GrackerAI’s benchmark of 100 cybersecurity companies across six AI engines shows most vendors get zero ChatGPT citations as buyers shift to AI for research.
Cybersecurity buyers are increasingly turning to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude when evaluating vendors, and most security companies have no idea what those AI engines are saying about them. New benchmark research from GrackerAI, the GEO platform for B2B SaaS and cybersecurity companies, found that
73 percent of cybersecurity vendors received zero citations from ChatGPT when buyers asked for vendor recommendations in their own category.
Cybersecurity founders spent the last decade learning Google SEO, and now the rules are being rewritten in real time”
— Deepak Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of GrackerAI
The benchmark analyzed 100 cybersecurity companies across six major AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI Overviews, using 250 representative buyer prompts. The findings expose a structural problem for security founders. AI engines are now the first stop for many CISOs and IT leaders evaluating tools, yet 78 percent of B2B buyers will only shortlist vendors they already recognize. If a security vendor is not cited in the AI response, it rarely makes it into the consideration set at all.
The pattern is showing up across the funnel. AI-referred sessions to B2B websites jumped 527 percent in the first five months of 2025, and those visitors convert 40 percent better than traditional organic traffic, according to industry data. Adobe’s $1.9 billion acquisition of Semrush in late 2025 confirmed to the broader market what cybersecurity founders are now feeling firsthand. Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, has become a strategic channel rather than an experiment.
If a CISO asks ChatGPT for the best XDR platform and your name does not appear, you have effectively been removed from the buying process. The good news is that AI search is still early enough that founders who move now can establish citation patterns that compound for years. The window is open. It is not going to stay open forever.
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GrackerAI was built cybersecurity-first to address this exact problem. The platform’s Data Intelligence engine ships with more than 30,000 manually researched cybersecurity prompts across 10 product categories on day one, including 4,200+ for Endpoint Security and XDR, 4,000+ for Compliance and GRC, 3,500+ for Cloud Security, 3,500+ for SIEM and SOAR, and dedicated libraries for IAM, Email Security, Application Security, Network Security, Vulnerability Management, and Threat Intelligence.
A dynamic monitoring layer ingests real-time feeds from the National Vulnerability Database, the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and MITRE ATT&CK, automatically generating tracking prompts for every critical CVE. A third layer creates 1,500 to 2,000 competitor-specific prompts during onboarding, with the full setup completing in under three minutes.
Each AI engine cites content differently, and GrackerAI optimizes for the patterns that matter on each one.
“ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and DeepSeek all weigh sources differently,” said Govind Kumar, Co-founder and CTO of GrackerAI. “ChatGPT favors structured authoritative content. Perplexity leans heavily on recent and well-cited sources. Google AI Overviews still pulls signals from traditional ranking factors. We optimize for the best practices on each model, so a single piece of content has the right footprint across all of them. That is the engineering work most generic SEO tools have not done for cybersecurity.”
The approach is producing measurable results for security customers. SSOJet, a developer-focused enterprise SSO platform, partnered with GrackerAI and lifted its AI visibility score from 18 percent to 67 percent over six months. Enterprise customer signups grew 287 percent, demo requests from AI-referred traffic grew 412 percent, and the average sales cycle dropped 47 percent. Full case study at gracker.ai/case-studies/ssojet.
GrackerAI offers a free 60-second AI visibility analysis for cybersecurity founders at portal.gracker.ai with no credit card required. Demos are available at gracker.ai/demo.
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