By
Austin Coker
Reading time: 14 min
Last updated: November 12, 2026.
When a security leader asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for “the best CSPM tools for a multi-cloud team,” the answer names three to five vendors and cites a handful of sources. Those sources are rarely vendor homepages. They are review sites like G2 and Gartner Peer Insights, analyst coverage, Reddit threads, independent test results and comparison articles. AI search optimization for a cybersecurity company is the work of showing up, accurately, in that small set of sources and on your own site in a form the engines can read.
This matters now because the shortlist has moved. In G2’s March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers, 51% said they start software research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, up from 29% eleven months earlier, and AI chatbots were the top source influencing which vendors made the shortlist (G2, April 15, 2026). Security buyers are part of that shift, more cautiously than most, and the way they verify an AI answer tells you exactly where to put your effort.
Security buyers use AI, but they don’t take it at face value. In a 2026 study by NOLA Marketing and the Ponemon Institute of 320 enterprise cybersecurity decision-makers, 35% said their team uses AI in product selection and purchasing. Among those users, 51% use AI chatbots for product research, 48% rely on AI-generated overviews, 42% use AI for product comparisons and 39% use it to draft RFPs. Trust was split: 41% rated their trust in AI outputs high and 43% rated it low (NOLA Marketing and Ponemon Institute, 2026).
A separate 2026 survey of 300 senior IT and IT security decision-makers in the UK and US by Vanson Bourne found that 28% use AI-generated recommendations or summaries when researching cybersecurity vendors. Analyst rankings and reports (47%) and word of mouth or peer communities (43%) still lead that list (Vanson Bourne, How Brands Know).
Across enterprise technology more broadly, the numbers are higher. A Treble and Censuswide survey of 300 CIOs, CISOs, CTOs and other senior buyers found 47% now start vendor research with AI assistants, ahead of Google Search at 43%, and 93% use AI to summarize or compare vendors once they are evaluating (Treble via Business Wire, February 2026).
Put together, the picture is consistent. AI is now one of the places a security shortlist starts, and it is often where vendors get compared. But security buyers check the answer against the sources they already trust: analysts, peers and independent evidence. AI search optimization for cybersecurity works with that behavior, not around it.
Security prompts are specific. They read like the first line of an RFP:
Each of these triggers a different set of retrieved sources. A category prompt leans on review platforms and roundups. An alternatives prompt pulls comparison pages and community threads. A compliance prompt pulls framework documentation and vendor pages that map controls clearly. You need to be present in the right source for each type.
No engine publishes its ranking logic, but citation studies show clear patterns. Profound analyzed 680 million citations from August 2024 to June 2025. Wikipedia was ChatGPT’s most-cited domain (7.8% of citations), followed by Reddit (1.8%), Forbes (1.1%) and G2 (1.1%). Perplexity leaned hardest on Reddit (6.6%), with Gartner (1.0%) and G2 (0.6%) also in its top ten. Google AI Overviews cited Reddit, YouTube, Quora, LinkedIn and Gartner most (Profound, AI Platform Citation Patterns).
Those are averages across every topic, not security alone, but the same source types show up again and again in security answers. Here is how each one feeds the shortlist.
G2’s own research shows why review sites matter twice. In the 2026 survey, 45% of buyers said citations from software review sites are the most confidence-inspiring signal in an AI-generated answer, and 64% said they encounter inaccurate AI recommendations often or very often (G2, April 2026). In other words, the review site gets you into the answer and also makes the buyer believe it.
Security is one of the few categories where buyers expect third-party validation before a demo. Gartner research, Forrester coverage and independent results such as MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations are exactly the kind of sources AI engines can quote. MITRE publishes objective, non-ranked results for each participant, which makes them useful evidence and easy to misrepresent. If you participated, link to the official results page and describe them in MITRE’s terms. Vague “industry-leading detection” claims don’t get cited, and a CISO who checks the source will notice.
Perplexity’s heavy reliance on Reddit means practitioner threads often decide how a security product is described. A thread titled “Anyone moved off [vendor] for EDR?” can shape answers for months. You can’t control those threads, and you shouldn’t try. What works is named employees, usually solutions engineers or researchers, answering technical questions openly and disclosing who they work for. Fake accounts and planted praise get spotted fast in security communities and damage you in exactly the place engines are reading.
Most security vendors that are invisible in AI answers have one or more of these problems.
Security companies tend to run aggressive bot protection on their own sites. That can stop the bots AI search depends on. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and allowing its published IP ranges (OpenAI crawler documentation). Perplexity gives the same advice for PerplexityBot and notes that Cloudflare’s Bot Fight Mode can still challenge its bots even when a WAF rule allows them (Perplexity crawler documentation). Cloudflare also began blocking AI crawlers by default for new domains on July 1, 2025 (Cloudflare press release).
You can allow search and retrieval bots while still blocking training crawlers if that’s your policy. OpenAI treats OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot as separate settings. Check your robots.txt, your CDN bot settings and your WAF logs before you spend a dollar on content.
Datasheets, integration lists, compliance mappings and documentation are often gated. Those are the facts an engine needs to answer “does this tool support SCIM provisioning” or “which SIEMs map to NIST 800-171.” If the answer only exists inside a PDF behind a form, the engine will quote someone else’s description of you, or a competitor’s ungated page.
“Stop breaches before they happen” tells an engine nothing it can match to a prompt. Pages that win citations say what the product does, the environments it covers, the deployment model, integrations, the frameworks it supports and who it is built for, in plain sentences an engine can lift.
Different product names on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, your site and old press releases confuse engines. So do outdated pricing models, retired product lines that still rank and acquisitions that were never reflected in your listings. AI answers often repeat the oldest or most-cited version of the truth.
Start with 30 to 50 real prompts, split by category, alternatives, integration, compliance and head-to-head. Pull them from sales call notes, RFP questions, win/loss interviews and the questions your solutions engineers answer every week. Run them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI Mode, and record who gets named and which URLs get cited. That citation list is your target list. Our guide to AI visibility tools covers the software that can automate the tracking.
Allow OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot in robots.txt, and add WAF and CDN exceptions using each vendor’s published IP ranges. Make sure product and solution pages render key content in the HTML, not only after JavaScript runs. Then verify in your server logs that these bots are actually getting 200 responses.
Generic platform pages lose to specific ones. Build pages such as “[Product] for SOC 2 Type II evidence collection,” “[Product] for CMMC Level 2,” “[Product] and Microsoft Sentinel integration” or “Cloud workload protection for Kubernetes.” Lead each with a direct answer, then deployment details, supported environments, limits and a short FAQ. This is the same approach that took Constant Hire to the top ChatGPT recommendation for its category: role-specific pages with full FAQs instead of one generic pitch.
Buyers ask “alternatives to X” constantly. If you don’t publish a fair comparison, the engine will build one from a competitor’s page or a Reddit thread. State where you fit, where the other tool is stronger and who should choose which. Engines and CISOs both reward pages that read like analysis rather than attack ads.
Link MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations participation to the official results, list certifications such as SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 or FedRAMP authorization with the issuing body or marketplace listing, and name customers only where you have permission. Put dated, specific outcomes on case study pages in HTML. If a claim can’t be verified, leave it out.
Fill in every field on G2 and Gartner Peer Insights, keep category assignments accurate, use the same product names you use on your site and ask customers for detailed reviews that mention the use case, environment and team size. Those details are what make a review useful for a prompt like “best SIEM for a small SOC.”
Original research, breach data analysis, threat reports and named expert commentary get picked up by trade press and cited by engines. A quote from your head of threat research in SecurityWeek or Dark Reading does more for AI visibility than a dozen sponsored listicles on low-quality sites.
Use Organization and Product structured data, keep one canonical description of each product, update review profiles and directories after renames or acquisitions, and retire or redirect pages for discontinued products. The goal is that every source describes you the same way.
We run your buyers’ real prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode and show you who gets named, which sources get cited and what it would take to change the answer.
Cybersecurity SEO and AI search optimization overlap more than vendors expect. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on the same index as organic results, and the technical work, specific pages and third-party links that help you rank also give engines something to retrieve. The difference is emphasis.
Run them together. A strong cybersecurity SaaS SEO program makes the AI work faster, and the AI work pushes you to fix the gaps in specificity and proof that hold back rankings. Our pillar guide to generative engine optimization explains the wider framework.
Measure the prompts, not just the traffic.
Run the prompt set on a fixed schedule, because answers change as engines refresh their sources. Monthly is a reasonable starting cadence; weekly for your most valuable prompts.
Expect movement on long-tail, specific prompts before head terms. A tool for one framework or one cloud environment can start getting cited for narrow prompts within weeks of the right page going live, provided the site is crawlable. Category prompts such as “best EDR” are dominated by the largest vendors and analyst coverage, and take longer.
The economics usually work for security because contract values are high. In our B2B financial data platform case study, a $10,000-a-year product grew demo sign-ups 40% in five months by shifting from blog keywords to commercial pages with FAQs and schema. Security products with larger contracts need even fewer AI-sourced deals to cover the work.
AI search doesn’t replace analyst relations, events, peer referrals or your sales team. It sits in front of them. Gartner found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience overall (Gartner, June 2025), and AI chatbots are one of the main tools buyers use to do that research on their own. By the time a CISO books a demo, the shortlist may already be set.
At 95 Projects, we run SEO and generative engine optimization together for B2B SaaS and security companies, measured on citations, AI referral traffic and pipeline rather than rankings alone. Our GEO for cybersecurity SaaS program covers the prompt audit, crawler and entity fixes, use-case pages and the third-party work that gets you cited. If you want to see where your product shows up in AI answers today, book a call and we’ll run your buyers’ prompts live with you. You can also compare options in our review of the best GEO agencies for cybersecurity SaaS.
Austin Coker is the CEO and founder of 95 Projects. He has worked in SEO since 2020, when he built and sold an ecommerce brand that grew mainly through search. He founded 95 Projects in 2022 to help SaaS, ecommerce, and B2B service companies show up wherever their buyers search, from Google to ChatGPT and AI Overviews.
Have questions about working with us? Book a 30-minute strategy call to discuss your goals and see if we’re a good fit.
No-pressure conversation
Clear next steps (if we’re a fit)
Talk directly to an expert
It is the work of getting a security vendor named and cited accurately when buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Google’s AI features for recommendations. It combines crawlable, specific product pages, review site and analyst presence, independent proof, community participation and consistent entity data.
Many use it for research and comparison, and then verify. A 2026 NOLA Marketing and Ponemon Institute study found 35% of enterprise security teams use AI in product selection, and most of those use chatbots for product research. Security buyers still lean heavily on analysts, peers and independent testing, which is why those sources matter for AI visibility too.
It varies by prompt, but review platforms such as G2 and Gartner Peer Insights, analyst research, Reddit and other community threads, trade press, independent test results and vendor pages all appear regularly. Profound’s citation study found Wikipedia, Reddit, Forbes and G2 among ChatGPT’s most-cited domains across all topics.
Block training crawlers if that’s your policy, but allow search and retrieval bots if you want to appear in AI answers. OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot won’t appear in ChatGPT search answers. Check robots.txt, your CDN’s bot settings and WAF rules, since bot protection often blocks these crawlers by accident.
Narrow, specific prompts can move within weeks once a crawlable, answer-first page is live. Category-level prompts dominated by large vendors and analyst coverage usually take several months, because reviews, press and community mentions build up on their own timeline.
No, but they overlap. SEO targets rankings in Google; AI search optimization targets mentions and citations in generated answers. The technical, content and authority work supports both, so most security companies get the best results running them together.
Build a fixed set of buyer prompts, run them across engines on a schedule and log mentions, citations, position and accuracy. Pair that with AI referral sessions in analytics, demo requests from those sessions and a self-reported attribution field on your forms.
