97th Floor AI Search Report: 2026 HR Tech Edition

AI answers lean heavily on "best of" lists

Inclusion in "best [category] software" articles was the strongest single signal we measured, and it held after adjusting for company size. When an HR leader asks for the best HRIS, background check provider or recognition platform, AI tools pull heavily from the lists that already rank for that question.

We checked the top-ranking "best [niche] software" articles for each brand's niche. Brands that appear on at least 80% of those lists have a median AI Search Performance score of 70. Brands that appear on none of them sit at 13. 16% of the brands we studied weren't on a single list we checked.

Volume of mentions on the web beats backlink quality

Web mentions, Reddit threads, YouTube coverage and G2 reviews all tracked closely with AI visibility. So did the sheer number of sites linking to a brand. The classic link-quality measures did not: the share of links from high-authority sites and recent link growth showed no positive relationship once size and category were accounted for.

For an HR Tech marketer, the lesson is that AI shortlists reflect what the market says about you, across many sources. A handful of high-authority links won't make up for a thin footprint on review sites and in community conversations.

The pages AI cites most help buyers compare HR software

The editorial pages earning the most AI citations aren't general HR advice. They're comparison and mid-funnel pages written for someone already shopping for software: the types of HRIS systems, the types of HR software, what HR software costs, the best ATS tools. These are the questions a buyer asks once they know they need a tool and are working out which kind, at what price and from whom.

That's the moment AI tools now handle for buyers, and it's where the shortlist gets built. Top-of-funnel HR how-to content (onboarding tips, engagement ideas) can drive traffic, but it rarely puts a brand in front of an active buyer. For most HR Tech brands, comparison, category and pricing content is the first content to build for AI search.

Content creation strategy: answer early, summarize early, then go deep.

Across 860 audited pages, pages with a key-takeaways summary in the first 30% were cited about twice as often as pages without one. Pages that answered their question in the first 100 words had a smaller edge. Length mattered even more. Pages of 2,000+ words were cited 27% of the time, against 8% for pages under 1,000 words. The median cited page runs about 1,700 words; the median uncited page, about 1,100.

Four items AI content checklists often recommend showed no measurable difference on their own: freshness, a credentialed author, author and date visible without JavaScript, and original data. They're still good practice for readers. They just won't get an HR brand cited by themselves, and ticking more boxes overall didn't raise citation rates.

Content quality beats volume

Unlike third party brand mentions, where AI favored brands with the most sheer volume, owned content is a different story.

Publishing more content doesn't move AI visibility on its own. We split brands by whether they publish faster or slower than peers their size, and by whether their content scored above or below the median for quality (as defined in section 9). Brands that publish more but score lower on quality barely outperform brands that do neither: a median AI Search Performance score of 29 vs. 24. Higher-quality content roughly doubles the score at either pace.

The gap is widest for mid-size HR Tech brands (201 to 1,000 employees), the largest group in the study. Mid-size brands that publish often with weaker content score 21. Mid-size brands that publish often with strong content score 70. For a mid-size brand, volume without quality buys almost nothing.

Technical basics are table stakes, not an advantage

93% of HR Tech sites let AI crawlers in through robots.txt, though only 11 of 115 explicitly welcome them by name; the rest simply don't block them. Most sites pass the other basics too, so these checks rarely separate leaders from laggards. We looked at whether brands missing a basic did worse than others their size. Only one failure clearly hurt: blocking the AI bots that fetch live answers. The two brands that do it both sit well below their size tier.

Structured data is the same story. Only 23% of sites have reasonably complete Organization schema on their homepage, and brands without it performed the same as brands their size that have it. It's hygiene that helps AI tools identify your company, but doesn't appear to be a serious lever that moves visibility on its own.