IT AI Index

Index › Vendors › Project Shield · September 2026 Edition

1 category · Named, not ranked

Project Shield

3Judge labels

0First choices

1Negative labels

3 of 12Models named it

1Category

September 2026 Edition. Every number here is derived from the raw labels under vendor table vv2026-09.2, every buyer segment counted.

Standing

2 labels, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. Project Shield was named 2 times in DDoS, where Cloudflare led with 93%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business14 of 41

under the label threshold

Mid-market38 of 51

under the label threshold

Enterprisenot named

No model named it for this buyer.

In ddos · each standing computed within its segment · bars are 0 to 100 · the accent bar is the product's own best reading

Standing by category

Every category where a model named Project Shield 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
DDoS protection	Network and edge	0%	38 of 51	50%	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 Project Shield 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 Project Shield across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

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

Direct0 labelsNone

Paraphrase0 labelsNone

Comparative1 labelNone

Budget-constrained1 labelNone

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative1 labelNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative3 labels in all, every segment counted; 0 of the 0 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.

“Project Shield: Free for small nonprofit and media sites” MiniMax M2.5 · DDoS · budget 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.

“only available to select organizations (e.g., media, election monitoring, human rights sites), which may not suit most businesses” Mistral Small · DDoS · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Project Shield, over the 3 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Project Shield was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Cloudflare3 of 33Not in the top three

AWS Shield3 of 31Not in the top three

Azure DDoS Protection3 of 30Not in the top three

Sucuri2 of 30Not in the top three

Akamai Prolexic1 of 31Not in the top three

Fastly1 of 30Not in the top three

Flowtriq1 of 30Not in the top three

Google Cloud Armor1 of 30Not in the top three

Imperva1 of 30Not 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 Project Shield. 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 2 of the 3 answers that named Project Shield and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

flowtriq.com2

cyberpress.org1

cybersecuritynews.com1

esecurityplanet.com1

securebin.ai1

sites.google.com1

techradar.com1

Eight of the eight domain citations in answers naming Project Shield came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

flowtriq.com/blog/best-cloud-ddos-protection2

cyberpress.org/ddos-protection-services-to-consider1

cybersecuritynews.com/ddos-protection-tools1

esecurityplanet.com/products/distributed-denial-of-service-ddos-protection-vendors1

flowtriq.com/blog/ddos-protection-small-business1

flowtriq.com/ddos-protection-facts1

securebin.ai/blog/ddos-protection-services-comparison-20261

sites.google.com/view/a-bowl-of-late-light/best-ddos-protection-services-to-keep-your-busi1

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Project Shield

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

Google’s Project Shield 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 Project Shield'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 Project Shield, 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 projectshield.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.