Every category where a model named ModSecurity 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	Since September 2026
Web application firewalls	Network and edge	8%	2 of 82	54%	26	criticized challenger	▲+7Since September 2026: 0% → 7%, +7 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

Movement

Since September 2026, ModSecurity held within the floor in its one category: no change cleared 11 points.

Best category · WAF · by segment

Small business=heldSince September 2026: 0% → 0%, ±0 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

0%from 0% in September 2026

Inside the floor by 11 pointsRank 59 → 61 of 62

Mid-market▲+7Since September 2026: 0% → 7%, +7 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

7%from 0% in September 2026

Inside the floor by 4 pointsRank 66 → 2 of 80

Enterprise=heldSince September 2026: 0% → 0%, ±0 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

0%from 0% in September 2026

Inside the floor by 11 pointsRank 69 → 77 of 77

All categories · Mid-market

Category	September 2026	Now	Change	Reading	Rank
WAF	0%	7%	▲+7Since September 2026: 0% → 7%, +7 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.	Within noise	Rank 66 → 2 of 82

Shares here are read over the models both editions asked, so they can differ by a point or two from the standing above, which counts every model in this edition.

The floor is 11 points of share, measured: how far the models move a leader on their own when the same questions are asked twice with nothing changed. A larger change is movement; a smaller one is noise, and both are shown. Movement is read over the twelve models both editions asked; GPT-6 Luna, Muse Glimmer 30B joined this edition and are in the standing but not yet in the comparison. How the floor is measured · The editions

By model

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

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Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	1	1	2
GPT-5.4 mini	1	1	0	0	2
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	0	0	2	2
Perplexity Sonar	0	0	0	0	0
Grok 4.20	0	0	0	3	3
Mistral Small	0	1	0	0	1
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	1	1	2	4
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	0	2	2
Kimi K2	0	1	0	1	2
GLM 4.7 FlashX	1	0	0	1	2
MiniMax M2.5	1	1	1	0	3
GPT-6 Luna	0	0	0	1	1
Muse Glimmer 30B	1	0	0	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

Direct5 labelsNone

Paraphrase1 labelNone

Comparative11 labelsNone

Budget-constrained16 labels4

Scale-constrained2 labelsNone

Negative23 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative58 labels in all, every segment counted; 4 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.

“If you want the absolute lowest cost and have internal sysadmin skills: go with ModSecurity (free) + OWASP CRS.” MiniMax M2.5 · WAF · budget prompt · first choice

“best-value WAF is usually an open-source stack: ModSecurity + OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS)” GPT-5.4 mini · WAF · budget prompt · first choice

“ModSecurity with OWASP CRS is the de-facto standard free engine.” Muse Glimmer 30B · WAF · budget prompt · first choice

“BunkerWeb or ModSecurity + CRS are excellent choices” GLM 4.7 FlashX · WAF · budget 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.

“ModSecurity, the classic open-source WAF engine, has reached End-of-Life (EOL).” Gemini 3.5 Flash · WAF · budget prompt · hard negative

“Avoid/Be cautious with: Unpatched ModSecurity v3 versions” Kimi K2 · WAF · negative prompt · hard negative

“A critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-47947) in ModSecurity, a widely deployed open-source WAF, allows attackers to crash systems through denial of service attacks” Claude Haiku 4.5 · WAF · negative prompt · soft negative

“ModSecurity (Open Source) Without Strict Tuning... recent critical vulnerabilities found in ModSecurity versions that allow attackers to bypass path inspection” GLM 4.7 FlashX · WAF · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as ModSecurity, over the 58 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and ModSecurity was named but was not.

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ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Cloudflare WAF47 of 5829Compare →

AWS WAF44 of 581Compare →

Imperva Cloud WAF22 of 582Not among the top eight

Akamai App & API Protector20 of 582Not among the top eight

Sucuri WAF20 of 580Not among the top eight

Azure WAF15 of 580Not among the top eight

Coraza12 of 581Not among the top eight

OWASP Core Rule Set12 of 580Not among the top eight

Fastly Next-Gen WAF11 of 581Not among the top eight

F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF10 of 580Not among the top eight

A head-to-head page exists where both products are among a category's top eight. 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 ModSecurity. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, five of the fourteen in this edition, so these counts come from 49 of the 58 answers that named ModSecurity and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

radware.com27

wafplanet.com24

indusface.com21

openappsec.io20

comparitech.com18

geekflare.com17

mgsoftware.nl16

developers.cloudflare.com14

g2.com13

softwaretestinghelp.com11

181 of the 181 domain citations in answers naming ModSecurity came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

comparitech.com/net-admin/best-web-application-firewall17

mgsoftware.nl/en/tools/best-web-application-firewalls16

indusface.com/blog/best-cloud-waap-waf-software14

wafplanet.com/14

openappsec.io/post/best-waf-solutions-in-2024-2025-real-world-comparison13

geekflare.com/guides/best-web-application-firewall12

radware.com/cyberpedia/application-security/most-reliable-web-application-firewalls12

softwaretestinghelp.com/web-application-firewall-waf11

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Search and answers

modsecurity.org is not in Google's top ten for any of the category's searches. In the answers, ModSecurity takes 8% of first choices and Cloudflare WAF takes 69%.

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In search

Google, US estimates

Position for “web application firewall”

–

not in the top ten

Position for “web application firewalls”

–

not in the top ten

Searches for its name, Google: 590 a month (“modsecurity”)
AI search demand for its name, est.: 55 a month
Organic visits to its site: about 1,098 a month
Searches its site ranks for: 1,126 · 20 in the top three
Sites linking to it: 5,512
Paid Google search: No ads found in the estimate; that does not mean it runs none

Ads on Google

None found in Google's ad transparency records for the US

In answers

This edition

Share of first choices

rank 2 of 82 in WAF

Segment leader

69%

Cloudflare WAF

First choices: 4 across its categories
Named in: 58 answers
Its own site cited: in 49 of the answers that named it

Search figures are US estimates from DataForSEO, read September 28, 2026; AI search demand is its modeled, directional estimate, not a count of queries to any assistant. The answers are this edition's. Two measurements side by side: neither is read as the cause of the other.

What it publishes

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Addresses on modsecurity.org

subdomains included

Content

counted in the table below

Documentation

Product · Integration

0 · 0

Kind	Pages	Last 90 days	2025-10 to 2026-09	Latest	Categories named
Glossary or explainer	2	0		0001-01-01

Most recent

0001-01-01What is modsecurity glossary or explainer
0001-01-01What is the difference between modsecurity and crs glossary or explainer

How it is countedHide how it is counted

Every page modsecurity.org exposes, subdomains included. Kind is read from the address and title. The last 90 days, the latest date and the twelve months count pages by when they were published, from the site's feeds, a date in the address, or the page's own publication date, read from up to a hundred of its most recently changed pages; a page that says only when it last changed is counted in its kind but not in when, so the recent counts are a floor, and a kind none of whose pages gives a publication date reads undated. Read September 29, 2026.

Names read as ModSecurity

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

ModSecurity + OWASP Core Rule Set 2ModSecurity (open-source) 1ModSecurity + OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS) 1ModSecurity / OWASP Core Rule Set 1

Follow ModSecurity

An email the morning each edition publishes: where this product moved, where it held, and by how much against the noise floor. One address, confirmed by a click; a stop link in every email.

Already following? Everything you follow, with a stop for each.

The company

ModSecurity is its own company.

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In its own words

Stated by the vendor, not checked

Positioning: an open source, cross-platform web application firewall (WAF) module
modsecurity.org
For: web application defenders
modsecurity.org
Not stated on the pages read: Price, starting price, free plan or trial, integrations, certifications, hosting, customers

What ModSecurity's own pages state, read September 28, 2026: modsecurity.org. A claimed page can correct any of 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 ModSecurity'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 ModSecurity, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

What a new claim receivesHide what a new claim receives

A new claim receives the current edition's vendor brief for ModSecurity by email, built from the raw record of the edition. It shows:

where ModSecurity is named, by buyer and by framing, and which cells hold its first choices;
the claims the models make when they name it, ranked, with the strongest and the weakest quoted;
its vocabulary against the segment leader's, and the pages the models cited;
who was chosen in the answers that did not name ModSecurity, and every reason the record gives;
a battlecard for each top rival: the head-to-head split, why they win, and the reservation quoted against them;
one page of published figures cleared to show a buyer.

Badges

Wins only: a badge exists where ModSecurity is ranked in a category's top three this edition. Three sizes, one file each, light and dark; the code is under each.

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ModSecurity is among the products AI models recommend first in Web application firewalls this edition. Each badge says so in the buyer's words, names the edition, and links to the standing. The next edition issues a new badge; this one stays true as a record of October 2026.

Wide · 320 × 104 Website, beside other badges

Show the code

<a href="https://it-ai-index.com/network/web-application-firewalls/"><img src="https://it-ai-index.com/badges/2026-10/modsecurity--web-application-firewalls-wide.svg" alt="Among AI models' top three in Web application firewalls, October 2026 Edition, IT AI Recommendation Index" width="320" height="104"></a>

Copy the code as it is. The link is part of the badge: it points at the Web application firewalls standing, where the claim can be checked.

Square · 240 × 240 LinkedIn, slides

Show the code

<a href="https://it-ai-index.com/network/web-application-firewalls/"><img src="https://it-ai-index.com/badges/2026-10/modsecurity--web-application-firewalls-square.svg" alt="Among AI models' top three in Web application firewalls, October 2026 Edition, IT AI Recommendation Index" width="240" height="240"></a>

Copy the code as it is. The link is part of the badge: it points at the Web application firewalls standing, where the claim can be checked.

Compact · 200 × 56 Email signature, footer

Show the code

<a href="https://it-ai-index.com/network/web-application-firewalls/"><img src="https://it-ai-index.com/badges/2026-10/modsecurity--web-application-firewalls-compact.svg" alt="Among AI models' top three in Web application firewalls, October 2026 Edition, IT AI Recommendation Index" width="200" height="56"></a>

Copy the code as it is. The link is part of the badge: it points at the Web application firewalls standing, where the claim can be checked.

Badges read on light and dark pages. Alt text carries the claim, the category, the edition and the index, so it stays a citation where the image does not load.