Every category where a model named Fastly 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	2%	4 of 87	10%	10	accepted challenger
Content delivery networks	Network and edge	2%	3 of 40	18%	49	accepted challenger
DDoS protection	Network and edge	0%	9 of 51	0%	14	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Fastly 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 Fastly 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	2	2	1	5
GPT-5.4 mini	0	5	0	1	6
Gemini 3.5 Flash	1	10	0	0	11
Perplexity Sonar	0	5	0	0	5
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	3	2	1	6
Mistral Small	0	2	3	0	5
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	4	3	1	8
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	2	0	3
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	4	0	1	6
Kimi K2	0	5	1	1	7
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	1	1	4	6
MiniMax M2.5	0	4	1	0	5

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

Direct34 labels1

Paraphrase29 labelsNone

Comparative50 labels2not counted in share

Budget-constrained16 labelsNone

Scale-constrained38 labels2

Negative27 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative194 labels in all, every segment counted; 3 of the 5 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.

“Fastly Next-Gen WAF (formerly Signal Sciences): Highly regarded for its "smart decision" engine, allowing teams to run it in blocking mode on Day 1 with almost zero false positives.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · WAF · scale prompt · first choice

“The Modern Specialists (Fastly, Cloudflare Enterprise): Built for ease of use, developer experience, and lower risk of human error.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · CDN · scale prompt · first choice

“The Best for Complex/Dynamic Engineering: Fastly. Known for unparalleled flexibility, instant cache purging” Gemini 3.5 Flash · CDN · scale prompt · alternative

“Common vendors to evaluate for a company of your size: Cloudflare ..., Fastly, Akamai, Imperva, and Radware.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · DDoS · scale 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.

“All major CDNs studied (including Cloudflare, Microsoft Azure, Amazon, and Fastly) have been found to have back-end TLS connections vulnerable” Claude Haiku 4.5 · CDN · negative prompt · soft negative

“Fewer PoPs (≈76 globally) and higher per‑GB pricing than Cloudflare. Simpler B2B setups often don't need this level of control.” GLM 4.7 FlashX · CDN · paraphrase prompt · soft negative

“While Fastly is highly regarded for its performance and developer experience, it has suffered from catastrophic global outages.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · CDN · negative prompt · soft negative

“Higher cost and operational complexity than Cloudflare/Bunny; Less "plug\u2011and\u2011play" for mid\u2011market teams” GLM 4.7 FlashX · CDN · direct prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Fastly, over the 194 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Fastly was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Cloudflare192 of 194130Compare →

Akamai125 of 19418Not in the top three

Amazon CloudFront119 of 1943Not in the top three

Bunny.net69 of 1948Compare →

Imperva45 of 1941Not in the top three

Google Cloud CDN39 of 1940Not in the top three

Akamai Prolexic33 of 1941Not in the top three

AWS Shield31 of 1940Not in the top three

KeyCDN28 of 1942Not in the top three

Radware21 of 1940Not 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 Fastly. 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 139 of the 194 answers that named Fastly and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

blog.blazingcdn.com79

fastly.comYour site75

yewsafe.com42

cybersecuritynews.com29

gartner.com29

edgenext.com28

techradar.com27

g2.com25

broadbandnow.com24

cyberpress.org23

306 of the 381 domain citations in answers naming Fastly came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

fastly.com/blog/best-cdn-providers38

blog.blazingcdn.com/en-us/top-cdn-providers-2025-an-expert-guide-to-types-technologies-and30

blog.blazingcdn.com/en-us/the-best-cdns-in-2026-compared-by-speed-price-and-global-coverag26

blog.blazingcdn.com/en-us/best-enterprise-cdn-providers-compared25

broadbandnow.com/guides/CDN-Providers24

wpforms.com/best-cdn-providers23

cybersecuritynews.com/ddos-protection-tools22

yewsafe.com/blog/177622396386522

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Fastly

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

Fastly (Signal Sciences) 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 Fastly'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 Fastly, 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 fastly.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.