- Zoho Payroll
- RazorpayX Payroll
- greytHR
- Keka
Issue 01 · Payroll and HRMS software · India · 28 August 2026
We asked four AI enginesthe 40 questions a payrollbuyer asks. Two companiesown the answers.
Forty questions, four engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. 160 runs, 159 answers. Run by hand in the consumer apps from India, logged in as an ordinary user, every answer read and tallied by a person.
01 · The questions
This is what a buyer typesbefore they ever see a website.
- 01 Which payroll software is best for a 50-person company in India?
- 02 Best HRMS for a startup in Bengaluru with 30 employees?
- 03 Which payroll software handles PF, ESI and TDS automatically in India?
- 04 Cheapest reliable payroll software for a small business in India?
- 05 Is there any free payroll software for small companies in India?
- 06 Keka vs greytHR — which is better for a 100-employee company? · names a brand
- 07 Zoho Payroll vs RazorpayX Payroll for an Indian startup? · names a brand
- 08 Darwinbox vs Keka for a 500-employee company in India? · names a brand
- 09 Which HRMS is best for a manufacturing company in India with factory workers and biometric attendance?
- 10 Best payroll software for a retail chain in India with shift workers across multiple stores?
- 11 Which HR software do Indian IT services companies with 200 to 1000 employees use?
- 12 Best payroll software for a CA firm that runs payroll for many client companies in India?
- 13 Which HRMS is good for schools and colleges in India?
- 14 Best payroll and HR software for hospitals and clinics in India?
- 15 Which payroll software integrates with Tally in India?
- 16 Which HRMS integrates with Zoho Books for accounting?
- 17 Payroll software in India that pays salaries directly to bank accounts?
- 18 Which HR software lets employees apply for leave and download payslips on a mobile app in India?
- 19 Best attendance and leave management software for a small office in India?
- 20 Which payroll software generates Form 16 and files TDS returns in India?
- 21 HR software in India that handles gratuity, bonus and full and final settlement correctly?
- 22 Which HRMS supports new labour codes compliance in India?
- 23 Best payroll software for a company with employees in multiple Indian states with different professional tax rules?
- 24 Which payroll software is best for a Mumbai-based mid-size company?
- 25 Best HRMS for a Delhi NCR company with 300 employees?
- 26 Which HR software do Indian startups that raised Series A typically use?
- 27 Which payroll software is easiest to set up for a first-time HR manager in India?
- 28 HRMS with good customer support in India, phone support and not just email?
- 29 Which payroll software offers WhatsApp notifications for employees in India?
- 30 Best HR software for hiring, onboarding and payroll together for an Indian SME?
- 31 Which HRMS has performance management and OKRs built in, for an Indian company?
- 32 Is Keka good for payroll, and what are its main problems? · names a brand
- 33 greytHR reviews — is it still worth it in 2026? · names a brand
- 34 What are the alternatives to Zoho People for Indian companies? · names a brand
- 35 Which payroll software is best for contract and gig workers in India?
- 36 Best HRMS for a Hyderabad pharma company with plant and office staff?
- 37 How much does payroll software cost per employee per month in India?
- 38 Which payroll software should I move to from Excel for 40 employees in India?
- 39 Which HRMS do Indian companies with remote and hybrid teams prefer?
- 40 Payroll software recommended by chartered accountants in India?
02 · Four engines, four answers
Same question.Four different shortlists.
Question 1 to every engine. Brands in brass are the ones it named.
Which payroll software is best for a 50-person company in India?
- greytHR
- Keka
- Zoho Payroll
- Darwinbox
- PeopleStrong
Re-captured 29 August 2026- RazorpayX Payroll
- Zoho Payroll
- Zoho People
- greytHR
- factoHR
- Keka
- Keka
- greytHR
- Zoho Payroll
03 · The leaderboard
Two brands appear infour of every five answers.
Times named, out of every possible answer in the view. The unprompted view removes the six questions that name a brand in the question itself.
04 · Engines differ
Same company.Different engine.Different result.
ChatGPT gives a tight five-name list. AI Overviews has a long tail. A brand can be strong on one and missing on another, so you have to work on each one.
ChatGPT24distinct brands named5.1names per answer
Perplexity39distinct brands named4.7names per answer
Gemini51distinct brands named6.0names per answer
Google AI Overviews71distinct brands named7.4names per answer
HROne, times named per engine
ChatGPT12
Perplexity13
Gemini5
Google AI Overviews22
05 · Named zero times
Ranking on Googledid not put them ina single AI answer.
Each of these companies is on Google's first page for the query beside its name. None of them was named in any of the 159 answers.
- Trilliant SoftwareGoogle page 1 for: Which payroll software is best for a 50-person company in India?
- Runtime HRMSGoogle page 1 for: Which payroll software is best for a 50-person company in India?
- MyndGoogle page 1 for: Which payroll software is best for a 50-person company in India?
- WaggexGoogle page 1 for: Which payroll software handles PF, ESI and TDS automatically in India?
- JibbleGoogle page 1 for: Best attendance and leave management software for a small office in India?
0of 160
06 · Cited is not recommended
The engine read their page.It still left them out.
Engines cite vendor blogs and comparison pages as sources. Waggex and Trilliant pages were used to write answers that then recommended somebody else. Being crawled is not being chosen.
Read by the engine
- Waggex
- Trilliant Software
Named to the buyer
WaggexTrilliant Software
07 · What this costs
The answer is wherethe search stops.
OpenAI says India passed 100 million weekly ChatGPT users in February 2026. That is one assistant, in one country, in a single week, and it is the company’s own count, published by them and not independently audited.
OpenAI, “Introducing OpenAI for India”, 18 February 2026Pew tracked a month of real browsing for 900 people. On Google pages that carried an AI summary, 8% of visits ended in a click on a search result. On pages without one, 15% did. The answer is where the search stops.
Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025, United States, 900 tracked panellists, March 2025Ahrefs matched four million URLs cited by Google’s AI Overviews against the search pages for the same queries. 37.9% of them appeared in the first ten blocks of that page, ads, snippets and answer boxes counted alongside organic listings. Ranking and being cited have become two different jobs.
Ahrefs, 2 March 2026, 863,000 search pages, 4 million cited URLsWhat we would do for a zero-named brand
- 01
Open the doors. Check that every engine's crawler (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot) can reach and read the site, and fix what blocks it: robots rules, client-side rendering, pages behind scripts.
- 02
Structure what is already published. Mark up the pricing, comparison and FAQ pages with the schema each engine parses (Organization, Product, Offer in rupees, FAQ), so the facts on them can be quoted.
- 03
Add the files engines check first: an llms.txt, a clean sitemap, and one consistent set of entity facts (name, founded, headquarters, pricing) wherever the brand is described.
- 04
Brief, do not write. For each of the 40 questions, a page-level brief: which page answers it, what it must state, in what order. The team writes; we check it before it goes live.
- 05
Fix the third-party record. The listings and threads the engines cite for this category (G2, Capterra, SoftwareSuggest, Reddit) are audited for missing, wrong or rupee-less entries and corrected.
- 06
Re-run the 40 questions every month, per engine, and fix what moved.
Want this runfor your category?
Fifteen minutes. We pick ten of your buyers' questions, run them live, and show you who gets named.
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