AI Retrieval Index — Which Software Pricing Do AI Assistants Research Most? | CostBench
AI Retrieval Index — Which Software Pricing Do AI Assistants Research Most?
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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 78,985 user-initiated retrievals across 3,317 products. This page ranks and analyses that demand. Data refreshed October 11, 2026.

The most-retrieved software pricing records on CostBench are developer and AI-infrastructure products. In the last 30 days, Vercel, Cloudflare Zero Trust, and Higgsfield AI led all products, and the single busiest category was AI Video Generators (3,457 retrievals). Across the whole catalogue, AI assistants retrieved these pricing records roughly 207× 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.
78,985 user-initiated retrievals assistants fetching a record for a user question
382 AI-referred visitors humans who then arrived from an assistant
182,693 crawler fetches background index crawls — not user demand
3,317 products with signal 808 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 — Vercel, Cloudflare Zero Trust, Higgsfield AI, and their peers in hosting, databases, and LLM APIs. The five busiest categories (AI Video Generators, Developer Tools, Financial Data & Terminals, Project Management, Business VPN) together account for 14.2% 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 ~207× more than humans visit them. Across every mapped product, assistants performed 78,985 user-initiated retrievals but only 382 humans then arrived on a record from an assistant — a retrieval-to-referral ratio of about 207:1. 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, AI Chatbots converts retrievals into human visits far more often (22 AI-referred visitors on 1,097 retrievals) than AI/GPU Cloud Compute (1 on 998). 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 Vercel Developer Tools 858 3
2 Cloudflare Zero Trust Business VPN 697 3
3 Higgsfield AI AI Video Generators 674 1
4 Supabase Database as a Service 648 3
5 Bloomberg Terminal Financial Data & Terminals 609 6
6 Tailscale Business VPN 524 1
7 Runway AI Video Generators 341 3
8 PixVerse AI Video Generators 338 1
9 CapCut Video Editing 324 1
10 Vidu AI Video Generators 318 0
11 Notion Project Management 313 1
12 Salesforce CRM 288 2
13 Hailuo AI AI Video Generators 286 1
14 HeyGen AI Video Generators 286 1
15 Netlify Cloud Infrastructure 276 0
16 Cloudflare CDN & Edge 275 0
17 Adobe Firefly AI Image Generators 267 1
18 ElevenLabs AI Voice Tools 266 0
19 Render Developer Tools 257 0
20 Apollo.io Sales Intelligence 254 1
21 Bitwarden Password Management 253 3
22 Vendr Vendor Management 248 1
23 Resend Email API & Delivery 239 0
24 Vast.ai AI/GPU Cloud Compute 238 0
25 Metricool Social Media Management 237 1
26 Magnific AI AI Design Tools 236 0
27 DigitalOcean Cloud Infrastructure 220 0
28 Google Gemini AI Chatbots 216 0
29 OpenAI AI Productivity 216 0
30 Canva Design Tools 215 3
31 Asana Project Management 212 1
32 Microsoft Speech Services AI Voice Tools 212 2
33 Runway API AI Media APIs 210 0
34 Connecteam Employee Scheduling 209 1
35 RevenueCat Subscription Billing 209 0
36 Google BigQuery Data Warehousing 208 0
37 S&P Capital IQ Pro Financial Data & Terminals 206 1
38 Replit Developer Tools 201 2
39 GitHub Developer Tools 198 1
40 Fresha Salon & Spa Software 195 1
41 Vanta Compliance Management 192 0
42 AppSheet No-Code/Low-Code 189 2
43 Brave Search API AI Search APIs 185 1
44 Clockify Time Tracking 185 3
45 Kling AI AI Video Generators 184 1
46 Twilio SMS Marketing 184 1
47 Proton VPN VPN 183 0
48 Veeam Backup & Recovery 183 1
49 Grok AI Chatbots 182 3
50 Pika AI Video Generators 182 0

“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 3,457 4.4% 27 Higgsfield AI
2 Developer Tools 2,285 2.9% 28 Vercel
3 Financial Data & Terminals 2,045 2.6% 22 Bloomberg Terminal
4 Project Management 1,899 2.4% 28 Notion
5 Business VPN 1,543 2.0% 11 Cloudflare Zero Trust
6 LLM API Providers 1,494 1.9% 28 OpenRouter
7 Cloud Infrastructure 1,485 1.9% 16 Netlify
8 Database as a Service 1,127 1.4% 16 Supabase
9 AI Chatbots 1,097 1.4% 20 Google Gemini
10 AI/GPU Cloud Compute 998 1.3% 11 Vast.ai
11 Social Media Management 870 1.1% 24 Metricool
12 AI Design Tools 865 1.1% 18 Magnific AI
13 Video Editing 859 1.1% 20 CapCut
14 CRM 838 1.1% 22 Salesforce
15 AI Image Generators 792 1.0% 21 Adobe Firefly

Deep dive on the busiest category: AI Video Generators →

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