Edbert Ongko is the founder of The Named Index, a free monthly index at namedindex.com. The business also offers a paid service to software vendors; no vendor was a client in the August or September 2026 editions, and position in the index cannot be bought. In this guest post, he looks at how much AI assistants’ recommendations for aged care software change from one month to the next.
Almost half of Australians, 45.6%, have recently used a generative AI tool, according to the Australian Digital Inclusion Index’s 2025 findings. With that many people asking an AI, what it names starts to matter. For an aged care provider choosing software, it can shape the shortlist.
Ask an AI assistant which software an aged care provider should use, and it will usually name a handful of vendors. The question is whether it would name the same ones next month.
I publish The Named Index, which measures which software vendors AI assistants name when buyers ask what to use. To answer that question for Australian care software, we put the same 384 buyer questions to the same four AI systems in August and September 2026: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. Then we compared the answers a month apart.
The answer: the list did not hold still. Of the vendors an AI named for a question in August, 61% were named again for the same question in September. Of the vendors named in September, 42% had not been named for that question a month earlier.
Some of that change is ordinary. Ask an AI the same question twice on the same day and the answers already differ, so we measured that too. On average, two answers to the same question shared about half their vendors when asked on the same day, and 35% when asked a month apart. Aged care moved most: about 45% on the same day, 29% a month apart. NDIS and allied health answers moved less.
For a provider choosing software, that changes how an AI answer should be read. One answer is a sample, not a shortlist.
“A vendor that appears once is a lead to check, not a recommendation. A vendor that is missing may simply not have come up that time.”
That makes the practical fix cheap. Ask the same question more than once, on more than one day, and in more than one assistant. Then do what you would do with any shortlist: talk to peers, ask for a demonstration, and check references.
These figures do have limits. They are not a claim that the market changed between August and September. An AI provider can change its model or its search index without saying so, and we only began recording which model answered on 16 September. Google’s AI Overviews returned far fewer answers in August than in September, so fewer of the comparisons come from it. Questions that mentioned a vendor by name were left out, and both months used the same list of 108 vendors, so no vendor counts as new just because it was added to the list. Read them, then, as what we observed from August to September 2026. The method is published on the site.
Within those limits, the lesson is simple. A shortlist that changes from month to month is not a reason to stop asking. It is a reason to ask more than once.
