AEO for alumni management software: AI search visibility ranking

What we observed in this category

Almabase leads the alumni management software category with a composite score of 40.0, more than double the next ranked brands Graduway and Hivebrite, which both sit at 17.5. The category average visibility is just 3.8%, meaning the top three brands at 25.0% each are dramatically outperforming the field. Almabase's position is reinforced by a 75.0% citation rate, which no other brand with positive visibility comes close to matching. The gap between first place and the rest is functionally large enough to make the top spot a distinct tier of its own.

A clear divergence exists between brands that appear in AI responses and brands that get cited as sources. Graduway and Hivebrite both hold 25.0% visibility but have 0.0% citation rates, meaning Google AI Mode names them without anchoring to their domains as references. Conversely, Graduway by Gravyty and ToucanTech have zero visibility but citation rates of 50.0% and 37.5% respectively, suggesting the AI pulls from their content as background evidence while not surfacing them as named answers. This named-versus-trusted split is one of the sharpest patterns in the data.

Google AI Mode is the top engine for every brand in this dataset, indicating the category's AI visibility is concentrated almost entirely in one engine. The top cited sources list includes third-party domains such as gradnet.io, reddit.com, getapp.com, and mightynetworks.com alongside brand-owned domains, showing that Google AI Mode is drawing on review aggregators and community platforms as well as vendor sites. Almabase.com and hivebrite.io both appear in the cited sources list, which aligns with their strong composite scores and confirms the AI is using their own content to support responses.