Every category where a model named F5 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
Web application firewalls	Network and edge	0%	27 of 87	17%	6	under 10 labels · led by Cloudflare at 55%
DDoS protection	Network and edge	0%	18 of 51	0%	2	under 10 labels · led by Cloudflare at 93%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for F5 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 F5 across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

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

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

Paraphrase3 labelsNone

Comparative11 labels1not counted in share

Budget-constrained3 labelsNone

Scale-constrained12 labelsNone

Negative5 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative40 labels in all, every segment counted; 0 of the 1 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.

“Best for On-Premise / Hybrid Environments: F5 (Radware) or Palo Alto Networks (Arbor)” Qwen 3.7 Flash · DDoS · paraphrase prompt · alternative

“Best for highly customizable enterprise apps: F5” Perplexity Sonar · WAF · comparative 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.

“Advanced control, but note: recent security incidents (CISA directive) should factor into vendor risk assessment” MiniMax M2.5 · WAF · scale prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as F5, over the 40 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and F5 was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Cloudflare36 of 4025Not in the top three

Imperva35 of 402Not in the top three

AWS WAF21 of 401Not in the top three

Akamai20 of 401Not in the top three

Fastly15 of 400Not in the top three

Akamai Prolexic12 of 400Not in the top three

Radware11 of 400Not in the top three

AWS Shield10 of 400Not in the top three

Azure DDoS Protection8 of 400Not in the top three

Azure WAF7 of 401Not 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 F5. 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 29 of the 40 answers that named F5 and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

cybersecuritynews.com19

cyberpress.org16

expertinsights.com13

wafplanet.com12

imperva.com10

openappsec.io10

gartner.com9

radware.com7

checkpoint.com6

esecurityplanet.com6

108 of the 108 domain citations in answers naming F5 came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

expertinsights.com/network-security/the-top-web-application-firewalls12

cyberpress.org/ddos-protection-services-to-consider8

cyberpress.org/waf-solutions-by-business-size8

wafplanet.com/8

cybersecuritynews.com/best-web-application-firewall-waf7

cybersecuritynews.com/ddos-protection-tools7

cybersecuritynews.com/best-web-application-firewall-solutions/amp6

comparitech.com/net-admin/best-web-application-firewall5

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as F5

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as F5; a claim can dispute any of them.

F5 (BIG-IP Advanced WAF / NGINX App Protect / Distributed Cloud WAAP) 1F5 (Radware) 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 F5'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 F5, 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 f5.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.