New index tracks which outsourcers AI recommends: Armasourcing
MANILA, PHILIPPINES — A narrow cluster of firms captures most of the visibility when AI assistants recommend outsourcing services to buyers, with a single answering-service provider appearing in more than 85% of queries and no virtual assistant or SMB outsourcing firm exceeding 60%, a new measurement from Philippine-based outsourcing analytics firm Armasourcing shows.
The AI Visibility Index ran 480 controlled queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity on August 3, 2026, supplemented by 1,485 real user answers collected through DataForSEO, a commercial search-data provider, spanning August 2025 through August 2026.
Smith.ai leads answering services with an 85.1% appearance rate across 168 runs
Smith.ai appears in 85.1% of answering-service runs in the index, reaching 97.6% on Gemini, the highest platform score recorded across any category. BELAY and Time Etc share the virtual assistant category lead at 55.8% each, and Helpware leads SMB business process outsourcing (BPO) outsourcing at 39.7%.
A company scores only when its name appears in the body of an AI answer after every citation link is stripped; each firm counts at most once per query. These are Armasourcing’s measurements of assistant outputs, not an independent OA assessment or ranking of the firms named. Armasourcing says it will publish the index quarterly, freezing each edition’s dataset on its collection date so that editions can be compared, with a Q4 2026 edition due to report movement against the current figures.
“We publish the index anyway, because the alternative is an industry measuring itself with numbers nobody can check,” said Eli Gutilban, founder and CEO of Armasourcing.
Athena’s 49-point gap between Gemini and ChatGPT shows single-platform data is not enough
Athena, a premium virtual assistant service, appears in 51.3% of Gemini runs and 2.6% of ChatGPT runs, a 49-percentage-point spread showing that a firm’s score on one assistant tells it nothing reliable about its standing on the others.
Teleperformance, Concentrix, TaskUs, and Accenture were excluded from the analysis by design because the buyer questions targeted small business procurement, not enterprise contract.
Armasourcing placed itself inside the index and scored 0.6%, appearing in one of 156 virtual assistant runs.
A BPO firm that measures its AI visibility on a single assistant is reading a platform-specific result that may be missing the buyers using the other three major platforms entirely.
“An independent tracker, ZeroRank, shows the same result for us, which is a useful check that our counting is not flattering anyone,” Gutilban added.
For outsourcing operators tracking their market presence, the cross-platform variance in the index points to a structural gap in how firms typically measure AI-driven exposure.
Reaching buyers through an AI assistant is not the same as ranking on a search engine, where results are consistent across users: on an assistant, the same query can surface a different shortlist depending on which platform the buyer opens.
The index also found that 44% of answering-service runs named at least one AI receptionist product alongside or instead of a traditional managed service provider, a sign that the category itself is being redefined by the assistants that buyers are now using to discover providers.
Armasourcing is currently subscribed as an Outsource Accelerator (OA) BPO Partner. Through OA’s Marketing, Sales, and Source Partner Hubs, the firm accesses a unified growth platform designed to convert high-intent prospects and accelerate deal flow in the outsourcing industry.
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Disclosure: Outsource Accelerator uses AI tools in the backend of its editorial workflow. Every article is reviewed and verified by a human editor before publication.
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