• AI visibility

Guide · AI search

Will AI assistants name your identity platform when a credential breach sends buyers looking?

Only if the facts buyers check, standards support, security record, integrations and price, are public, consistent and confirmed by independent sources. Stolen credentials are now a leading way into companies, so identity purchases often start with an incident and a deadline. The first places a buyer looks, increasingly AI answers, shape a shortlist that is then tested hard by security reviews and procurement.

By Underneath Team Guide Updated

The short version

  1. Identity is the attacker’s favorite entry point: Verizon’s 2025 breach report (opens in a new tab) found credential abuse was the leading initial attack vector, at 22%, and CrowdStrike (opens in a new tab) reported that 79% of attacks to gain initial access were malware-free.
  2. Breaches that start with compromised credentials cost an average of $4.67 million, and phishing, often aimed at logins, was the most common initial vector at 16%, according to IBM’s 2025 report.
  3. Identity and access management spending grows from $20.7 billion in 2025 to $23.4 billion in 2026, an 11.8% rise, in Gartner’s forecast as summarized by Louis Columbus (opens in a new tab).
  4. Identity platforms are prized: Palo Alto Networks (opens in a new tab) agreed to buy CyberArk at an equity value of approximately $25 billion, a 26% premium.
  5. A new buying trigger is arriving: in Okta’s Businesses at Work report (opens in a new tab), 78% cited controlling access for non-human identities as a top concern and only 10% had a strategy for governing them.

Who buys identity and access management, and what is a customer worth?

A CISO or CIO signs, IAM architects run the evaluation, and procurement tests the vendor’s own security.

Identity and access management (IAM) covers several products that enterprises increasingly buy together: workforce single sign-on and multi-factor authentication (MFA), identity governance and administration (IGA) for joiners, movers and leavers, privileged access management (PAM) for administrator accounts, customer identity for consumer logins, and newer tools that detect identity attacks. Gartner’s 1Q26 forecast, as summarized by Columbus, puts the IAM subsegment at $20.7 billion in 2025 and $23.4 billion in 2026. Identity governance grows faster than the subsegment, at 14.7%, and access management at 14.5%.

The buying group is wide because identity touches everything:

  • The CISO, who owns the risk after a credential-based incident.
  • The CIO and IT, who run the directory and every application connected to it.
  • IAM architects, who check standards, integrations and migration effort.
  • Audit and compliance, who need access reviews and evidence for regulators.
  • Procurement and vendor risk, who send the identity vendor a security questionnaire, since a compromised identity provider exposes every connected system.

A won customer tends to be large and durable. Once an identity platform is wired into a company’s applications, replacing it is a major project, so contracts tend to renew and expand into governance and privileged access, we infer. The market values that position highly. Palo Alto Networks said the CyberArk deal would establish “Identity Security as a new core platform,” and its CEO described identity security as a category at its “inflection point.”

What sends enterprises shopping for identity security?

Credential-based breaches, regulatory pressure for stronger authentication, and the arrival of AI agents with their own access.

Breaches that begin with a login. Verizon analyzed 12,195 confirmed data breaches; credential abuse (22%) and exploitation of vulnerabilities (20%) were the leading ways in. CrowdStrike’s 2025 threat report found a 442% increase in voice phishing between the first and second halves of 2024, and said valid account abuse accounted for 35% of cloud incidents in the first half of 2024. Vendors selling the cloud side of that defense can read how cloud security vendors reach enterprise shortlists.

The 2024 attacks on Snowflake customers showed the pattern plainly. Mandiant (opens in a new tab) reported that the attackers used stolen customer credentials, mostly from infostealer malware, and that the affected accounts “were not configured with multi-factor authentication enabled.” Mandiant and Snowflake notified approximately 165 potentially exposed organizations. Mandiant found no evidence of a breach of Snowflake’s own enterprise environment.

Pressure for stronger authentication. CISA “strongly urges all organizations to implement phishing-resistant MFA,” and notes that the Office of Management and Budget requires federal agencies to adopt it. In Okta’s customer data, high-assurance MFA adoption grew from 41% to 58%. For the network side of these projects, see how network security vendors win zero trust buyers.

AI agents. AI agents need accounts and permissions too. Okta’s report found 78% of organizations cite controlling non-human identity access as a top concern, and Palo Alto Networks framed its CyberArk deal partly around securing “autonomous AI agents.” Okta and Palo Alto Networks both sell identity products, so treat their framing as interested.

Each trigger arrives with urgency: an audit finding, a board question or an incident review. That urgency, we infer, pushes buyers to fast research tools such as AI assistants.

Where does AI search sit in an identity purchase?

Early, during research and shortlisting; no public study isolates identity buyers.

The broadest recent evidence covers technology buyers. TrustRadius’s 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report (opens in a new tab) found that 63% of buyers used AI during their purchase journey, but 94% of them fact-checked its answers at least some of the time and 74% used reviews to inform their decisions. Analyst reports were used by only 13%. As a seller of review visibility, TrustRadius has an interest in that finding.

For identity, the fact-checking step is unusually formal. A shortlisted vendor will face a security questionnaire, a review of its certifications and incident history, and an architecture check against the buyer’s directory and applications. An AI answer can get a vendor into that process; it cannot carry the vendor through it. Endpoint vendors meet a similar test, described in how EDR vendors win when CISOs ask AI.

Which questions do identity buyers ask AI assistants?

Questions about platforms, standards, migration, governance, AI agents and the vendor’s own security. We wrote these prompts to illustrate identity buying; they were not observed from real IAM teams.

Buying needIllustrative prompt
Platform choice“Okta or Microsoft Entra ID for 6,000 employees who mostly use Google Workspace?”
Phishing-resistant MFA“Which identity providers support passkeys and FIDO2 for every user, including contractors?”
Privileged access“What are the alternatives to CyberArk for privileged access in a hybrid Windows and Linux estate?”
Governance“Do we need a separate identity governance tool, or can our identity provider handle access reviews for SOX?”
AI agents“How should we give AI agents their own identities and limit what they can access?”
Migration“How long does it take to migrate 400 apps from one single sign-on provider to another?”
Vendor risk“Has this identity vendor had security incidents, and how did it disclose them?”

Each of these can trigger many searches. Google documents that AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a “query fan-out” technique (opens in a new tab), and OpenAI documents that ChatGPT search rewrites a question (opens in a new tab) into “one or more targeted queries.” A question about passkeys for contractors, we infer, sends those searches to documentation and standards pages as well as to review sites.

What path leads from an AI answer to a signed identity contract?

Through an urgent shortlist: trigger, AI-assisted research, security review, pilot, then a multi-year platform contract.

  1. Trigger. An incident, audit finding or AI-agent rollout makes identity a priority.
  2. Research. The IAM lead or CISO asks assistants for options that fit the company’s directory, applications and regulators.
  3. Shortlist and review. A few vendors receive security questionnaires and architecture questions; the vendor’s own security record is examined.
  4. Pilot. The chosen vendor connects a group of applications and users.
  5. Contract and expansion. The platform is priced by users or identities and grows into governance, privileged access and non-human identities, the bundle Palo Alto Networks is assembling.

The AI answer matters at step 2, and the urgency of step 1 shortens the time buyers spend there, we infer. A vendor not named early may never reach step 3.

Why do assistants name some identity vendors and skip others?

The platforms do not document vendor selection; studies show answers repeat what a company’s own sources say, including contradictions.

Documented by the platforms. Both Google and OpenAI state that their AI answers go out to the web and link the pages behind them. Neither says what makes one SSO, MFA or privileged access vendor appear and another not.

Observed in studies. In our business-facts study, consistency across a company’s own sources made a large difference: where a business’s profile phone number did not appear on its own website, 30.6% of the numbers AI engines gave differed from the profile, against 1.6% where it did. The study covered local businesses, but the lesson carries over, we infer: an identity vendor whose integration list, standards support or certifications differ between its site, documentation and review profiles invites answers that differ too.

Pricing is another fact buyers ask about, and our pricing study found only 61.9% of software plan prices quoted by four AI engines were fully faithful to the official pricing page. Identity pricing, with per-user tiers and add-ons, gives answers plenty of room to drift.

Identity-specific trust signals, our inference. Most of what an IAM team checks before a pilot sits on public pages an assistant can also read:

  • standards support: SAML, OpenID Connect, SCIM provisioning, and FIDO2 or passkey authentication;
  • the vendor’s own security record: certifications such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, FedRAMP status, a public trust center, and dated incident disclosures;
  • the integration catalog, with clear statements of depth, not just logos;
  • migration guides and reference architectures;
  • independent coverage, analyst placements and practitioner reviews.

Our working assumption is that identity vendors who keep these answers public, current and consistent hand assistants better material to work with. That assumption has not been tested on SSO, governance or privileged access vendors.

What is at stake for an IAM vendor that assistants overlook?

A missed urgent decision and a long lock-in afterward; no study has measured the cost in dollars.

  • Urgent cycles are short. When an incident drives the purchase, buyers decide quickly, so a vendor not named at the start has little time to enter, we infer.
  • Lock-in cuts both ways. The switching cost that protects an incumbent also keeps a missing vendor out for years.
  • Bundles expand the loss. Losing the access decision can mean losing governance, privileged access and agent identities later, as platforms like Palo Alto Networks bundle them.
  • Wrong facts can disqualify. An AI answer that misstates your passkey support, certifications or a past incident can remove you before the security review. Correcting those errors is covered in how to fix wrong brand information in AI answers.

Which GEO work helps an IAM vendor get verified and named?

Publish standards support, security record and fit in one consistent form; nobody can force a mention.

  1. One consistent set of facts. Keep product names, supported standards, integrations, certifications and pricing identical across your site, documentation, marketplace listings and review profiles.
  2. A public trust center. Publish certifications, audit dates, data residency, subprocessors and incident history on readable pages. Your own security is part of the product.
  3. Standards and migration content. Explain passkey rollout, provisioning, and migration from named competitors in practical detail.
  4. Answers for new triggers. Publish clear guidance on AI-agent and non-human identities, tied to what your product actually does.
  5. Independent coverage. Contribute identity attack research and expert comment after major incidents; brief analysts. This is the identity version of how brands build authority for AI search.
  6. Reviews from practitioners. Encourage detailed reviews from IAM teams, within review platforms’ rules.
  7. Honest comparisons. Fair pages comparing you with Okta, Entra ID or CyberArk help buyers, though third-party sources weigh more; see whether comparison pages help B2B citations.
  8. Measurement. Track platform, standards, governance, agent and vendor-risk questions across assistants and repeated runs; see how many prompts to track.

For the wider security buying picture, see cybersecurity software and AI search; for subscription economics, see B2B SaaS and AI search.

What remains unmeasured about AI in identity purchases?

Nobody has yet measured how IAM buyers use assistants or whether being named changes identity vendors’ win rates.

  • No survey of IAM buyers. The TrustRadius figures describe technology buyers as a whole, not identity teams.
  • Vendor sources. Threat and adoption figures here come largely from security vendors, including CrowdStrike, Okta and Palo Alto Networks.
  • Transfer from our studies. Our facts and pricing studies did not test identity vendors; we apply them by inference.
  • Ties to closed identity deals. None are measured here; the general evidence is in does AI visibility drive business results.

What should an identity vendor check before the next breach-driven buying cycle?

What assistants say about your passkey and SSO support, your security record, and your fit for each buying trigger.

List questions for each trigger: breach response, phishing-resistant MFA, governance audits, AI-agent identities, migration and vendor risk. Repeat every question on each main assistant, and on more than one day. Record whether you are named, whether your facts are right, and which sources are cited. Fix inconsistencies in your own sources first; they are the cheapest gap to close.

If you would rather have us run it, ask us to review your identity visibility. We will check where assistants include or omit you when enterprises shortlist SSO, MFA, governance and privileged access vendors, and which gaps most likely keep you out of security reviews, pilots and per-user platform contracts. The way we then align an identity vendor’s standards, trust center and integration facts across every source is described on our generative engine optimization service page.

Frequently asked questions

Do identity breaches really drive IAM purchases?

They are a leading trigger. Credential abuse was the top initial attack vector in Verizon’s 2025 report, at 22%, and incidents put identity on the board agenda.

Should identity vendors publish their own incident history?

Yes. Buyers ask about past incidents, and an assistant that finds only third-party accounts of them will repeat those. A dated, factual record gives answers your version.

Does supporting passkeys help AI visibility?

Only if it is clearly documented. Buyers increasingly ask about phishing-resistant MFA, which CISA strongly urges, and answers can only repeat what they can find.

How do we keep AI answers from quoting the wrong price?

Make one clear public pricing page and keep it consistent elsewhere. Only 61.9% of software prices quoted by AI engines in our study were fully faithful.

Sources

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