Part of the EPR GEO Scorecard series, Everything-PR's quarterly measure of AI Citation Share by vertical.
Disclosure: Everything-PR and 5W AI Communications share common ownership. Everything-PR reports independently on the communications industry, including on research produced by 5W. Editorial decisions are made by Everything-PR's editorial team.
"A brand can survive a bankruptcy filing. Surviving it as three separate owners with three separate answers is a different kind of problem, and it's the one the AI engines actually notice."
Ronn Torossian, Publisher, Everything-PR · Founder and chairman, 5W AI Communications
LinkedIn 88 (A). Indeed 84 (A). ZipRecruiter 74 (B). Dice 68 (C). Glassdoor 66 (C). Handshake 62 (C). CareerBuilder 46 (F). Monster 42 (F). A 46-point gap, the widest in the series, separates the top and bottom of the job-board category — driven not by disclosure differences but by an actual corporate collapse.
Executive Summary
Monster and CareerBuilder both filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2025. Their assets were split across three separate buyers in court-approved sales: JobGet acquired the core job-board business, Valnet took Monster's media properties, and Valsoft took Monster's government-services division. The engines have not fully caught up to the fragmentation — several still retrieve pre-bankruptcy corporate facts as current.
LinkedIn and Indeed lead on the mechanism familiar from every professional-services volume in this series: both sit under large, publicly traded parent companies (Microsoft and Recruit Holdings, respectively) that generate continuous structured disclosure. Both also benefit from something unique to this category — a two-sided marketplace that produces content from employers and job seekers simultaneously, distinct from the single-sided-content model of the professional-services firms scored in Vols. 8–13.
Handshake, the only fully private firm in the cohort, scores a respectable 62 (C) — well above where private firms typically land in this series — on the strength of a genuinely differentiated campus-recruiting niche that generates its own retrievable authority independent of scale.
Audience: Talent acquisition leaders, HR technology buyers, recruiting agency executives, job seekers evaluating platforms, and communications professionals advising HR-tech and recruiting clients on AI visibility.
15 Publishable Findings
- Monster and CareerBuilder's June 2025 Chapter 11 filings, followed by a three-way asset split, produced the widest top-to-bottom score gap (46 points) of any volume in this series.
- Several engines still retrieve pre-bankruptcy corporate facts about Monster and CareerBuilder as current, a lag effect distinct from any prior volume's entity-confusion findings.
- LinkedIn scores highest (88, A) on the strength of Microsoft's public disclosure and a two-sided marketplace generating both employer and job-seeker content.
- Indeed, owned by Japan's publicly traded Recruit Holdings, scores 84 (A) — the aggregator model and sheer application volume (reported at roughly 200 million applications per month) give the engines abundant retrievable scale data.
- Asked "best job board for volume of applicants," four of five engines name Indeed first, directly reflecting its own widely reported application-volume statistics.
- Handshake, the only fully private firm in the cohort, scores 62 (C) — the strongest relative private-firm performance of any Scorecard volume, driven by a genuinely differentiated campus-recruiting specialty rather than scale.
- Glassdoor, also owned by Recruit Holdings, scores lower than sibling Indeed (66 vs. 84) despite common ownership, because its review-and-salary-data business model generates a different retrieval pattern the engines treat inconsistently across query types.
- Dice, the tech-specialist board owned by publicly traded DHI Group, scores 68 (C) — public status helps, but the specialist niche caps Query-Type Breadth the way it capped Oliver Wyman in Vol. 9 and Ryan Specialty in Vol. 12.
- ZipRecruiter, public but smaller than LinkedIn or Indeed, scores 74 (B) — strong retrieval on its AI-matching feature specifically, weaker on general recommendation queries.
- Perplexity produces the highest score for six of eight firms, consistent with the series pattern, driven by real-time retrieval of usage statistics, employer reviews, and recent news coverage of the Monster/CareerBuilder bankruptcy specifically.
- Asked "who owns CareerBuilder now," three of five engines correctly name JobGet; two default to describing CareerBuilder as an independent company, reflecting incomplete post-bankruptcy retrieval.
- Monster's declining reputation, already a multi-year trend before the bankruptcy, is the single most consistently retrieved reputation fact in this volume — four of five engines describe Monster as a legacy platform that has lost share, independent of the bankruptcy itself.
- No firm in the cohort, public or private, carries FAQ schema, though six of eight carry Organization schema, a high rate consistent with Vol. 12 and Vol. 13's findings for disclosure-heavy categories.
- Asked "best job board for recent college graduates," five of five engines name Handshake first, the cleanest single-query-type dominance of any firm in this volume.
- The job-board category ceiling (88) is the highest of any non-consulting vertical measured, reflecting that LinkedIn's parent, Microsoft, brings a disclosure and content infrastructure advantage that exceeds even the public insurance brokers and wealth managers scored in Vols. 12 and 13.
Methodology. Scores are based on observed AI engine outputs during an August 2026 test window. Five engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. 50 prompts per firm across five query buckets (Recommendation, Comparison, Capability, Reputation, Corporate), 10 prompts each. Total: 2,000 individual response audits across eight firms. Each response is scored on a binary (cited/not cited) and qualitative (primary mention, secondary mention, absent) basis. Raw observations are normalized into the five-dimension framework: Citation Frequency 40%, Cross-Engine Breadth 20%, Query-Type Breadth 20%, Extractability 15%, Crawl Access 5%. The methodology is identical to Vols. 1–13 and is reproduced quarter-over-quarter. Full protocol at the EPR GEO Scorecard hub.
The Recruiter Test: What the Engines Actually Say
| Prompt | ChatGPT Names First | Perplexity Names First | Gemini Names First |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Best job board for volume of applicants" | Indeed | Indeed | Indeed |
| "Best platform for professional networking and hiring" | |||
| "Best job board for recent college graduates" | Handshake | Handshake | Handshake |
| "Who owns CareerBuilder now" | JobGet (post-bankruptcy) | JobGet, correctly cites 2025 sale | Describes CareerBuilder as independent (outdated) |
| "Best job board for tech and IT roles" | Dice | Dice, notes low interview-rate stat | Dice, then LinkedIn |
| "Is Monster still a major job board" | Declining, lost share | Declining, notes 2025 bankruptcy | Declining, legacy platform |
The finding: Query-type ownership is unusually clean in this category compared to prior volumes — Indeed owns volume, LinkedIn owns networking, Handshake owns campus recruiting, and Dice owns tech specialization, each by wide margins. The one area of genuine engine inconsistency is the Monster/CareerBuilder post-bankruptcy ownership structure, where the underlying facts changed faster than the retrieval graph updated.
The Scorecard
| Dimension (weight) | Indeed | ZipRecruiter | Dice | Glassdoor | Handshake | CareerBuilder | Monster | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Citation Frequency (40%) | 92 | 88 | 76 | 70 | 68 | 64 | 44 | 40 |
| Cross-Engine Breadth (20%) | 90 | 86 | 74 | 66 | 64 | 60 | 46 | 42 |
| Query-Type Breadth (20%) | 82 | 78 | 70 | 62 | 62 | 58 | 42 | 38 |
| Extractability (15%) | 84 | 78 | 70 | 66 | 62 | 60 | 40 | 36 |
| Crawl Access (5%) | 78 | 74 | 64 | 58 | 56 | 52 | 30 | 26 |
| FINAL GRADE | 88 · A | 84 · A | 74 · B | 68 · C | 66 · C | 62 · C | 46 · F | 42 · F |
Engine Heatmap
| Firm | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity | Google AIO | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 90 (A) | 86 (A) | 84 (A) | 92 (A) | 88 (A) | 88 | |
| Indeed | 86 (A) | 82 (A) | 80 (A) | 90 (A) | 82 (A) | 84 |
| ZipRecruiter | 76 (B) | 72 (B) | 70 (B) | 80 (A) | 72 (B) | 74 |
| Dice | 70 (B) | 66 (C) | 62 (D) | 74 (B) | 68 (C) | 68 |
| Glassdoor | 68 (C) | 64 (C) | 60 (D) | 72 (B) | 66 (C) | 66 |
| Handshake | 64 (C) | 60 (D) | 56 (D) | 68 (C) | 62 (D) | 62 |
| CareerBuilder | 48 (F) | 44 (F) | 42 (F) | 54 (D) | 42 (F) | 46 |
| Monster | 44 (F) | 40 (F) | 38 (F) | 50 (D) | 38 (F) | 42 |
Engine reads. LinkedIn and Indeed are the only two firms to score A on all five engines, the first time two firms have both cleared that bar in the same Scorecard volume. Perplexity produces the highest score for every firm in the cohort, notably including the two bankrupt brands, where its real-time retrieval surfaces the 2025 restructuring coverage other engines still partially miss.
Company Deep Dives
LinkedIn, 88 (A)
Owned by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) since 2016. Reported over 1.2 billion users globally, with roughly 9% year-over-year user growth.
What's working. Microsoft's public-company disclosure obligations extend to LinkedIn's own reported usage and engagement statistics, giving the engines a continuous stream of structured, dated data. The platform's dual identity, professional network and job board simultaneously, produces content from both employer and job-seeker sides of the marketplace, a structural advantage no single-sided job board in this cohort can match.
What's hurting. Crawl Access (78), while the highest in the cohort, still leaves room to match the disclosure-heavy leaders in Vol. 12 and Vol. 13.
What moves the score. Continued extension of crawl accessibility across the platform's vast content footprint. Estimated lift: 2-4 points within two quarters.
Indeed, 84 (A)
Owned by Recruit Holdings (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 6098). The world's largest job-search aggregator by reported application volume.
What's working. Recruit Holdings' public disclosure as a Japanese listed company provides the same structural benefit Microsoft provides LinkedIn. Indeed's own widely reported statistics, roughly 200 million applications processed monthly, are directly retrievable and reinforce its "best for volume" positioning across nearly every engine.
What's hurting. Query-Type Breadth (78) trails LinkedIn's (82) slightly, reflecting Indeed's narrower identity as primarily an aggregator rather than a networking platform.
What moves the score. Content addressing query types beyond raw volume, particularly around match quality and employer-side tools. Estimated lift: 3-5 points within two quarters.
ZipRecruiter, 74 (B)
NYSE: ZIP. Public. AI-matching-focused job platform that syndicates listings across 100+ job boards.
What's working. Public-company disclosure and a well-documented AI-matching feature give ZipRecruiter strong retrieval on capability-specific queries. Perplexity names the firm at the top of its class within the cohort.
What's hurting. Smaller scale than LinkedIn or Indeed limits general recommendation-query performance. 2025 employer-survey data showing softer hiring demand has been retrieved on some reputation-adjacent queries.
What moves the score. Continued emphasis on the AI-matching differentiator, which already retrieves well, extended into broader query types. Estimated lift: 4-6 points within two quarters.
Dice, 68 (C)
Owned by DHI Group (NYSE: DHX). Tech- and IT-specialist job board.
What's working. Public parent-company disclosure. Strong, specific retrieval on tech-and-IT-specific queries, where the firm is consistently named among the top specialist options.
What's hurting. The specialist focus caps Query-Type Breadth (62) well below the general-purpose leaders, the same pattern that held Oliver Wyman back in Vol. 9 and Ryan Specialty Holdings back in Vol. 12.
What moves the score. Content addressing adjacent query types without diluting the tech-specialist identity that already retrieves well. Estimated lift: 4-7 points within three quarters.
Glassdoor, 66 (C)
Also owned by Recruit Holdings. Reviews, salary data, and job-listing hybrid platform.
What's working. Strong retrieval on employer-review and salary-transparency queries specifically, a distinct lane from sibling company Indeed.
What's hurting. Despite shared ownership with Indeed, Glassdoor scores substantially lower (66 vs. 84), because its review-based content model produces a different, less consistently retrieved data structure than Indeed's aggregator model.
What moves the score. Structured data specifically optimized for the review-and-salary use case, which is the firm's genuine differentiator. Estimated lift: 5-8 points within three quarters.
Handshake, 62 (C)
Private, venture-backed. Campus-recruiting platform connecting employers to students across 1,500+ partner universities.
What's working. The strongest relative private-firm performance in this entire series. Five of five engines name Handshake first on the "recent college graduates" query, the cleanest single-query dominance of any firm in this volume, reflecting genuine category differentiation rather than scale or disclosure.
What's hurting. Outside the campus-recruiting niche, Handshake's general Query-Type Breadth (58) and Crawl Access (52) both trail the public firms in the cohort.
What moves the score. Structured content extending beyond the campus niche, since the underlying differentiation already works exceptionally well within its lane. Estimated lift: 5-8 points within three quarters.
CareerBuilder, 46 (F)
Filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2025. Job-board business acquired by JobGet in a court-approved sale.
What's working. Retrieved reliably on resume-database and cost-comparison queries, reflecting the firm's historical positioning as a lower-cost alternative to LinkedIn.
What's hurting. The June 2025 bankruptcy filing and subsequent asset sale to JobGet has not fully propagated through engine retrieval — three of five engines correctly identify the new ownership, but two continue to describe CareerBuilder as an independent, ongoing operation. Crawl Access (30) is among the lowest in the entire series to date.
What moves the score. Clear, structured, dated content from the new owner establishing the current corporate identity and ownership structure. Estimated lift: 8-14 points within two quarters if entity consolidation is prioritized.
Monster, 42 (F)
Filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2025. Assets split between Valnet (media properties) and Valsoft (government services division).
What's working. Historical brand recognition from its 1999-2010 category-defining period still generates baseline citation frequency, even as current performance lags.
What's hurting. The floor of the cohort. A multi-year decline predating the bankruptcy is the single most consistently retrieved reputation fact in this volume, and the 2025 filing and three-way asset split compounds an already-negative retrieval pattern with genuine entity confusion. Crawl Access (26) is the lowest score recorded across all thirteen volumes to date.
What moves the score. Basic entity clarification from whichever entity now controls the Monster brand identity, since the current retrieval baseline is low enough that almost any structured content would represent measurable improvement. Estimated lift: 8-14 points within two quarters, contingent on which owner takes responsibility for brand communications.
Biggest Winners
| Winner | Why |
|---|---|
| LinkedIn and Indeed, the only two firms to score A on all five engines | Public parent-company disclosure combined with genuinely differentiated marketplace models neither smaller competitor can replicate. |
| Handshake on campus-recruiting queries specifically | The single cleanest query-type dominance in this volume, proving a genuine niche can outperform scale within its own lane. |
| Dice on tech-and-IT-specific queries | Public status plus a well-established specialist identity produces reliable retrieval within its niche. |
Biggest Risks
| Risk | Who It Hurts | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| Post-bankruptcy entity confusion in engine retrieval | CareerBuilder, Monster | High |
| Multi-year reputation decline compounding an active restructuring | Monster | High |
| Specialist niche capping general-query performance | Dice | Medium |
| Shared ownership not translating to shared performance | Glassdoor (vs. sibling Indeed) | Medium |
Q4 2026 Predictions
Who gains next quarter:CareerBuilder (+4-8 points) if JobGet publishes clear post-acquisition brand content. The current entity-confusion gap is the single highest-leverage fix available to any firm in this volume.
Who holds steady:LinkedIn and Indeed (88 and 84, +/- 1-2 points). Both firms' ceilings are set by genuine structural advantages unlikely to shift quarter over quarter.
Biggest wildcard:Whether Monster's fragmented ownership (Valnet and Valsoft) produces any coordinated communications response at all. Absent one, the firm's score is likely to hold at or near the series floor.
Structural prediction:This volume's 46-point gap, the widest in the series, is unlikely to be repeated soon — it required an actual bankruptcy and asset fragmentation, a more severe event than any disclosure or ownership-structure difference identified in prior volumes.
Action Items by Audience
| Audience | What This Means | What to Do |
|---|---|---|
| Talent Acquisition Leaders | AI engines already have clean, confident answers about which platform serves which hiring need. | Ask ChatGPT which platform to use for a specific role type and compare the answer to your current job-board budget allocation. |
| HR Technology Buyers | A platform's post-acquisition or post-restructuring status may not be accurately reflected in AI-generated vendor comparisons. | Verify current ownership and operational status directly before relying on an AI summary for vendor due diligence. |
| New Platform Owners (JobGet, Valnet, Valsoft) | The acquired brands' AI-retrieved identity still reflects the pre-acquisition entity in a meaningful share of engine responses. | Publish clear, dated, structured content establishing current ownership and brand direction as a priority entity-disambiguation task. |
| Job Seekers | AI-generated platform recommendations are already fairly reliable for query types like "best for graduates" or "best for tech roles." | Use AI recommendations as a starting point, but verify current platform ownership if a recommendation seems outdated. |
| Communications Advisors | This volume shows what happens when disclosure gaps become genuine corporate-event gaps: the retrieval graph does not update itself. | Treat any client M&A, bankruptcy, or restructuring event as requiring immediate structured-content follow-up specifically for AI-retrieval purposes, not just traditional press coverage. |
FAQ
Why these eight firms?
LinkedIn and Indeed as the two dominant general-purpose platforms, ZipRecruiter as a public mid-scale competitor, Dice and Glassdoor as specialist and hybrid models, Handshake as the cohort's sole private firm, and Monster and CareerBuilder as the two brands that underwent bankruptcy and asset fragmentation in 2025.
What happened to Monster and CareerBuilder?
Both filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2025. Court-approved sales split the assets: JobGet acquired the core job-board business, Valnet took Monster's media properties, and Valsoft took Monster's government-services division. Neither brand currently operates as a single, unified independent entity.
Why is the gap in this volume wider than any prior Scorecard volume?
Every prior volume's widest gaps were driven by disclosure differences between public and private firms. This volume's 46-point gap is driven by an actual corporate bankruptcy and three-way asset split, a more severe underlying event than any ownership-structure difference identified previously.
Why does Handshake score so much better than private firms in prior volumes?
Handshake's campus-recruiting specialty is a genuinely differentiated niche the engines retrieve cleanly and consistently, independent of the firm's private ownership. This is closer to Dice's tech-specialist advantage than to the generalized private-firm penalty seen in Vols. 8 through 13.
How are scores calculated?
50 prompts × 5 engines × 8 firms = 2,000 audits. Binary + qualitative scoring. Normalized into five dimensions (Citation Frequency 40%, Cross-Engine Breadth 20%, Query-Type Breadth 20%, Extractability 15%, Crawl Access 5%). Identical methodology across all fourteen volumes. Reproduced quarterly.
How often does the Scorecard rerun?
Quarterly. Q1 2027 rerun ships in the new year. Quarter-over-quarter movement is the structural story.
About the EPR GEO Scorecard Series
The EPR GEO Scorecard Series applies a single locked five-dimension framework to one consumer or industry vertical at a time. Published volumes: Beauty (Vol. 1), Hotels & Hospitality (Vol. 2), Luxury Brands (Vol. 3), Streaming & Entertainment (Vol. 4), QSR (Vol. 5), Consumer Tech (Vol. 6), PR Holding Companies (Vol. 7), Law Firms (Vol. 8), Management Consulting (Vol. 9), Executive Search Firms (Vol. 10), Talent & Literary Agencies (Vol. 11), Commercial Insurance Brokers (Vol. 12), Wealth Management (Vol. 13), and Job Boards & Recruiting Platforms (Vol. 14). Twice weekly. The methodology hub: everything-pr.com/epr-geo-scorecard.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
Part of Everything-PR's Citation Share Index and Generative Engine Optimization research.