Every category where a model named Microsoft 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	24%	2 of 78	3%	35	accepted challenger
Content delivery networks	Network and edge	0%	37 of 40	100%	3	under 10 labels · led by Cloudflare at 80%
Backup and disaster recovery	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	115 of 121	100%	1	under 10 labels · led by Veeam at 18%
Managed relational databases	Data platform	0%	52 of 73	0%	1	under 10 labels · led by Amazon RDS at 32%
Streaming platforms	Data platform	0%	52 of 78	0%	1	under 10 labels · led by Confluent Cloud at 32%

Movement

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

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

Direct28 labels9

Paraphrase27 labels13

Comparative31 labels2not counted in share

Budget-constrained12 labels2

Scale-constrained3 labelsNone

Negative12 labels2not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative113 labels in all, every segment counted; 24 of the 28 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: B2B companies heavily integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem... Azure is almost always the path of least resistance.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Cloud hosting · direct prompt · first choice

“Azure = "the Microsoft-centric, hybrid-cloud champion" – the natural choice for organisations deeply invested in Windows” MiniMax M2.5 · Cloud hosting · comparative prompt · first choice

“Choose Azure if your company uses Microsoft products extensively or needs to bridge on-premise servers with the cloud.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Cloud hosting · direct prompt · first choice

“My general recommendation for a mid-sized B2B company would be Azure if you're in the Microsoft ecosystem” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Cloud hosting · paraphrase prompt · first choice

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 standard AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud for backup storage” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Backup and DR · budget prompt · hard negative

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

“their complex pay-as-you-go pricing, steep learning curves, and high data transfer (egress) fees frequently lead to "sticker shock" invoices” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Cloud hosting · budget prompt · soft negative

“Azure's China North 3 region suffered a 50-hour outage” DeepSeek V4 Flash · CDN · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Microsoft Azure, over the 113 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Microsoft Azure was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Amazon Web Services105 of 11341Compare →

Google Cloud103 of 1130Not in the top three

DigitalOcean53 of 11316Compare →

Akamai Connected Cloud39 of 1132Not in the top three

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure30 of 1130Not in the top three

Vultr27 of 1131Not in the top three

IBM21 of 1130Not in the top three

Cloudways11 of 1132Not in the top three

Alibaba Cloud10 of 1130Not in the top three

Hetzner9 of 1132Not 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 Microsoft 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 82 of the 113 answers that named Microsoft Azure and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

geekflare.com36

digitalocean.com25

techradar.com21

hostingadvice.com20

forbes.com19

worldmetrics.org19

atlantic.net18

meridianitinc.com16

guideflow.com15

pcmag.com15

204 of the 204 domain citations in answers naming Microsoft Azure came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

geekflare.com/hosting/best-cloud-hosting-platforms36

forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-cloud-hosting17

meridianitinc.com/blog/best-cloud-server-hosting-providers16

worldmetrics.org/service/enterprise-cloud-hosting15

digitalocean.com/resources/articles/comparing-aws-azure-gcp13

pcmag.com/picks/the-best-cloud-web-hosting-services13

wifitalents.com/service/enterprise-cloud-hosting13

kansoftware.com/insights/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-gcp-enterprise-cloud12

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

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 Microsoft 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 Microsoft 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 microsoftazure.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.