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 479,865 user-initiated retrievals across 3,293 products. This page ranks and analyses that demand. Data refreshed July 20, 2026.
What the data shows
Four patterns stand out in the 30-day window, each computed directly from the table below rather than asserted.
- Developer and AI infrastructure dominate. The top of the ranking is almost entirely tools that engineers integrate — Supabase, Vercel, OpenRouter, and their peers in hosting, databases, and LLM APIs. The five busiest categories (Developer Tools, AI Video Generators, LLM API Providers, Cloud Infrastructure, Project Management) together account for 19.6% of all retrievals. People ask assistants about the pricing of tools they build on far more than about the pricing of everyday consumer apps.
- Machines read these records ~368× more than humans visit them. Across every mapped product, assistants performed 479,865 user-initiated retrievals but only 1,304 humans then arrived on a record from an assistant — a retrieval-to-referral ratio of about 368:1. 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.
- High machine demand does not imply human clicks. 66 products drew 500+ retrievals yet sent zero AI-referred visitors in the window — Brave Search API, for instance, was retrieved 1,816 times with no measured human referral. A record can be heavily used to answer questions while almost no one follows a link to it. Retrievals and referred visitors are genuinely different signals.
- Referral yield varies sharply by category. Among the busiest categories, AI Video Generators converts retrievals into human visits far more often (273 AI-referred visitors on 19,378 retrievals) than Database as a Service (5 on 11,853). 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.
“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 | Developer Tools | 24,211 | 5.0% | 27 | Vercel |
| 2 | AI Video Generators | 19,378 | 4.0% | 26 | Runway |
| 3 | LLM API Providers | 18,710 | 3.9% | 27 | OpenRouter |
| 4 | Cloud Infrastructure | 16,546 | 3.4% | 16 | DigitalOcean |
| 5 | Project Management | 15,438 | 3.2% | 28 | Airtable |
| 6 | Database as a Service | 11,853 | 2.5% | 16 | Supabase |
| 7 | AI Coding Assistants | 10,836 | 2.3% | 22 | GitHub Copilot |
| 8 | AI Chatbots | 9,616 | 2.0% | 20 | Google Gemini |
| 9 | Web Scraping & Data Collection | 7,467 | 1.6% | 19 | Tavily |
| 10 | CRM | 6,503 | 1.4% | 21 | HubSpot CRM |
| 11 | AI/GPU Cloud Compute | 6,411 | 1.3% | 11 | RunPod |
| 12 | AI Voice Tools | 6,357 | 1.3% | 16 | ElevenLabs |
| 13 | Email API & Delivery | 6,324 | 1.3% | 14 | Resend |
| 14 | AI Transcription APIs | 6,315 | 1.3% | 12 | Google Cloud Speech-to-Text |
| 15 | Business VPN | 6,290 | 1.3% | 11 | Tailscale |
Deep dive on the busiest category: Developer Tools →
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