Best Digital PR Agencies for Cybersecurity Companies (2026)

Two different purchases wear the same name

Cybersecurity buyers concentrate their trust in a narrow set of publications: Dark Reading, SecurityWeek, The Record, BleepingComputer, CSO Online, SC Media. Roughly 30 to 50 journalists own the security beat globally, and coverage outside that set is visible to your investors and invisible to your buyers.

Two different services promise to get you into that world, and conflating them wastes budgets. Security communications is media relations: journalist relationships, executive positioning, breach and disclosure comms, analyst briefings. It is bought on retainer and measured in presence. Digital PR is citation building: campaigns designed to earn the links and references that compound into search rankings and AI-answer visibility, measured in movement. When a CISO asks an AI engine which vendors to shortlist, the answer is synthesised from cited sources; digital PR is the work of becoming one.

Most of the agencies below sell the first. We sell the second. Both are legitimate purchases; buying one expecting the other is not.

The communications firms

Code Red Communications

Best for exclusive cybersecurity media relations: Code Red Communications presents itself as a specialist comms shop for vendors buying journalist relationships, not citations.

Based on its public materials, Code Red Communications describes itself as working exclusively in cybersecurity comms: media relations, social and analyst relations. The exclusivity is the stated pitch, and for narrative and trade-press relationships it appears a reasonable one. What the model does not appear to produce, based on published information, is citation assets: we found no evidence of a research engine, link-building output, or published measurement of search or AI visibility.

Corporate Ink

Best for funded challengers buying retainer comms: Corporate Ink describes itself as a B2B tech PR firm with cyber, risk and compliance depth, stating it serves vendors from roughly $20M to $750M in revenue.

Corporate Ink markets "GEO-aligned PR," a claim worth reading carefully: it is self-described, the measurement behind it is not published as far as we can tell, and based on our review, a meaningful share of the firm's own AI-search footprint appears to come from best-agency listicles they publish about their own category on their own blog. That is a currently effective tactic, and in our view buyers should understand it is the tactic.

Highwire

Best for Series B to IPO security comms: Highwire presents itself as offering a security practice inside a full-service firm built for late-stage companies whose story is now for analysts and investors as much as buyers.

Based on publicly available information, Highwire appears to run a security practice inside a firm it describes as a $41M full-service operation built for the Series B to IPO arc. The scale appears genuine and is priced accordingly, and security appears to be one practice among many, which in our view is exactly the dynamic smaller vendors should probe: who, specifically, works your account after the pitch team leaves the room.

Walker Sands

Best for integrated B2B tech marketing: Walker Sands positions itself as offering digital PR as one capability inside a full-service programme for larger brands consolidating functions.

Based on its public positioning, Walker Sands offers digital PR as one capability inside an integrated marketing engagement. Integration appears to be the product; if citations are what you want, in our view you are buying a slice of a machine tuned for something broader, and we believe specialists will out-produce that slice per pound.

Crackle PR

Best for VC-backed vendors wanting media relations with an AI-visibility narrative: Crackle PR describes itself as a senior-only tech PR shop marketing GEO and answer-engine optimisation alongside earned media.

Credit where due: based on their published content, they appear to have moved on AI discoverability earlier than most comms firms. The caveat, in our view, mirrors Corporate Ink's: their visibility playbook appears to lean heavily on self-published category rankings, including for this exact query, and their claims about AI-search results are their own.

The citation work

Ranking Atlas (that's us)

Best for security vendors that need to be found, cited and shortlisted: Ranking Atlas builds the studies journalists cover, then reports exactly where every placement appears across search and AI answers.

Our core product is the citation layer itself. We build original security research designed to survive the scrutiny of the most hostile audience in B2B, working practitioners: primary-source datasets, published methodology, downloadable data, findings stated without spin. That is what earns coverage from trade journalists who ignore vendor surveys, and what practitioners share instead of shredding.

Then we prove what it did. Prompt-level tracking of where your brand appears across search and AI answers, benchmarked against named competitors, with branded and non-branded visibility separated: that measurement is part of the engagement, not a reporting afterthought. The split matters because it is where the industry hides: our audits repeatedly find vendors who look dominant on prompts containing their own name and are absent from the questions CISOs actually ask. We report the second number, because it is the one connected to pipeline.

The same standard applied to ourselves: we are a specialist boutique, and we do not do breach response, vulnerability disclosure comms or analyst relations. A vendor in crisis needs a comms firm on retainer, and should hire one from the list above. What we do is build the citation base that decides whether you appear when buyers ask, and show you the movement. Our analysis of the paid-link economy explains why we build it earned.

What the engagement costs

Published category benchmarks for comms retainers: boutique $8K to $14K a month, mid-market $15K to $28K, defined projects $40K to $100K over 60 to 120 days. Research-led citation campaigns are scoped per engagement. Whichever you buy, price it against output your buyers encounter: a retainer can produce a year of coverage that never touches the security trade press or a single retrievable citation, and plenty do. For how these engagement models compare across the whole category, see our B2B SaaS agency guide.

Questions that expose the difference

Show me the last five placements in publications CISOs read. URLs and dates. The security beat is small; this is checkable.

Show me a client's AI visibility report, with branded and non-branded separated. A blended number, or no number, tells you which half of the story you would be getting.

Where does your own AI-search visibility come from? If the honest answer is rankings the agency publishes about itself, you have learned the playbook and its ceiling.

Who designs the research? Security practitioners dismantle weak methodology in public, enthusiastically. Ask whether the dataset would survive that audience, and who is accountable if it does not.

FAQ

Do cybersecurity companies need a specialist PR agency?

For crisis and disclosure comms, security-native experience is close to mandatory. For citation building, the specialism that matters is research rigour the practitioner community respects, which is a methodology competency, not a rolodex.

How do security vendors get named in AI answers?

Engines corroborate: vendors cited across multiple retrieved sources get named, single-source vendors rarely do. Original research that earns trade coverage builds corroboration across several source types at once, which is why it moves AI answers and search together. Mechanics in our citation equity guide.

What does a research campaign deliver, and when?

Four to six weeks from kickoff across study design, data production, landing page and outreach, with placements landing during and shortly after that window. Visibility compounds across successive campaigns over months as each round of coverage extends the citation base, which is why movement against a documented baseline is the result and a single campaign's placement count is only the input.

Is regulatory news an opportunity?

The most reliable one in the category. NIS2, DORA, SEC disclosure rules and CISA advisories each open coverage windows where journalists need data within hours. Vendors holding relevant original data convert those windows into citations; vendors offering a CEO quote get a name-check that neither ranks nor gets retrieved.