Every category where a model named Azure for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Cloud hosting	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	19 of 78	35%	20	criticized challenger
Managed relational databases	Data platform	0%	59 of 73	50%	2	under 10 labels · led by Amazon RDS at 32%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Azure yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Azure across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	1	0	1
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	1	1	2
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	0	0	2	2
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	0	0	1
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	1	1	2	4
Mistral Small	0	0	2	0	2
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	1	1	0	2
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	0	0	1
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	1	1	2
Kimi K2	0	1	0	1	2
GLM 4.7 FlashX	1	0	0	0	1
MiniMax M2.5	0	0	1	1	2

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct6 labelsNone

Paraphrase7 labelsNone

Comparative4 labelsNone

Budget-constrained20 labels2

Scale-constrained15 labelsNone

Negative21 labels2not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative73 labels in all, every segment counted; 2 of the 4 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“The major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) generally have better security infrastructure and support” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · first choice

“AWS and Azure are well-known IaaS providers that offer a wide range of services and are often considered by mid-sized businesses.” Llama 4 Maverick · Cloud hosting · paraphrase prompt · alternative

“If you are a Microsoft-heavy shop (Office 365, Active Directory, Windows Server), Azure often offers the smoothest integration.” Kimi K2 · Cloud hosting · scale prompt · alternative

“Already on AWS/Azure/GCP: Their RDS equivalents (Azure often cheapest for steady small workloads)” Grok 4.1 Fast · Managed databases · budget prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Avoid big clouds like AWS/GCP/Azure for tiny budgets” Grok 4.1 Fast · Cloud hosting · budget prompt · hard negative

“powerful, but usually more expensive and more complex for small-budget teams unless you carefully optimize” GPT-5.4 mini · Cloud hosting · budget prompt · soft negative

“No hard spending limits: Unlike consumer services, AWS, GCP, and Azure do not have "hard stops" on billing” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · soft negative

“Avoid AWS/GCP/Azure for small projects — their pricing complexity often leads to unexpected bills” Kimi K2 · Managed databases · budget prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Azure, over the 73 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Azure was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Amazon Web Services59 of 733Not in the top three

DigitalOcean38 of 7314Not in the top three

Google Cloud37 of 730Not in the top three

Akamai Connected Cloud24 of 731Not in the top three

Vultr24 of 731Not in the top three

Hetzner22 of 736Not in the top three

GCP19 of 730Not in the top three

Cloudways11 of 735Not in the top three

OVHcloud11 of 731Not in the top three

Bluehost11 of 730Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Azure. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 53 of the 73 answers that named Azure and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

techradar.com20

digitalocean.com16

reddit.com15

hostingadvice.com13

atlantic.net12

aws.amazon.com12

forbes.com10

cybernews.com9

g2.com9

dev.to8

124 of the 124 domain citations in answers naming Azure came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

techradar.com/news/best-cloud-hosting-providers16

atlantic.net/cloud-platform/best-cloud-hosting-providers-small-businesses8

digitalocean.com/resources/articles/cloud-service-providers8

forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-cloud-hosting7

theweather.agency/blog/hosts-from-hell-the-worlds-worst-web-hosting-companies-and-why-they7

hostingadvice.com/how-to/best-business-cloud-hosting6

hostingadvice.com/how-to/cloud-hosting-cost6

reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/180oq3k/reevaluating_cloud_providers_for_20246

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Azure

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Azure; a claim can dispute any of them.

Google Cloud / AWS / Azure 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Azure's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Azure, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at azure.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.