.9%. A German spend management vendor that barely registers in the overall ranking and doesn't appear in the top 5 in any individual category. finway.de achieves 1.00% citation share as a domain, but that breadth isn't yet enough to generate consistent ranking visibility. For vendors in this position, the most direct lever is placement in the comparison articles and listicles where the category's top vendors already appear. Building out additional product pages helps less here than presence in the sources AI systems actually pull from.
For DACH vendors, it's worth taking a closer look at the language dynamics of the relevant sources. The decisive lever is not building English-language presence. The dominant citation domains are predominantly German-language: OMR, fuer-gruender.de, Handelsblatt, lexware.de, capterra.com.de, getapp.de. The question isn't whether you're internationally visible — it's which German-language specialist media, founder resources, and comparison portals name you as a reference. Brands present there gain visibility across all three platforms. Those that aren't remain invisible, regardless of how well their own website is optimized.
What Recon Rise does
This report shows the category. We show where your brand sits 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. Then the operational work begins: building the sources AI draws on for your category. Placing earned media, developing comparison content, setting up data structures. The infrastructure that ensures your brand appears in the right answers — consistently, not just once.
To find out what this looks like for your brand: Get in touch
Methodology
Profound AI Visibility Monitoring · 25 prompts across 5 topic areas: Corporate Cards, Invoice Processing, Spend Management, Accounting Integration, Competitive Comparison · Measurement period: April 5–12, 2026 · Platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity · Multiple executions per prompt and platform · 304 unique brands identified · Citation analysis based on 666 unique domains · Region: Germany · Category: FinTech / Spend Management
AI Visibility Index DACH 2026 — Spend Management Recon Rise GmbH · Düsseldorf · reconrise.ai © 2026 Recon Rise. All rights reserved.
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