30 buying questions produced 411 citations. Small consultancies' own sites took 50%, and Salesforce's own properties and other established vendors took 39%.
Questions asked
30
Citations read
411
First-party share
50%
Third-party share
1%
Entry bar
28
Median cited site
46
The study asked 30 questions in three bands: 5 general, 15 medium and 10 specific. It used ChatGPT and Google organic results, with 1 run per question. That gave 411 citations on 197 domains.
A general question is like "best Salesforce consulting partner". A specific one adds a budget, an org size, a product (CPQ, Service Cloud, NPSP) or a billing model.
Small consultancies' own sites took 50% of citations. Established vendors and marketplaces took 39%, forums and social took 8%, and third-party sources took 1%.
Salesforce's own properties lead the established vendors: appexchange.salesforce.com, salesforce.com and trailhead.salesforce.com. appexchange.salesforce.com was cited on 21 of 30 questions. clutch.co is the review site cited, and crm.folio3.com is an example of a small consultancy.
The communities cited are reddit.com, linkedin.com and youtube.com, on 15, 7 and 5 of 30 questions.
| Type | Share of citations | Cited examples |
|---|---|---|
| Small providers' own sites | 50% | crm.folio3.com (7 of 30), findpartners.salesforce.com (6 of 30), foundhq.com (6 of 30), soliantconsulting.com (6 of 30), noltic.com (5 of 30) |
| Established vendors and marketplaces | 39% | appexchange.salesforce.com (21 of 30), salesforce.com (17 of 30), trailhead.salesforce.com (7 of 30), cloudmasonry.com (7 of 30), codleo.com (7 of 30) |
| Directories | 0% | crunchbase.com (1 of 30) |
| Review sites | 1% | clutch.co (1 of 30), goodfirms.co (1 of 30) |
| Publishers and guides | 0% | ecosystem.hubspot.com (1 of 30) |
| Forums and social | 8% | reddit.com (15 of 30), linkedin.com (7 of 30), youtube.com (5 of 30), community.hubspot.com (1 of 30), facebook.com (1 of 30) |
With both engines pooled, own-site share is 46% on general questions, 47% on medium and 57% on specific. ChatGPT goes from 54% on general to 70% on specific. Google organic goes from 41% to 47%. Both engines cite own sites more on specific questions than on general ones.
Third-party share stays small: 3% on general, 1% on medium and 1% on specific.
| Question type | Questions | Citations | First-party | Third-party | ChatGPT first-party | Google organic first-party |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General | 5 | 68 | 46% | 3% | 54% | 41% |
| Medium | 15 | 198 | 47% | 1% | 56% | 42% |
| Specific | 10 | 145 | 57% | 1% | 70% | 47% |
| Both engines | 30 | 411 | 50% | 1% | 62% | 43% |
On all 30 questions the entry bar is 28 and the median cited site scores 46. The first 4 questions gave the same bar, 28.
Own pages get cited here, so the next step is to score a page with the free AEO checker on how easily an engine can quote it.
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