Every category where a model named NGINX 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
Load balancers	Network and edge	15%	3 of 94	4%	53	accepted challenger
API gateways	Developer platform	0%	13 of 66	7%	14	accepted challenger	=heldSince September 2026: 0% → 0%, ±0 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

Movement

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

By model

How each model treated NGINX 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	2	1	3	0	6
GPT-5.4 mini	0	1	2	0	3
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	5	0	0	5
Perplexity Sonar	1	0	1	0	2
Grok 4.20	1	4	1	0	6
Mistral Small	1	1	2	1	5
DeepSeek V4 Flash	2	4	1	0	7
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	2	0	2
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	4	2	1	8
Kimi K2	0	3	1	1	5
GLM 4.7 FlashX	2	1	1	0	4
MiniMax M2.5	0	4	2	0	6
GPT-6 Luna	0	1	0	0	1
Muse Glimmer 30B	0	5	2	0	7

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

Direct29 labels6

Paraphrase20 labelsNone

Comparative43 labels3not counted in share

Budget-constrained32 labels11

Scale-constrained31 labels4

Negative40 labels5not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative195 labels in all, every segment counted; 21 of the 29 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.

“A well-run software load balancer (HAProxy or NGINX) or a cloud-managed service will give you the performance, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness you need” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Load balancers · scale prompt · first choice

“a cloud-based load balancer (if you're in the cloud) or Nginx (if on-premises) represents the best balance of cost, performance, and ease of management” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Load balancers · direct prompt · first choice

“The Industry Standard (Flexible & Powerful): NGINX ... If you are moving toward a microservices/Kubernetes architecture, transition to NGINX Ingress.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Load balancers · direct prompt · first choice

“Start with Nginx if you have in-house expertise or want to learn it, as it's free and highly capable.” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Load balancers · 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.

“Less feature-rich for API management out-of-the-box compared to Kong or Apigee; requires more manual configuration.” Mistral Small · API gateways · comparative prompt · soft negative

“running them on under-powered virtual machines ... creates a bottleneck” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Load balancers · negative prompt · soft negative

“Don't use Nginx for complex load balancing - It's a web server first” Kimi K2 · Load balancers · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as NGINX, over the 191 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and NGINX was named but was not.

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ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

HAProxy142 of 19120Compare →

AWS Elastic Load Balancing77 of 19111Compare →

F5 BIG-IP70 of 19118Not among the top eight

Azure Load Balancer63 of 1913Compare →

Citrix ADC59 of 1911Not among the top eight

Traefik51 of 1914Compare →

Cloudflare Load Balancing50 of 19110Compare →

Google Cloud Load Balancing50 of 1912Not among the top eight

Envoy38 of 1911Not among the top eight

Kong Gateway33 of 1919Not 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 NGINX. 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 146 of the 191 answers that named NGINX and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

loadbalancer.org64

g2.com63

guideflow.com55

devopsschool.com44

aws.amazon.com42

learn.g2.com39

kemptechnologies.com38

f5.com35

nomios.com33

pickmysoft.com32

445 of the 445 domain citations in answers naming NGINX came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

loadbalancer.org/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-load-balancer42

learn.g2.com/best-load-balancing-software39

devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-load-balancers-features-pros-cons-comparison35

guideflow.com/blog/load-balancer-software35

guideflow.com/et-ee/blog/load-balancer-software33

nomios.com/news-blog/best-load-balancers-202433

pickmysoft.com/blog/best-load-balancing-software32

xurrent.com/blog/top-load-balancers31

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Search and answers

nginx.org is not in Google's top ten for any of the category's searches. In the answers, NGINX takes 15% of first choices and HAProxy takes 29%.

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In search

Google, US estimates

Position for “load balancer”

–

not in the top ten

Position for “load balancers”

–

not in the top ten

Searches for its name, Google: 33,100 a month (“nginx”)
AI search demand for its name, est.: 4,362 a month
Organic visits to its site: about 38,473 a month
Searches its site ranks for: 10,028 · 709 in the top three
Sites linking to it: 147,748
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

15%

rank 3 of 94 in load balancers

Segment leader

29%

HAProxy

First choices: 21 across its categories
Named in: 191 answers
Its own site cited: in 146 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 nginx.org

1,295

subdomains included

Content

293

counted in the table below

Documentation

713

Product · Integration

0 · 0

Kind	Pages	Last 90 days	Latest	Categories named
Blog	200	9	2026-09-23	APM, CDN
News or press	59	undated
Conference or event	12	1	2026-08-19
Glossary or explainer	9	5	2026-07-18
Comparison	8	1	2026-09-15
Webinar or virtual event	2	0	2026-04-09
Report or ebook	2	undated
Podcast or video	1	0	2025-05-14

Most recent

2026-09-23Stop writing authentication checks into every service combine them in your kubernetes gateway blog
2026-09-21Nginx control api view in memory configuration and reload via http requests blog
2026-09-15NGINX Routing on HTTP Request Body blog
2026-09-1510982 comparison
2026-09-10HTTP Strict Transport Security Policy in NGINX Ingress Controller blog
2026-09-08Predicate Routing for Native Handling of API Traffic blog

How it is countedHide how it is counted

Every page nginx.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. An event counts as online when its address or title says so (webinar, on demand, virtual or online summit); a conference, summit, trade show, expo or roadshow that does not say so is counted as a conference or event, which on a vendor's site is mostly in person. Read September 29, 2026.

Names read as NGINX

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

NGINX Plus 20Nginx 9NGINX (F5) 2NGINX Plus (F5) 2NGINX (Open Source / NGINX Plus) 1NGINX (Open Source) 1NGINX (Plus / Open Source) 1NGINX (and NGINX Plus) 1NGINX (open-source) 1NGINX / F5 NGINX Plus 1NGINX / NGINX Plus 1NGINX Plus (by F5) 1NGINX Plus / NGINX App Protect 1NGINX/NGINX Plus 1Nginx (Open-Source Version) 1Nginx/HAProxy 1

Follow NGINX

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

NGINX is its own company.

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In its own words

Stated by the vendor, not checked

Positioning: nginx ("_engine x_") is an HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer, TCP/UDP proxy server, and mail proxy server.
nginx.org
Not stated on the pages read: Who it is for, price, starting price, free plan or trial, integrations, certifications, hosting, customers

What NGINX's own pages state, read October 5, 2026: nginx.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 NGINX'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 NGINX, 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 NGINX by email, built from the raw record of the edition. It shows:

where NGINX 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 NGINX, 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 NGINX 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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NGINX is among the products AI models recommend first in Load balancers 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/load-balancers/"><img src="https://it-ai-index.com/badges/2026-10/nginx--load-balancers-wide.svg" alt="Among AI models' top three in Load balancers, 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 Load balancers standing, where the claim can be checked.

Square · 240 × 240 LinkedIn, slides

Show the code

<a href="https://it-ai-index.com/network/load-balancers/"><img src="https://it-ai-index.com/badges/2026-10/nginx--load-balancers-square.svg" alt="Among AI models' top three in Load balancers, 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 Load balancers standing, where the claim can be checked.

Compact · 200 × 56 Email signature, footer

Show the code

<a href="https://it-ai-index.com/network/load-balancers/"><img src="https://it-ai-index.com/badges/2026-10/nginx--load-balancers-compact.svg" alt="Among AI models' top three in Load balancers, 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 Load balancers 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.