Plugin Visibility Index · AI Plugin Leaderboard · September 2026
AI Plugin Leaderboard: which WordPress plugins ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode recommend
Five plugin categories, three prompts each, three engines: 45 AI answers read in full. The engines agree completely on one category, backup, mostly agree on LMS, and disagree on who leads in the other three. One vendor’s domains turned up as a source in 18 of the 45 answers, in all five categories.
Who each engine names first
The plugin each engine put first most often across its three answers in the category.
| Category | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Google AI Mode | Page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Booking | Amelia (2 of 3) | Amelia (2 of 3) | BookingPress (2 of 3) | Full table |
| Caching | LiteSpeed Cache (3 of 3) | WP Rocket (2 of 3) | No repeat leader | Full table |
| Backup | UpdraftPlus (3 of 3) | UpdraftPlus (3 of 3) | UpdraftPlus (3 of 3) | Full table |
| LMS | LearnDash (3 of 3) | LearnDash (2 of 3) | LearnDash (2 of 3) | Full table |
| Membership | Paid Memberships Pro (2 of 3) | MemberPress (2 of 3) | MemberPress (3 of 3) | Full table |
Named in every answer
Out of 56 plugins that were named at least once, four were named in all nine answers for their category. Booking has no plugin that made every answer.
| Category | Plugin | Named first |
|---|---|---|
| Caching | LiteSpeed Cache | 5 of 9 |
| Backup | UpdraftPlus | 9 of 9 |
| LMS | LearnDash | 7 of 9 |
| Membership | Paid Memberships Pro | 3 of 9 |
| Booking | None. Amelia was closest, at 8 of 9 | 4 of 9 |
What travels across categories
- FS Code’s domains are a source in 18 of 45 answers. fs-poster.com, fs-code.com and booknetic.com appeared in all five categories and on all three engines. The company sells a booking plugin and a social-posting plugin. Earlier runs in this index found the same vendor over-represented (Attribution 01); it has held on new wording and a third engine.
- Two of the five category leaders are not in the wordpress.org directory. LearnDash has no listing, and neither does MemberPress. Directory installs are not what the engines are ranking.
- The largest plugins are often quiet. All-in-One WP Migration (5,000,000+ installs) was named in 2 of 9 backup answers; WP-Optimize (1,000,000+) in 2 of 9 caching answers; ProfilePress (100,000+) in none of the membership answers.
- Google AI Mode leans on YouTube and Reddit; the others barely do. youtube.com was a source in 13 of 15 Google answers and 2 of 30 on the other engines. reddit.com: 7 of 15 on Google, 2 of 30 elsewhere.
- ChatGPT has sources nobody else uses. gigapress.net was in ChatGPT’s retrieval for 9 of its 15 answers, across all five categories, and in no Perplexity or Google answer.
How to read this
Each engine got three different real phrasings per category, taken from Google autocomplete, on the same day. Plugins were counted by first mention against a fixed candidate list per category. With three answers per engine, a one-answer difference is noise: the same prompt to the same engine twice repeats only about three quarters of its products (Run 01).
The leaderboard is re-run monthly with fresh phrasings, never the same string twice, because an identical prompt returns a cached source list and would make the ranking look more stable than it is (Run 04). Earlier runs used a different prompt, so the September figures here are a new baseline rather than a trend.
Is your plugin in these answers?
Send me your wordpress.org slug, or your product URL. I will run your category on all three engines and tell you where you are named, where you are not, and which sites the engines read instead. Free, no call.