Which second brain app do AI assistants recommend most?

Notion. In our 9 November 2026 run it was named in 33 of 77 answers across 10 of 17 questions, ahead of Recall and Obsidian (28 answers each).

Which websites do ChatGPT and Claude cite for note-taking and AI memory questions?

Reddit, by a wide margin: 85 of 973 cited links across the 2 and 9 November 2026 runs. GitHub (37) and Wikipedia (17) followed. Vendor websites were cited far less often.

Which questions did you ask?

17 questions without a brand name in them, such as "best second brain apps 2026", "best AI memory apps", "how to make ChatGPT remember everything I've read", "how to search everything I've watched on YouTube", "best app to chat with saved YouTube videos" and "second brain apps with MCP".

Why publish a result where BrainTube scores zero?

Because the numbers are the point. We track them every week to see whether our own pages earn a place in AI answers, and we would rather publish an honest zero than a flattering sample.

How often is this updated?

The questions run every Monday. We update this page with new runs and keep the date of each run on the page.

Research · November 2026

Which note and memory apps do AI assistants recommend?

Every Monday we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the same 17 buyer questions about second brain apps, AI memory tools and saving YouTube videos, then count which tools each answer names and which websites the search-enabled answers cite. This page publishes the 9 November 2026 run.

By Ilian Raykov, founder of BrainTube

Updated 11 November 2026

The short answer

In 77 answers to 17 questions (9 November 2026), the tools AI assistants named most were Notion (33 answers), Recall (28) and Obsidian (28), followed by Mem (15), NotebookLM (13) and Readwise (13). When the assistants searched the web, Reddit was the most cited website. BrainTube, which publishes this study, was named in none of the 77 answers.

Tool	Answers that named it (of 77)	Questions it appeared in (of 17)	AI answer series that named it (of 5)
Notion	33	10	5
Recall	28	10	5
Obsidian	28	9	5
Mem	15	6	5
NotebookLM	13	6	5
Readwise	13	7	5
Logseq	12	4	4
Reflect	10	4	4
Mem0	8	4	3
Heptabase	6	2	5
Capacities	6	2	5
BrainTube	0	0	0

Run of 9 November 2026, scheduled weekly run. 5 answer series: ChatGPT and Claude each with and without web search, plus Gemini. Spelling variants were merged (Notion AI → Notion, Recall.ai → Recall, Mem.ai → Mem, Google NotebookLM → NotebookLM, Readwise Reader → Readwise). Questions that contain the word BrainTube are excluded. One answer can name several tools.

How we measured

We send the same fixed list of questions to five answer series every Monday: ChatGPT with and without web search, Claude with and without web search, and Gemini. Each answer is stored in full, and the tools it names are extracted and counted. Questions that already contain our own name are left out of this table, so the counts show what an assistant suggests to someone who has never heard of any of these tools.

What the assistants cite

Across the 2 and 9 November 2026 runs, the search-enabled answers cited 973 links from several hundred websites:

Reddit: 85 links (about 1 in 11)
GitHub: 37 links
Wikipedia: 17 links
Official help pages (OpenAI, Google) and vendor sites such as recall.it, glasp.co and mem0.ai followed with 6 to 15 links each.

The pattern is clear: for these questions AI assistants lean on community discussion and open-source projects more than on vendor marketing pages.

What this means if you are choosing a tool

Notion and Obsidian come up because they are general note apps with large communities, not because they are built to save video or podcasts.
Recall, Readwise and NotebookLM come up for saving and summarising what you read and watch.
If you want the YouTube videos, podcasts and articles you save to be searchable from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients, compare the read and write access of each tool's MCP server: see second brain apps with MCP.

Use this data

You may quote and reuse these numbers with a link to this page (CC BY 4.0). Related pages: best second brain apps 2026, best AI memory tools for ChatGPT and Claude, apps to search YouTube videos by transcript.

Frequently asked

Which second brain app do AI assistants recommend most?: Notion. In our 9 November 2026 run it was named in 33 of 77 answers across 10 of 17 questions, ahead of Recall and Obsidian (28 answers each).
Which websites do ChatGPT and Claude cite for note-taking and AI memory questions?: Reddit, by a wide margin: 85 of 973 cited links across the 2 and 9 November 2026 runs. GitHub (37) and Wikipedia (17) followed. Vendor websites were cited far less often.
Which questions did you ask?: 17 questions without a brand name in them, such as "best second brain apps 2026", "best AI memory apps", "how to make ChatGPT remember everything I've read", "how to search everything I've watched on YouTube", "best app to chat with saved YouTube videos" and "second brain apps with MCP".
Why publish a result where BrainTube scores zero?: Because the numbers are the point. We track them every week to see whether our own pages earn a place in AI answers, and we would rather publish an honest zero than a flattering sample.
How often is this updated?: The questions run every Monday. We update this page with new runs and keep the date of each run on the page.

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