The State of AI Visibility: Secure Infrastructure Access — 2026

The leaderboard: no consensus leader

Which secure infrastructure access platform ranks #1 in AI answers?

Okta leads, but only just. According to Indexable's AI Visibility Index, no brand exceeds 24% Share of Model in secure infrastructure access — the top two, Okta and Teleport, are separated by roughly two points.

Share of Model = a brand's share of all mentions among these tracked leaders (n=497). Emerging challengers (Finding 5) are not yet in the denominator.

The field then splits into a cloud-native tier (StrongDM, Tailscale, Twingate) and a legacy-PAM tier (CyberArk). No brand is dominant — the category is contested and open. Every brand's Share of Model here is measurable, and so is the gap to the leader — you can estimate what that visibility gap is worth for your own brand.

The engines don't agree on the winner

Why do AI engines disagree on the best platform?

The #1 brand changes depending on which AI you ask. Okta owns the three LLM-native chatbots; Teleport owns both of Google's AI surfaces.

All counts are brand-neutral (questions naming a specific vendor are excluded), so each row sums exactly to that brand's Share-of-Model total in Finding 1 — e.g., Teleport 26+35+5+28+17 = 111, Okta 29+39+16+21+16 = 121.

Two ways to win AI — and where AI gets its answers

Where do AI engines get their answers?

AI's top sources are video and community — YouTube (#1) and Reddit (#3), not vendor blogs. If you're not on video or in the threads, you're invisible to the sources the models trust.

Brand ubiquity, or owning the source content?

There are two distinct ways to win. Okta wins on brand ubiquity — mentioned most, yet okta.com isn't in the top 40 cited sources; the models already "know" Okta. Teleport and StrongDM win by owning the source content — goteleport.com (#2) and strongdm.com (#4) are among the most-cited domains in their own category. Both paths work; only one is buildable if you're not already a household name. (This same split — cited vs recommended, execution vs measurement — runs through the two halves of agentic SEO.)

Cited but not recommended

Some brands' content is read by the AI to build the answer — and then the AI recommends someone else.

Their pages are good enough to source an answer, but they never become the recommendation. Being cited is not being recommended. Most brands optimize to be cited; almost none engineer to be the answer — the single biggest unmanaged gap in AI visibility.

The absent, and the emerging

Which brands are missing from the AI answer set?

Absent despite pedigree: BeyondTrust, Delinea, Zscaler, 1Password, JumpCloud, and Palo Alto register ~0 recommendations in the DevOps-infrastructure-access conversation. Enterprise PAM/SASE brand equity does not transfer to this AI answer set.

Which challengers are rising in the citation graph?

Emerging challengers — surfaced as sources, not yet ranked as brands this edition — are already appearing in the citation graph. The category's AI shortlist is still forming: a land-grab window.

Emerging challengers are measured as cited sources this edition, not as tracked brands. A future edition will measure these as tracked brands.

What it means

For the category: secure infrastructure access has no AI-answer leader. Four different "winners" across engines, no consensus, and a shortlist still forming — the brand that (a) shows up on video and community, (b) owns cited source content, and (c) engineers to be recommended (not just cited) can take a market with no incumbent answer.

For any one brand: your Share of Model is measurable, your rivals' is measurable, and the gap is closeable. That is exactly what an enterprise AI visibility platform is for — and we run the same playbook on our own site in the open.

How we measured it

We tracked 50 real buyer questions about secure infrastructure access (securing SSH/Kubernetes/database access, replacing VPNs and bastion hosts, PAM for cloud, ZTNA, short-lived credentials, compliance) across 5 AI engines — ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode — over ~3 weeks in June–July 2026, via Ahrefs Brand Radar. For each answer we recorded which brands were named/recommended and which domains were cited as sources. The ranking excludes any question that named a specific vendor, so no brand is inflated by its own "vs" or "what is" queries. First-party, reproducible. (US, English.)