--- title: "How collaboration software wins teams that ask AI first" description: "By being named when teams ask AI which tool to try, then turning those free signups into seat growth and company-wide contracts that renew." canonical: "https://underneath.agency/resources/collaboration-software-ai-search" published: 2026-10-07 updated: 2026-10-08 publisher: "Underneath (https://underneath.agency/agent)" entity: "https://underneath.agency/.well-known/entity.json" --- Guide · AI search # How do collaboration software companies win teams that ask AI first? By being the tool an AI assistant names when a team lead asks what to try, then turning that free signup into seats, paid plans and, eventually, a company-wide contract. The category already has its first public warning: monday.com told investors in 2025 that Google’s AI features were shrinking the small-business traffic its self-serve funnel runs on. Canva, on the other side, says ChatGPT has become one of its larger sources of visits. ## The short version 1. Bank of America’s analysis of [monday.com’s web traffic](https://www.itiger.com/news/2561490983) found search-driven visits fell 23.5% year over year in the second quarter of 2025 and 25.3% in July, which the analyst linked to Google’s wider rollout of AI Overviews. 2. A year later, monday.com’s [August 2026 guidance](https://s29.q4cdn.com/881027206/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/v2/MNDY-USQ_Transcript_2026-08-10.pdf) still assumed no rebound in top-of-funnel activity, while its customers paying over $100,000 a year grew 37% and those over $500,000 grew 68%. 3. [Canva](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/canva-gets-to-4b-in-revenue-as-llm-referral-traffic-rises/) says it was one of the top 10 domains ChatGPT sends visitors to, and that traffic from AI referrals is “in double-digit percentages” (without saying of what), as its business accounts doubled to $500 million in annual recurring revenue. 4. In [Capterra’s survey](https://cioinfluence.com/machine-learning/ai-and-security-drive-project-management-software-investment-capterra-survey-finds/) of 2,545 project management professionals, 55% said adding AI features prompted their most recent purchase and 71% ranked security as critical. 5. In [our study of Google’s AI Overviews](https://underneath.agency/research/ai-reddit-citations-study), 35.4% of B2B software answers cited Reddit, with r/projectmanagers among the most cited communities. ## Who chooses a team’s work tool today, and what does a growing account bring in? A team lead usually picks the first tool; IT and procurement later turn it into a contract. Collaboration software is bought where people actually work, and work is still spread out. [Gallup’s 2025 data](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/694361/hybrid-work-retreat-barely.aspx) shows the share of remote-capable US employees working hybrid slipped from 55% to 51%, while fully remote and fully on-site work each rose two points. In tech, remote-capable staff are as likely to be fully remote (47%) as hybrid (45%). Even fully on-site employees increasingly say their team is spread across locations: 27% in 2025, up from 13% in 2023. That keeps demand steady but the field crowded. According to [Ramp’s spend data](https://ramp.com/vendors/slack), 54% of organizations with a vendor in the communication category use Slack. And buyers are trimming as much as adding: [Zylo](https://zylo.com/blog/saas-benchmarks) reports that 53% of all SaaS licenses are underutilized, and lists meeting, productivity and project management tools among the applications most often duplicated. So the typical buying moment is either a team looking for something better than what it has, or IT asking which tools to consolidate onto. Support leaders re-shopping for AI agents follow a similar path, covered in [how support software gets chosen through AI](https://underneath.agency/resources/customer-support-software-ai-search). What a customer is worth depends on how far it grows after the first seat. The public companies in the category report this directly: - [Asana](https://seekingalpha.com/pr/20420470) ended fiscal 2026 with 25,928 “Core” customers spending $5,000 or more a year, and 817 spending $100,000 or more. - [Atlassian](https://s206.q4cdn.com/270053503/files/doc_financials/2026/q1/TEAM-Q1-2026-Earnings-Release.pdf) serves over 300,000 customers, of which 53,017 had more than $10,000 in annual cloud revenue, up 13% year over year. - [monday.com](https://ppc.land/monday-com-reports-google-ai-search-changes-impacting-traffic-acquisition) added 258 net new customers paying over $50,000 a year and a record 144 paying over $100,000 in one quarter of 2025. The pattern is the same everywhere: a small team starts on a free or cheap plan, and the money arrives when the tool spreads to departments and a central buyer signs a larger agreement. ## Where does AI search already sit in that journey? At the very top, where teams look for a tool to try, and the evidence is company-reported. The clearest case is monday.com. On its [Q2 2025 earnings call](https://s29.q4cdn.com/881027206/files/doc_financials/2025/q2/MNDY-USQ_Transcript_2025-08-11.pdf), co-CEO Roy Mann said high-intent buyers still click through, and that “the drop that we see is just on volume because they are experimenting with AI on top.” The company described the effect as small and concentrated in the small-business segment. Bank of America’s analyst was less relaxed. Working from web traffic estimates, he noted that less than 30% of monday.com’s signups come from Google, and that extending July’s traffic trend implied a 5.2% decline in self-serve gross new annual recurring revenue in 2026. By August 2026 the company was planning its year without any recovery in performance marketing, and leaning on enterprise expansion instead. Canva shows the other side of the same shift. Its co-founder told TechCrunch that the company sees ChatGPT and similar assistants as top-of-the-funnel acquisition platforms, and that it is allocating resources to appear in their answers alongside its search work. Canva said users had more than 26 million conversations with its app inside ChatGPT by October 2025. Cross-category buyer surveys lean in the same direction. In [G2’s March 2026 survey](https://company.g2.com/news/g2-research-the-answer-economy) of software buyers across categories, 51% said they now start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google. G2 sells to software vendors, so treat that as a direction rather than a precise share for collaboration tools. ## What do team leads and IT ask assistants about work tools? Questions about fit for a team, replacing an incumbent, consolidating tools, security and AI features. These sample prompts are our own, written to mirror how team leads and IT buyers phrase a search for a work tool; none was observed in real use: - Fit for a team: “Best project management tool for a 15-person hybrid marketing team that works across three time zones.” - Replacing an incumbent: “Alternatives to monday.com with a free plan that doesn’t cap seats.” - Living with a suite: “Slack or Microsoft Teams for a company that already runs on Google Workspace?” - Consolidation: “Can one tool replace our wiki, task tracker and video messaging?” - Security and control: “Which whiteboard tools support single sign-on, audit logs and EU data residency?” - AI features: “Which work management tools have AI agents that can update tasks for us?” Vendors already write for the alternatives question. [ClickUp’s guide](https://clickup.com/blog/monday-alternatives/) to monday.com alternatives, for example, puts ClickUp first in its comparison table. Pages like that are common in software, and assistants can cite them; see [our article on comparison pages](https://underneath.agency/resources/do-comparison-pages-help-b2b-ai-citations) for what the research says about their value. The AI-features question matters more here than in most categories. Capterra found that wanting AI features was the top trigger for a [new project management tool purchase](https://underneath.agency/resources/project-management-software-customers-ai-search), ahead of cost or user growth. A reasonable expectation is that buyers ask assistants which tools have the AI capabilities they want, which means your AI features need to be described in plain, public, checkable terms. ## How does an AI recommendation turn into revenue for a collaboration tool? Through a free signup that spreads: one team, then more seats, then a central contract. **Signup.** For product-led collaboration tools, the AI answer’s job is to send a team lead to the signup page. That click is the part analytics can see, and it is where monday.com felt the drop and Canva felt the gain. **Seat growth.** Collaboration tools grow by invitation. A reasonable expectation, which we infer from how these products spread, is that one AI-sourced team can be worth far more than its first plan once colleagues join. **Enterprise contract.** The largest revenue arrives when IT or procurement standardizes. Canva’s business accounts, defined as companies with more than 25 seats, grew 100% to $500 million in annual recurring revenue. monday.com’s growth in 2026 came mainly from upmarket customers. At that stage, buyers are more likely to ask an assistant to compare shortlisted tools on security, administration and integrations, and those answers rarely show up as referral traffic. We infer they surface instead as direct visits, branded searches and demo requests. **Renewal.** The contract then has to survive renewals and consolidation reviews. Asana reported dollar-based net retention of 96% for customers spending $100,000 or more, which means retention, not just acquisition, sets the value of each new account. ## What gets a work management tool named in an AI answer? Platforms document little; studies point to independent coverage, community discussion and clear, checkable facts. **What Google says.** AI Mode, according to Google, relies on a [“query fan-out” technique](https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-search/): it issues multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources, then combines the results. A question about the best tool for a hybrid team can therefore pull in pricing pages, review sites and community threads at once. **Observed in our studies.** In our Reddit study, 17.9% of all AI Overviews in our sample cited at least one Reddit thread, and more than a third did in B2B software. The most cited communities included r/projectmanagers (9 citations) and r/projectmanagement, where practitioners discuss the tools they use. In [our brand entity study](https://underneath.agency/research/brand-entity-ai-recommendations-study), independent coverage was the strongest predictor we measured: each tenfold increase in independent sites naming a brand in the cited pages went with 4.7 times the odds of being recommended. The same study found big suite brands such as Google Workspace, Slack or Zoom named in passing in answers to a project management question, rather than put forward as the pick. We infer that being famous in an adjacent category does not make a product the answer to a specific team’s question. **Observed in other research.** In a test on skincare products, [researchers found](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17443) that well-known brands were recommended 100% of the time when all products had identical specifications, but that dominance disappeared once a competitor had less than a 0.1-star rating advantage. That is a different category, so treat it only as a signal: a clearly stated advantage may be how a challenger gets named next to Microsoft, Google or Atlassian. **Trust factors specific to collaboration software.** Security comes first: in Capterra’s survey, 71% of buyers ranked it as critical and 39% made purchases because of security needs. Integrations and administration controls follow, because the tool has to fit the suite a company already runs. And [Capterra’s wider buyer research](https://capterra.com/resources/tech-trends-successful-buyer-purchase-journey/) found successful buyers were at least 50% more likely to factor in product comparison sites and expert recommendations when building their shortlist. A reasonable expectation is that public trust pages, integration directories and review profiles carry weight when an assistant compares tools. ## What does it cost a collaboration tool to be left out? Mostly small-business volume first, then a weaker pipeline into enterprise expansion. monday.com is the documented example. Its executives called the impact minor and limited to the small-business end, while the analyst modeled a measurable hit to self-serve growth and the company stopped planning for a recovery. Both views agree on where the cost lands: on the free and low-tier signups that feed seat growth. For a product-led company, those signups are the raw material for tomorrow’s enterprise accounts, so a smaller top of the funnel can show up in large-customer growth a year or two later. That last step is our inference; no company has published it. The loss is also hard to see from inside. When an assistant answers “which tool should my team use?” with three names and yours is not among them, nothing appears in analytics. How fewer search clicks play out further down the funnel is the subject of [our article on AI answers and pipeline](https://underneath.agency/resources/ai-answers-pipeline-revenue). ## Where does GEO effort go for a collaboration product? Into what assistants can find and trust about your tool, from positioning to pricing; no placement is guaranteed. Six areas usually make up generative engine optimization (GEO) for a work management or messaging product: 1. **One clear story everywhere.** Describe who the product is for, what it replaces and what it connects to in the same words on your site, review profiles, help center and app marketplace listings (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace and Atlassian all run app directories). See [why well-known brands still miss AI recommendations](https://underneath.agency/resources/why-well-known-brands-miss-ai-recommendations). 2. **Independent coverage.** Earn mentions in the comparison sites, newsletters, podcasts and “best of” lists your buyers read. Our article on [which lists matter](https://underneath.agency/resources/best-of-lists-ai-recommendations) covers how to pick them. 3. **Community presence, done honestly.** Practitioner communities like the project management subreddits are where tool choices get discussed and, in our data, cited. Answer questions openly as the vendor; do not plant posts. 4. **Public, specific security and admin pages.** Single sign-on, audit logs, data residency, compliance reports and admin controls should be readable without a login, because that is what the enterprise comparison turns on. 5. **Accurate pricing.** Per-seat prices with annual and monthly billing are easy for answers to garble. In [our pricing study](https://underneath.agency/research/ai-pricing-accuracy-study), Asana’s Starter plan was quoted at $10.99 a month, which is the annual-billing rate; billed monthly it was $13.49. Keep one current pricing page and retire old figures elsewhere. 6. **Measurement by buying stage.** Track a fixed set of team-fit, alternatives, consolidation and security questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google, and connect the results to signups, seat growth and enterprise pipeline. For how to set that up, see [how many prompts to track](https://underneath.agency/resources/how-many-prompts-to-track-ai-visibility). ## What can’t we yet say about AI search and collaboration revenue? No one has shown how much AI visibility adds to a collaboration company’s revenue, rather than accompanying it. The monday.com figures are an analyst’s estimates from third-party traffic data, and the company disputed how much they mattered. Canva’s referral claims are self-reported to a journalist and not broken down. The Capterra and G2 surveys come from review platforms that sell to software vendors. Our Reddit, brand entity and pricing studies record what AI answers cite, not what team leads do next. We also cannot yet tell how much of monday.com’s small-business slowdown came from AI Overviews rather than Google’s ranking updates or wider demand. Treat the channel as real and growing, with the size of its effect on contracts still unmeasured. ## How should a collaboration company check whether assistants are sending it teams? Find out which AI answers name you when team leads ask for a tool like yours. A practical first step is an audit of your team-fit, alternatives, consolidation and security questions across the main assistants and Google’s AI features, set against your signup, seat-growth and enterprise pipeline data, so the gaps are ranked by what they are worth. We can help rank those gaps by seat and contract value and plan the fixes: [ask us to review where assistants place you for team-fit questions](https://underneath.agency/contact). The ongoing work, from public security and admin pages to tracking answers against signups and seat growth, is outlined on our [generative engine optimization service](https://underneath.agency/services/generative-engine-optimization) page. ## Frequently asked questions ### Do AI Overviews really reduce signups for collaboration tools? In the one public case, monday.com reported softer small-business acquisition and an analyst linked a fall of about a quarter in its search-driven visits to AI Overviews. The company said high-intent buyers still click through. No study has yet measured the effect across the category. ### Should product-led collaboration companies care about AI visibility if most revenue is enterprise? Yes. Enterprise accounts in this category often start as a single team on a free plan, so the AI answer that sends that team to you can be the first step of a large contract. The enterprise comparison stage also happens partly inside assistants. ### Does publishing an “alternatives to” page help? It can, if it is fair and specific. Assistants look for pages that answer alternatives questions, and vendors in this category publish many of them. Pages that only praise your own product are a weak bet. ### How can a collaboration software company tell if AI is sending it customers? Combine AI referral signups in analytics with a “how did you hear about us?” question at signup, and a regular check of how often assistants name you for your buyers’ questions. Then follow those accounts as they add seats. ## Sources - Benzinga via Tiger Brokers (2025), [Monday.com Stock Slides As SEO Traffic Declines Raise Growth Fears](https://www.itiger.com/news/2561490983) - monday.com (2025), [Q2 2025 earnings call transcript](https://s29.q4cdn.com/881027206/files/doc_financials/2025/q2/MNDY-USQ_Transcript_2025-08-11.pdf) - monday.com (2026), [Q2 2026 earnings call transcript](https://s29.q4cdn.com/881027206/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/v2/MNDY-USQ_Transcript_2026-08-10.pdf) - PPC Land (2025), [Monday.com reports Google AI search changes impacting traffic acquisition](https://ppc.land/monday-com-reports-google-ai-search-changes-impacting-traffic-acquisition) - TechCrunch (2026), [Canva gets to $4B in revenue as LLM referral traffic rises](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/canva-gets-to-4b-in-revenue-as-llm-referral-traffic-rises/) - Asana (2026), [Asana Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2026 Results](https://seekingalpha.com/pr/20420470) - Atlassian (2025), [Q1 Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Release](https://s206.q4cdn.com/270053503/files/doc_financials/2026/q1/TEAM-Q1-2026-Earnings-Release.pdf) - Capterra via CIO Influence (2025), [AI and Security Drive Project Management Software Investment, Capterra Survey Finds](https://cioinfluence.com/machine-learning/ai-and-security-drive-project-management-software-investment-capterra-survey-finds/) - Capterra (2024), [Capterra’s 2025 Tech Trends Report](https://capterra.com/resources/tech-trends-successful-buyer-purchase-journey/) - Gallup (2025), [Hybrid Work in Retreat? Barely.](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/694361/hybrid-work-retreat-barely.aspx) - Ramp (2026), [Slack vendor data](https://ramp.com/vendors/slack) - Zylo (2026), [SaaS benchmarks](https://zylo.com/blog/saas-benchmarks) - G2 (2026), [In the Answer Economy, Don’t Win the Click — Win the Answer](https://company.g2.com/news/g2-research-the-answer-economy) - ClickUp (2026), [Best monday.com Alternatives & Competitors](https://clickup.com/blog/monday-alternatives/) - Google (2025), [Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode](https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-search/) - Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems (2026), [Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17443) - Underneath (2026), [Reddit citations in AI answers](https://underneath.agency/research/ai-reddit-citations-study), [brand entity and AI recommendations](https://underneath.agency/research/brand-entity-ai-recommendations-study) and [software pricing accuracy](https://underneath.agency/research/ai-pricing-accuracy-study) --- This is the Markdown twin of https://underneath.agency/resources/collaboration-software-ai-search. 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