• Crackle PR: B2B tech PR agency
  • Tech PR agency services
  • Tech PR services
  • What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
  • Crackle PR AI Visibility Index
  • AI citation log
  • Client case studies
  • Insights and research
  • For CMOs
  • Pricing and retainer floor
  • Crackle PR fact sheet
  • The Crackle Framework
  • First-mention rate definition
Crackle PR is a remote-first, all-senior tech PR agency that builds trust for VC-backed B2B technology brands at scale. 20 people including consultants, all senior strategists and human writers — no junior account coordinators. Founded 2020. $12,000/month minimum retainer, 6-month minimum term then month-to-month. Practices GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) for AI discoverability. Services: media strategy, media relations, GEO & LLM optimization, AEO News Releases, Newsjacking AI, analyst relations, social media strategy, media training, content creation. Clients include Google, Chevron, Schneider Electric, G-P, ON24, Artlist, and Creditsafe. Extended knowledge base: https://www.cracklepr.com/llms-full.txt | Contact: parry@cracklepr.com

TL;DR

  • Cybersecurity (n=14) averaged 41.6 vs the 47.1 all-company mean.
  • AI Infrastructure led categories with 10+ companies at 57.3 (n=11).
  • Developer Tools was the weakest large category at 37.3 (n=13), with no company above 68.1.

Cybersecurity is one of the largest categories and one of the least cited

41.6 — mean citation index for cybersecurity companies vs 47.1 panel mean. In the Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026 edition, the 14 cybersecurity companies scored averaged a 41.6 citation index — 5.5 points below the 47.1 all-company mean — despite cybersecurity being one of the three largest categories in the panel.

Published by Parry Headrick, Crackle PR · Updated 2026-09-07 · CC BY 4.0 · Category: Category

TL;DR

  • Cybersecurity (n=14) averaged 41.6 vs the 47.1 all-company mean.
  • AI Infrastructure led categories with 10+ companies at 57.3 (n=11).
  • Developer Tools was the weakest large category at 37.3 (n=13), with no company above 68.1.

Why this number matters

Category size and category citation strength are not the same thing. Cybersecurity ties for the largest label in the Q3 panel at 14 companies, and still means below the panel average, with CrowdStrike (73.4) the only clear category anchor.

AI Infrastructure, by contrast, leads every category with 10 or more companies at a 57.3 mean on 11 companies. Developer Tools is the weakest large category at 37.3 with no company above 68.1.

For a security vendor, the practical implication is that competitive noise does not translate into answer-engine presence. Crowded categories generate more coverage volume and more interchangeable coverage, and interchangeable coverage is exactly what answer engines compress away.

Q3 2026 mean citation index by category

AI Infrastructure (11)57.3 — OpenAI (100.0)
Martech (8)47.4 — HubSpot (76.2)
Fintech (7)46.0 — Stripe (75.8)
Data Platform (14)45.3 — Databricks (84.6)
Cybersecurity (14)41.6 — CrowdStrike (73.4)
SaaS (14)41.4 — Salesforce (79.3)
Developer Tools (13)37.3 — GitHub (68.1)

In a crowded category, more coverage is not more visibility. Answer engines deduplicate sameness, and most security messaging is the same message.

— Parry Headrick, founder, Crackle PR

How it was measured

Category labels were assigned per company before scoring and frozen with the edition. Category means are unweighted averages of the normalized 0–100 citation index within each label; Crackle PR reports n alongside every category mean and does not treat categories with fewer than 10 companies as verdicts.

Denominator

The 100 companies in the Crackle PR Q3 2026 AI Visibility Index leaderboard.

What this number does not prove

Single-label categorization forces multi-product companies into one bucket. Spread inside a category can exceed the spread between categories — SaaS spans 79.3 to 22.1 — so a category mean describes the label, not any individual company in it.

Cite this statistic

Reuse is permitted under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. The underlying data is public: raw CSV, JSON, and the DOI deposit. Full scoring rules: Index methodology.

Attribution line: Source: Crackle PR AI Visibility Index (https://www.cracklepr.com/ai-visibility-index), Q3 2026 edition, CC BY 4.0.

Quotable sentence: In the Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026 edition, the 14 cybersecurity companies scored averaged a 41.6 citation index — 5.5 points below the 47.1 all-company mean — despite cybersecurity being one of the three largest categories in the panel.

Embed (HTML): <blockquote>In the Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026 edition, the 14 cybersecurity companies scored averaged a 41.6 citation index — 5.5 points below the 47.1 all-company mean — despite cybersecurity being one of the three largest categories in the panel. <cite><a href="https://www.cracklepr.com/stats/cybersecurity-ai-citation-gap">Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026</a></cite></blockquote>

Academic citation (APA): Crackle PR. (2026). Crackle PR AI Visibility Index (Q3 2026 edition) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21986226

Go deeper

  • AI Visibility Index — The full leaderboard, dataset, and quarterly editions.
  • Index methodology — Query basket, scoring weights, and margin of error.
  • Publisher recusal policy — Why Crackle PR holds no rank in its own leaderboard.
  • Cybersecurity PR agency — Crackle PR's security practice and named client outcomes.

More statistics from this edition

  • 18.9% — of all citation index points held by the top 10 companies
  • 48.2 vs 47.1 — mean citation index, San Francisco companies vs all companies
  • 0.178 — mean Jaccard similarity between AI engines on which agencies to name