I run a site that measures which products AI assistants name when somebody asks them to recommend software. I published a call center and contact center platforms board, and rather than publish it and say nothing, I am bringing the result to the people best placed to tell me it is wrong.
Caveat before the number, because it matters more than the number: the nearest board I publish is call centre software, which is not the same category as a PBX, so FreePBX arguably should not be on it at all.
The method. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity were each asked 44 differently worded versions of “What is the best call center software for a 50-person customer support team?”, and every product named across the 132 answers was counted. No product name appears in any of the questions – the engines are never shown a list to pick from.
Where FreePBX landed. The engines named 75 distinct products. FreePBX was named in 0 of the 44 phrasings. The ones closest to it that were: VICIdial 1; Five9, at the top, 75. A second, independent run of all of it named it 0 times as well.
VICIdial is the only open-source telephony project named anywhere in those answers. Everything else returned was a hosted commercial contact centre – either the engines mirroring who buys ads, or a real statement about how the category gets asked about now. Somebody here would know which.
The board and both raw runs are published as files beside it, so every figure above can be recomputed rather than taken on trust:
There is nothing to sign up for and I am not selling anything. What I want is the method taken apart. If the phrasings are loaded, if the name-folding is wrong, or if this category is simply the wrong shape for this project, I would rather hear it here than keep publishing it.