In Romanian historiography, Glad is presented as one of the three local "voivodes" who ruled territories inhabited by Romanians at the time of the Hungarian Conquest. Madgearu and Pop list almost a dozen place-names from the Banat and its wider region which suggest that settlements were named after Glad. For instance, a village named Cladova (formerly Galadua) and a monastery named Galad were first mentioned in 1308 and 1333, respectively, and an Ottoman document from 1579 referred to two villages named Gladeš and a settlement named Kladova. Silviu Oța writes that the theory of a connection between Glad and the name of those settlements is "considerably weak", because neither the origins nor the chronology of those place names have so far been thoroughly studied. Oţa also says, "the historical geography of the Banat is reflected quite accurately in the chronicle", which suggests that Anonymus knew the geographical features of the region, but does not prove that Glad was a real person. According to Györffy and Kordé, Anonymus who invented all local rulers in the Gesta named Glad after the village where the monastery was built. Gyula Kristó states that the name was created by the chronicler from the toponym Ghilad. Deletant, Macartney and other scholars also say that Anonymus seems to have borrowed many episodes of his narrative of Glad (including his connection with Vidin) from the story of his alleged descendant, Ahtum, in the Long Life of Saint Gerard.
