AI Retrieval Index — Which Software Pricing Do AI Assistants Research Most? | CostBench
AI Retrieval Index — Which Software Pricing Do AI Assistants Research Most?
Shortlist
CostBench · AI Retrieval Index

Which software pricing do AI assistants research most?

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another assistant about software pricing, the assistant sometimes retrieves that product’s CostBench pricing record to answer. Over the last 30 days, AI assistants made 73,863 user-initiated retrievals across 3,317 products. This page ranks and analyses that demand. Data refreshed September 16, 2026.

The most-retrieved software pricing records on CostBench are developer and AI-infrastructure products. In the last 30 days, Higgsfield AI, Bloomberg Terminal, and Cloudflare Zero Trust led all products, and the single busiest category was AI Video Generators (2,738 retrievals). Across the whole catalogue, AI assistants retrieved these pricing records roughly 127× more often than humans arrived on them from an assistant — the demand is overwhelmingly machine-side. Every figure counts retrievals of CostBench’s pricing record for the product, not citations or overall AI visibility.
73,863 user-initiated retrievals assistants fetching a record for a user question
583 AI-referred visitors humans who then arrived from an assistant
154,338 crawler fetches background index crawls — not user demand
3,317 products with signal 893 with enough activity to monitor

What the data shows

Four patterns stand out in the 30-day window, each computed directly from the table below rather than asserted.

  1. Developer and AI infrastructure dominate. The top of the ranking is almost entirely tools that engineers integrate — Higgsfield AI, Bloomberg Terminal, Cloudflare Zero Trust, and their peers in hosting, databases, and LLM APIs. The five busiest categories (AI Video Generators, Financial Data & Terminals, Developer Tools, AI Chatbots, LLM API Providers) together account for 11.9% of all retrievals. People ask assistants about the pricing of tools they build on far more than about the pricing of everyday consumer apps.
  2. Machines read these records ~127× more than humans visit them. Across every mapped product, assistants performed 73,863 user-initiated retrievals but only 583 humans then arrived on a record from an assistant — a retrieval-to-referral ratio of about 127:1. The value of being in an assistant’s answer is mostly in being the machine’s source, not in click-through traffic. That is exactly why we never blend the two numbers.
  3. Referral yield varies sharply by category. Among the busiest categories, LLM API Providers converts retrievals into human visits far more often (22 AI-referred visitors on 1,269 retrievals) than AI/GPU Cloud Compute (3 on 1,039). Consumer-facing AI categories tend to send people onward; developer-infrastructure categories are mostly read by the machine and rarely clicked.

These are single-window observations, not trends. We are publishing one 30-day snapshot; we do not yet make trend claims. See the methodology for what each metric does and does not mean.

Top 50 most-retrieved pricing records

Ranked by user-initiated retrievals over the last 30 days.

# Product Category Retrievals AI-referred
1 Higgsfield AI AI Video Generators 634 9
2 Bloomberg Terminal Financial Data & Terminals 615 9
3 Cloudflare Zero Trust Business VPN 385 2
4 Grok AI Chatbots 374 1
5 Vercel Developer Tools 315 4
6 Vendr Vendor Management 306 0
7 Canva Design Tools 286 6
8 Hailuo AI AI Video Generators 274 4
9 Tailscale Business VPN 262 2
10 Google Veo AI Video Generators 260 2
11 Vast.ai AI/GPU Cloud Compute 257 1
12 Vanta Compliance Management 237 0
13 Supabase Database as a Service 225 3
14 RevenueCat Subscription Billing 212 0
15 Fresha Salon & Spa Software 207 0
16 S&P Capital IQ Pro Financial Data & Terminals 207 4
17 Proofpoint Email Security 203 2
18 Google Cloud Speech-to-Text AI Transcription APIs 199 1
19 Bitdefender GravityZone Endpoint Security 198 3
20 Palo Alto Networks Cybersecurity 196 1
21 OpenRouter LLM API Providers 191 1
22 Pika AI Video Generators 189 0
23 LinkedIn Sales Navigator Sales Intelligence 187 0
24 CoreWeave AI/GPU Cloud Compute 186 0
25 Microsoft Sentinel SIEM 185 1
26 Samsara Fleet Management 181 0
27 FactSet Financial Data & Terminals 180 1
28 Lovable AI Coding Assistants 179 4
29 Kling AI AI Video Generators 178 5
30 AlphaSense Financial Data & Terminals 177 6
31 Google BigQuery Data Warehousing 177 0
32 Looker Studio Business Intelligence 175 0
33 Runway AI Video Generators 175 2
34 Veeam Backup & Recovery 175 0
35 Salesforce CRM 174 2
36 Notion Project Management 173 3
37 CapCut Video Editing 166 3
38 AppSheet No-Code/Low-Code 162 0
39 Cerebras Inference API LLM API Providers 160 1
40 Google Cloud Text-to-Speech AI Voice Tools 160 1
41 Magnific AI AI Design Tools 160 2
42 Refinitiv Eikon Financial Data & Terminals 160 1
43 Apollo.io AI Sales Tools 159 1
44 ElevenLabs AI Voice Tools 158 7
45 SentinelOne Cybersecurity 158 1
46 Jira Service Management Help Desk/Support 157 0
47 Procore Construction Management 153 1
48 Lambda AI/GPU Cloud Compute 152 0
49 AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ALB/NLB) Load Balancers 150 0
50 Make AI Automation 150 2

“Retrievals” = user-initiated retrievals of the product’s CostBench pricing record. “AI-referred” = humans who then arrived on that record from an assistant. Separate signals — never combined.

Which categories AI assistants research most

Retrievals summed across every product in each category. Top 15 shown.

# Category Retrievals Share Products Most retrieved
1 AI Video Generators 2,738 3.7% 27 Higgsfield AI
2 Financial Data & Terminals 2,109 2.9% 22 Bloomberg Terminal
3 Developer Tools 1,388 1.9% 28 Vercel
4 AI Chatbots 1,269 1.7% 20 Grok
5 LLM API Providers 1,269 1.7% 28 OpenRouter
6 Project Management 1,225 1.7% 28 Notion
7 AI/GPU Cloud Compute 1,039 1.4% 11 Vast.ai
8 HR/HRIS 1,011 1.4% 23 ADP
9 Cybersecurity 992 1.3% 15 Palo Alto Networks
10 AI Coding Assistants 970 1.3% 22 Lovable
11 Business VPN 960 1.3% 11 Cloudflare Zero Trust
12 Endpoint Security 890 1.2% 16 Bitdefender GravityZone
13 Cloud Infrastructure 840 1.1% 16 Backblaze B2
14 AI Design Tools 785 1.1% 18 Magnific AI
15 CRM 778 1.1% 22 Salesforce

Deep dive on the busiest category: AI Video Generators →

Represent one of these products? Claim its pricing record free to verify your identity and confirm its sources.