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Bersyn Weekly Edition 1: Five SaaS companies AI is failing this week

Starting today, every Wednesday we publish a Bersyn Weekly edition — five public scans of B2B SaaS companies that AI assistants are getting wrong. Same methodology as our previous public scans: twenty buyer Conversations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, scoring how often each Surface names the company versus a competitor. The why is the same one that drove this whole product into existence: AI is now an inbound surface, and your buyers are asking about products in your category right now. If the four big assistants do not name you when those Conversations happen, you are not in the consideration set.

This edition curates from the scan run we executed on 22 May 2026. The raw data has been public since the day we ran it; we are now using it to seed a recurring series. Edition 2 will be a fresh scan of a different category. The schedule from this Wednesday forward is one new edition every seven days.

How the series works

What gets included. Companies with five or more employees, real B2B SaaS, not solo consultancies or freelance shops. Categories rotate week to week — one edition might be documentation tools, the next sales tools, the next observability, the next note-taking. A category appears once and then takes a break for at least four editions before we revisit it. The goal is breadth, not piling on a single sector.

What we measure. Per-Surface mention rate (out of five Conversations per Surface, twenty Conversations total per company), the top competitor named in the scanned company's place, and the Gap type for each Surface: Omitted (the AI did not name the company at all), Misclassified (the AI named the company but placed it in the wrong category), Generic (the AI gave a category answer without naming any specific brand including the scanned one), or Confused (the AI named the company but described a different product). We publish the receipt, not a summary.

How to get scanned. Any B2B SaaS founder can run a free first scan at bersyn.com. We feature companies whose data is interesting, not whose founders ask. If you would rather not be featured publicly, email gissur@qualitas.is before you scan and we will keep your result private. We publish honest scans, including our own.

Edition 1 — five public scans

1. Quantstruct — AI documentation tooling

  • URL: quantstruct.io
  • Category: AI documentation tools (developer-facing)
  • Score: 0.0 / 10
  • Worst Surface: all four tied at zero
  • Named villain: GitBook
  • Gap type per Surface: ChatGPT — Omitted. Claude — Omitted. Perplexity — Omitted. Gemini — Omitted.

Zero out of ten across all four AI Surfaces is the rarest finding we publish, because it requires the company to be uniformly absent from training data, live retrieval, and Google Knowledge Graph at the same time. Quantstruct hit it. Across twenty Conversations covering "best AI documentation tool", "tools for documenting LLM behaviour", and "alternatives to GitBook for AI teams", GitBook was named in nineteen Conversations and Mintlify in eleven. Quantstruct was named in none. Even Perplexity — which usually finds newer entrants via live web fetching — failed to surface the company on any of its five Conversations.

The uncomfortable finding is that the prompts a buyer would naturally type are the exact prompts on which Quantstruct is invisible. GitBook is the default answer; Mintlify is the second default; the rest of the category is downstream noise to the AI Surfaces. Quantstruct's category placement is conceptually closer to GitBook than to most competitors, which makes the absence sharper, not less notable.

We did not contact Quantstruct before publishing. This is a public scan using prompts any of their buyers could send.

2. AllInOneTools — Online PDF and image utilities

  • URL: allinonetools.net
  • Category: Online PDF tools (compress, merge, convert, OCR)
  • Score: 0.0 / 10
  • Worst Surface: all four tied at zero
  • Named villain: Smallpdf
  • Gap type per Surface: ChatGPT — Omitted. Claude — Omitted. Perplexity — Omitted. Gemini — Omitted.

The PDF-tools category is brutally consolidated in the AI Surfaces. Smallpdf was named in eighteen of twenty Conversations; ILovePDF in fourteen. The combined Smallpdf-plus-ILovePDF mention rate on this scan was over 90 percent. AllInOneTools, despite running an active product with hundreds of free utilities, was not named in any Conversation on any Surface.

The uncomfortable finding is the durability of category leaders. Smallpdf launched in 2013 and ILovePDF in 2010. Both have accumulated more than a decade of third-party mentions — comparison articles, Reddit threads, productivity-blog roundups, browser-extension reviews. That accumulation is what the AI Surfaces have learned. A newer competitor in this category is not competing on product; it is competing against thirteen years of compounding web evidence. The fix is not "build a better PDF tool". The fix is targeted Patches that put the brand into the next training cut and the next retrieval index — different Patches for ChatGPT versus Perplexity versus Gemini.

We did not contact AllInOneTools before publishing. This is a public scan using prompts any of their buyers could send.

3. Inkdrop — Markdown notes for developers

  • URL: inkdrop.app
  • Category: Markdown note-taking
  • Score: 1.5 / 10
  • Worst Surface: ChatGPT + Claude + Gemini (three-way tie at the bottom)
  • Named villain: Obsidian
  • Gap type per Surface: ChatGPT — Omitted. Claude — Omitted. Gemini — Omitted. Perplexity — Misclassified.

Inkdrop is a thoughtfully built indie product with a loyal developer following, encrypted sync, plugin architecture, and a clear positioning around code-first notes. On the AI Surfaces it is essentially invisible against Obsidian, which was named in eleven Conversations, and Notion, which was named in ten. The only Surface that named Inkdrop at all was Perplexity, and it placed Inkdrop in the "general productivity notes" bucket rather than the developer-notes bucket where the product actually lives — a Misclassified result is in some ways more painful than an Omitted one, because the company is visible but mislabelled.

The uncomfortable finding is that a small loyal user base does not translate to AI Surface presence. Inkdrop has been in market since 2017; it has paying customers; the Twitter and dev.to footprint exists. None of that is enough on its own. The category-leader brands — Obsidian, Notion, Logseq — have orders of magnitude more third-party citation density, and the AI Surfaces have learned only the dominant names. The Patch for Inkdrop is per-Surface: ChatGPT and Claude need accumulated developer-blog and Reddit-r/programming mentions in the next training cut; Gemini needs domain-level signals in Google Knowledge Graph; Perplexity needs SERP presence on "best markdown notes for developers" specifically, where the misclassification can be corrected by clearer category framing on the company's own pages.

We did not contact Inkdrop before publishing. This is a public scan using prompts any of their buyers could send.

4. Tally.so — No-code form builder

  • URL: tally.so
  • Category: Online form builders
  • Score: 4.0 / 10
  • Worst Surface: ChatGPT + Gemini
  • Named villain: Jotform (in the Surfaces that omit Tally) — Typeform overall
  • Gap type per Surface: ChatGPT — Omitted. Gemini — Generic. Claude — Named. Perplexity — Named.

Tally.so is the highest scorer in this edition, and we are including it precisely for that reason. Four out of ten is the strongest result among the seven companies in the 22 May scan, and it is still a failure. Claude and Perplexity both named Tally with reasonable frequency; the company has clearly built enough live-retrieval and training-data presence to land in two of the four Surfaces. ChatGPT and Gemini, the two Surfaces most dependent on training data and search-engine knowledge graphs, named Typeform and Jotform in every Conversation where Tally was the natural answer.

The uncomfortable finding is the per-Surface unevenness. The same company, in the same category, at the same moment, can be a confident "yes, you should use this" on Claude and a complete absence on ChatGPT. Buyers do not know which Surface they are using when they ask. A founder cannot ship a single piece of content and expect it to lift all four. Tally's Patch sequence would lead with ChatGPT — third-party mentions of "Tally" by name in form-builder roundups and Reddit threads — and follow with Gemini-targeted Wikidata and Crunchbase reinforcement. Claude and Perplexity are already working; do not break what works.

We did not contact Tally.so before publishing. This is a public scan using prompts any of their buyers could send.

5. Pylon — Modern B2B customer support

  • URL: usepylon.com
  • Category: B2B customer support platforms (Slack-native ticketing)
  • Score: 2.0 / 10
  • Worst Surface: ChatGPT + Gemini
  • Named villain: Zendesk
  • Gap type per Surface: ChatGPT — Omitted. Claude — Generic. Gemini — Omitted. Perplexity — Named.

Pylon is a Y Combinator company, well funded, and operates in the specific niche of Slack-native B2B customer support — a category Zendesk does not lead on product, but does lead on AI Surface mindshare. Across twenty Conversations covering "best B2B customer support tool", "Slack-based ticketing", and "alternatives to Zendesk for technical teams", Zendesk was named in fourteen Conversations and Intercom in fourteen more. Pylon was named in three, all on Perplexity. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini named Zendesk and Intercom even on prompts where Pylon's positioning is much closer to what the buyer described.

The uncomfortable finding is that even on category-defining queries — "Slack-native ticketing" is closer to Pylon's literal product definition than to Zendesk's — the AI Surfaces default to the well-known brand. The training data does not yet contain enough Pylon-by-name references in the Slack-native-ticketing context for the Surfaces to make the substitution. This is a Patch-shaped problem, not a positioning problem. Pylon's positioning is correct; the citation density is not yet there. The Patch sequence is the same shape as Tally's: ChatGPT and Gemini first, third-party mentions and SERP presence on the precise category terms.

We did not contact Pylon before publishing. This is a public scan using prompts any of their buyers could send.

Three patterns we keep seeing

Whatever was big at the last training cut keeps getting recommended. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini all lean on training data, and that data is anchored to whoever had the most third-party citations at the cutoff date. Newer entrants do not get rotated in. The category leader from two years ago is still the default answer today, even when product reality has moved on.

The Gap is per-Surface, not uniform. A company can be a confident "yes" on Claude and a total Omission on ChatGPT, in the same Conversation, in the same minute. Tally.so in this edition is the cleanest example. Treating "AI visibility" as a single number is the wrong frame. The Patch is per-Surface, because the failure is per-Surface.

The named villain is usually consistent within a category — which concentrates the fix. In customer support, both Plain and Pylon lose to Zendesk. In PDF tools, AllInOneTools loses to Smallpdf. In documentation, Quantstruct loses to GitBook. This consistency is useful, because it means the Patches for any company in the same category share a structural shape: the third-party mentions, the Knowledge Graph signals, the SERP positioning are aimed at the same dominant competitor. One company's Patch is roughly transferable to its category peers.

What to do if your company is here

If you are one of the companies in this edition, this is not an attack. We publish honest scans, including our own scan of Bersyn, where we found exactly the same kind of Gaps we are publishing about you. The data above is the same data you would see if you ran a free scan on your own product right now. It is not curated, not adversarial, and not run with hostile prompts.

If you want to fix the Gaps, the free first scan at bersyn.com is the same data you are seeing here, but for your own decision-making — your own Conversations, your own competitors named, your own per-Surface breakdown. The $49 one-time audit at audit.bersyn.com gives you the per-Surface Patches as a deliverable: a PDF with copy-pasteable text suggestions tied to specific pages on your site, scoped to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini separately.

What is coming in Edition 2

Edition 2 publishes next Wednesday. Category: B2B sales tools — CRM, prospecting, and sequencing platforms. The candidate list this week includes Customer.io, Salesloft, Apollo, Reply, and Lemlist. We will lock the final five before scan time and publish the receipts on Wednesday.

If you want a category scanned in a future edition, reply to this post with the category name. We are running scans daily through 30 June, and the Wednesday cadence is the publication schedule, not the scan schedule.

Want your company scanned for free? Start here: bersyn.com.

— Gissur Þór Rúnarsson, Founder, Bersyn (Reykjavík)

Bersyn Weekly Edition 1 — published 27 May 2026. Methodology, raw scan data, and prompts available at github.com/gthorr/Bersyn/tree/main/marketing/outreach/scans.