CyberArk and miniOrange tied at the top of privileged access management, each named in all 6 of the 6 answers ChatGPT and Gemini gave when we asked which PAM tool to buy. We ran this on 2026-08-07: six real buyer questions, one live web search each, with every product named and every source domain recorded.
Only two other names cleared a majority on their own. Delinea was named in 5 of 6 answers (83%), and Safeguard by One Identity in 4 of 6 (67%). After those four, the floor drops out: no other product appeared in more than 2 of the 6 answers.
In total, 16 different product labels surfaced across the six answers, but the tail is thin. Eight of the 16 were named just once, in a single question. The two assistants converged hard at the top and scattered at the bottom, which means the buyer's exact wording, not the category leaderboard, decided almost everything below the top four.
How the shortlist changed with the question
Two names held across every phrasing: CyberArk (6 of 6) and miniOrange (6 of 6). Everything else moved. The bare query "best privileged access management software" returned the widest list, 8 products in one answer, while "best free privileged access management software" returned the shortest, just 4.
The bare "best" answer was the only place BeyondTrust and Wallix showed up, each named 1 time in that one question and nowhere else in the set. It was also the only answer to use the plain label "One Identity" rather than the product name "Safeguard by One Identity," which carried the other 4 mentions of that brand.
The "best free" answer broke the pattern completely. It named only 4 products: Mamori, Delinea Secret Server, miniOrange and CyberArk. Mamori (1 of 6) and Delinea Secret Server (1 of 6) appear in this question and no other. The enterprise names that dominate every other answer, BeyondTrust, Wallix and Safeguard by One Identity, all vanish from the free list.
The split worth studying is "free" versus "affordable," because they sound alike and are not. "Most affordable" returned 6 products: Safeguard by One Identity, miniOrange, Delinea, CyberArk, ManageEngine PAM360 and Sectona Security Platform. Only miniOrange and CyberArk are common to both the free and the affordable answers. "Affordable" kept the expensive incumbents and added two mid-market names, while "free" dropped the incumbents and surfaced a genuinely different shortlist. A buyer who types one of those words instead of the other sees an almost entirely different set of 6 versus 4.
The remaining questions each had their own one-off entrants. "For small teams" (7 products) was the only home for Keeper PAM and Iraje Privileged Access Manager, each named once. "Recommendations" (7 products) was the only place Kron PAM appeared, named once. "What should I use" (5 products) was where Sectona Security Platform first showed up before returning in "most affordable," making its 2 of 6 total. Same category, six questions, and the tail turns over almost every time.
One brand quietly beat its own headline number. Delinea was named in 5 of 6 answers outright, and in the sixth, the free question, it appears under its free product name Delinea Secret Server, so the Delinea brand is actually present in all 6. The One Identity brand, counting both its labels, sits in 5 of 6, absent only from the free answer.
Where the answers came from
Four domains fed all 6 answers: reddit.com, community.spiceworks.com, gartner.com and oneidentity.com, each cited in 6 of 6. Two of those are community discussion threads (Reddit and Spiceworks), one is an analyst site (Gartner), and one is a vendor's own domain. Across the full set, 12 distinct domains were cited.
That vendor domain is the finding worth sitting with. oneidentity.com was cited in all 6 answers, and the One Identity brand was named in 5 of them (Safeguard by One Identity 4 times, One Identity once). The vendor's own pages helped write the answer that recommends the vendor. Delinea did the same at smaller scale: delinea.com fed 4 of 6 answers, and Delinea was named in 5. Apono and Mamori show the cleanest version of the effect: apono.io fed exactly the 2 answers that named Apono, and mamori.io fed the 1 answer that named Mamori.
Two roundup-style sources appeared: aimultiple.com in 4 of 6 answers and thectoclub.com in 1. These are the third-party "top PAM tools" lists, and they carried less weight than the community threads and vendor pages, which hit 6 of 6.
The classic software review directories did not appear at all. No G2, no Capterra, no TrustRadius in any of the 6 answers. The nearest thing to a review site was gartner.com (6 of 6), an analyst brand, not a user-review directory. For a category this commercial, buyers are being pointed to forum threads and vendor pages, not star ratings.
What this means if you sell PAM
The lesson is blunt: the source list, not your market share, decides whether you get named. The four domains that fed every answer (reddit.com, community.spiceworks.com, gartner.com and oneidentity.com, all 6 of 6) are what the two assistants actually read. A product with a large install base that is absent from those pages loses to a smaller product that is present on them.
So the work is concrete: be in the exact places these answers were built from. Get named in the live Reddit and Spiceworks threads that both ranked 6 of 6. Earn a line in the aimultiple.com roundup that fed 4 of 6. And publish your own pages the way One Identity and Delinea did, because their domains were cited in 6 and 4 answers and their products rode along.
There is one specific opening. The "best free" answer named only 4 products and pulled from a different source mix. Delinea got named twice under one brand by holding both "Delinea" (5 of 6) and "Delinea Secret Server" (1 of 6, free question only). If you have a free tier, the free question is a separate shortlist with far less competition, 4 names instead of 8, and almost nobody is defending it.
The full list, counted
Two brands appear under two labels, and we are keeping each as its own row, because that is how the answers named them, rather than summing them into a number the data never shows. Delinea appears as "Delinea" (5 of 6) and separately as "Delinea Secret Server" (1 of 6). One Identity appears as "Safeguard by One Identity" (4 of 6) and separately as "One Identity" (1 of 6).
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| CyberArk | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| miniOrange | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Delinea | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Safeguard by One Identity | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Apono | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| ManageEngine PAM360 | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Sectona Security Platform | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| StrongDM | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Delinea Secret Server | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| One Identity | 1 of 6 | 17% |
Six more products were named once each and sit below the table: BeyondTrust, Wallix, Keeper PAM, Iraje Privileged Access Manager, Kron PAM and Mamori, each at 1 of 6 (17%).
One honest note
Glotier is not in this category, and you will not find us in any of these 6 answers. That is correct. We do not sell privileged access management, so ChatGPT and Gemini should not name us here, and they don't. We would not ship a page that pretended otherwise.
But this page is the thing we do for a living. We ran the same six-question measurement on PAM that we would run on your category: the real answers, the products named, the exact domains behind each one. The check is free, there is no account, and it takes about a minute. If your name is missing from your own category's answers, that is worth knowing before your next buyer asks the question for you.