We ran Iris's citation check on 12 cold-email and outbound tools on 8 November 2026. The check works like this: Iris fetches the tool's homepage, derives four questions a buyer in that category would ask an AI assistant, puts each question to two web-search engines (Groq web search and Gemini with Google Search), and records whether the tool's own domain is named in the answer, and who is named instead. Eight answers per tool. No ranking opinion from us anywhere in this table; it is a count.
The table
| Tool | Named in | Groq | Gemini | Named instead (share of this tool's 8 answers) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| hunter.io | 4 of 8 | 1/4 | 3/4 | instantly.ai 50%, mailforge.ai 50%, woodpecker.co 38% |
| lemlist.com | 4 of 7* | 0/3 | 4/4 | apollo.io 57%, salesloft.com 57%, outreach.io 43% |
| apollo.io | 3 of 8 | 2/4 | 1/4 | clay.com 50%, salesforce.com 25%, zoominfo.com 25% |
| snov.io | 3 of 8 | 1/4 | 2/4 | lemlist.com 38%, expandi.io 25%, lusha.com 25% |
| smartlead.ai | 2 of 8 | 0/4 | 2/4 | instantly.ai 75%, apollo.io 50%, lemlist.com 50% |
| woodpecker.co | 2 of 8 | 1/4 | 1/4 | lemlist.com 75%, apollo.io 50%, reply.io 50% |
| saleshandy.com | 2 of 8 | 2/4 | 0/4 | apollo.io 50%, lemlist.com 38%, instantly.ai 38% |
| outreach.io | 2 of 8 | 2/4 | 0/4 | salesforce.com 38%, gong.io 25%, 11x.ai 25% |
| instantly.ai | 0 of 8 | 0/4 | 0/4 | apollo.io 50%, lemlist.com 38%, reply.io 38% |
| mailshake.com | 0 of 8 | 0/4 | 0/4 | apollo.io 50%, outreach.io 38%, instantly.ai 38% |
| quickmail.com | 0 of 8 | 0/4 | 0/4 | lemlist.com 75%, instantly.ai 50%, woodpecker.co 38% |
| reply.io | not checked | – | – | the site did not answer our fetch during the run |
*One of lemlist's eight answers failed to return, so it is scored on seven.
Questions put to the engines included: "What is the best cold email tool for B2B lead generation?", "Which platforms combine LinkedIn outreach with email campaigns?", "What are the top outbound tools that include built-in email validation?", "Which cold outreach platforms offer high deliverability and multichannel support?". Forty distinct questions across the twelve tools.
What the counts say
Three of eleven checked tools were never named. instantly.ai, mailshake.com and quickmail.com scored 0 of 8. No tool was named in more than half of its own answers. The best result in the set was hunter.io at 4 of 8.
The engines disagree, so one check is not a result. lemlist is named in 4 of 4 Gemini answers and 0 of 3 Groq answers. saleshandy and outreach are the reverse: 2 of 4 on Groq, 0 of 4 on Gemini. If you only ask one assistant you will conclude the wrong thing about your visibility. Iris records each engine separately for this reason.
Being everyone else's answer does not mean you win your own. apollo.io appears in the "named instead" column for 7 of the 11 tools, usually at 50% or more. On its own four questions it is named 3 of 8, and the engines prefer clay.com (50%). The questions Iris derives come from how your homepage describes you; apollo's homepage describes a data platform, and in the data-platform question set it loses to a data-platform competitor.
instantly.ai is the sharpest case in the set. Never named on its own questions, yet named instead of smartlead (75%), hunter (50%), quickmail (50%), saleshandy, mailshake and woodpecker (38% each). Its homepage title reads "Sales Engagement and Lead Intelligence", so the questions Iris derived were about sales-engagement tools for small businesses, and under that wording the engines named CRM-flavoured tools. Under "cold email" wording, which is how every other tool's buyers ask, instantly is named constantly. The words on your own page decide which question set you are judged on.
A site that does not answer a fetch does not get read. reply.io never returned our page fetch during the run. We cannot score it, and an answer engine's reader that hits the same wall cannot quote it either; it was still named in other tools' answers (reply.io 38–50%) from pages elsewhere on the web, which is the engines' memory, not your page.
Where Iris fits
The score most tools give you (an "AI readiness" number) predicts citation. The check above proves or disproves it: a real engine, a real buyer question, a yes or no. Iris does both, in this order:
- Free scan, no account: paste a URL, get the SEO and AI-readiness score with every failed signal listed and the fixes ordered by how many points each is worth.
- The citation check (Iris Seedling plan, $9 a month): the four questions, the engines, the yes/no per answer, and the "named instead" list you see in the table.
- The fixes: question-shaped headings, a comparison page that answers the exact buyer question, a dated byline, llms.txt and a Markdown twin of each page, generated from your own content and handed to you as code to paste (or applied by Autopilot on Cloudflare, WordPress or Shopify if you turn it on).
Run the free scan on your URL: https://www.nextiqumai.com/iris
Method notes: run 8 November 2026; 4 questions per tool, 2 engines, 8 answers; questions are derived by Iris from each homepage and are the same wording the tool's own buyers would use; shares in the last column are the fraction of that tool's answers in which the other domain was named. Raw answers are kept with each check and available on request.