Cooper
Index Update4 min read

The Week 29 Cooper Index: 49 of 80 Software Category Leaders Changed

The first official week-over-week reading of Cooper's software recommendation index, with verified leadership movement across all eight hubs and assistant agreement kept separate from raw AIQ.

Week 29 at a Glance

The Week 29 Cooper Index covers 2,595 products across 80 software categories in eight hubs. The immutable edition records 6,837 cited pages from 3,307 source domains, an increase of 120 products, 199 cited pages, and 188 domains from the Week 28 baseline. Those totals describe the breadth of the edition; they do not rank one product or category against another.

The measurement window runs from July 13 through July 19, 2026, under scoring version aiq-v2. It is the second official immutable edition and therefore the first one that can support week-over-week movement by comparing the same product, category, and Overall scope with Week 28.

The First Official Movers

Leadership changed in 49 of the 80 categories, while 31 leaders held their position. That is a broad reset in the category-level ordering, but not a single league table: every movement below belongs only to the market where it was measured.

In Sales Enablement, Content Camel moved from nineteenth to first, the largest leadership move among the eight hub examples in this overview. Its Week 29 position comes with a first-place category rank from ChatGPT and no Overall category rank from Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity. Marketing Automation tells a different story: Mailchimp moved from eighth to first while appearing in all four assistant rankings—second on ChatGPT and Gemini, third on Claude, and eleventh on Perplexity.

Support and HR also produced new leaders with full assistant breadth. CloudTalk moved from tenth to first in Contact Center, but its assistant positions stretch from first on ChatGPT to twentieth on Gemini and tenth on both Claude and Perplexity. In Recruiting, JazzHR moved from seventh to first with assistant ranks of first, fourth, fifth, and first. Both products are ranked by all four assistants; only the placement pattern differs.

Finance provides the clearest agreement among the selected movers. Cube advanced from sixth to first in FP&A and ranks first with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. In Productivity, M-Files moved from second to first in Document Management even as its category-local Overall AIQ changed from 33 to 31. Rank movement and AIQ movement are separate facts: a product can improve its place because the full category order changed around it.

The IT & Security example is the largest move into first place among these four paired readings. WorkOS rose from sixteenth to first in Identity & Access, ranking first on ChatGPT, tenth on Claude, and eighth on Perplexity, with no Gemini category rank in the Overall scope. In Engineering, Metabase moved from fourth to first in Business Intelligence with a more compact third, third, first, and first assistant pattern.

Where the Assistants Agreed

Sixty-two of the 80 Week 29 category leaders have an Overall category rank from all four assistants. Six go further and rank first with every assistant. That is a useful signal of within-category convergence, but it does not make their raw AIQ values comparable across unrelated markets.

CRM shows how agreement can sharpen even when the Overall leader stays the same. HubSpot CRM remained first in CRM, while its assistant positions changed from third, first, second, and fifth in Week 28 to first across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity in Week 29. Cube reached the same four-assistant first-place pattern in FP&A after moving up from sixth Overall.

Where They Split

Eighteen category leaders lack an Overall rank from at least one assistant: eleven are ranked by three assistants, one by two, and six by only one. Content Camel is a one-assistant leader, while WorkOS is ranked by three. CloudTalk demonstrates a different kind of split: it appears with all four assistants, yet its category positions range from first to twentieth.

An absent assistant rank means only that the product has no category rank in this scope. It does not mean the assistant rejected the product, and it does not explain why the Overall order changed. Breadth, position, AIQ, and evidence volume remain separate observable measures.

Overall and Rising Are Separate

Overall AIQ combines the category-relative Best, Most affordable, and Easiest to set up dimensions. Rising AIQ is its own category-relative measurement and is not folded into any of the results above. The standalone Week 29 Rising AIQ report will keep emerging-product signals separate from these Overall movements.

The same boundary applies between categories. A first-place result in CRM can be compared with the previous CRM edition; it should not be compared by raw AIQ with a first-place result in FP&A, Contact Center, or any other market.

Explore the Week 29 Edition

The immutable Week 29 ranking archive is the fixed source for this edition. It preserves the exact measurement used here even after a later week becomes current.

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