Three #1 rankings on a PE-backed enterprise sale

We write content for a cyber risk quantification company: private-equity backed, selling to Fortune-500 security teams. Three of our articles rank #1 on Google for the exact queries a CISO (chief information security officer) searches before committing budget, and the domain surfaces in 50 Google AI Overview answers.

Measured externally: Ahrefs via third-party gateway + live Google search captures. No client analytics.

The result

The result: three #1 rankings on the path to a purchase

We wrote content for a cyber risk quantification company: private-equity backed, selling to Fortune-500 security teams. Three of our articles now rank #1 on Google for the exact queries a CISO (chief information security officer) searches before committing budget. The domain also surfaces in 50 Google AI Overview answers.

Article we wrote	Search it ranks #1 for
5 Steps to a Board-Ready Cyber Risk Report	“5 steps to a board ready cyber risk report”
Decision Velocity: The CISO Metric Nobody’s Tracking	“decision velocity ciso metric”
Cyber Risk Quantification: From Reports to Operations	“cyber risk quantification from reports to operations”

Site signal	Jun 2026	Sep 2026	Change
Domain Rating (DR)	47	49	+2
Referring domains	839	1466	+627
Ranked keywords, top-10 (Ahrefs sample)	179	120	-59
Indexed pages (Ahrefs)	57	37	-20

What these numbers mean: Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ third-party score of a website’s authority on a 0-100 scale. Ahrefs is an independent SEO data provider, not Google and not the client. All figures below are its estimates. The +627 referring domains are dominated by low-DR link networks; DR still rose (+2) against that noise. Ranked-keyword and indexed-page counts fell, so we make no keyword-growth claim.

What we did

Three articles live and ranking, with strict attribution

Three 2026-dated articles confirmed live on the client’s blog, matched to our drafts by title, topic, and a text-overlap check
All three rank #1 for their target searches (live Google capture, 21 September 2026)
Two other #1 and #3 captures were deliberately excluded: those pages predate the engagement (2024) and are not our content. No false wins are recorded.
LinkedIn posts from the client’s leadership are live but are their own writing (no match to our drafts); we do not claim them
Medium and Quora items are not publicly verifiable and are not claimed

The client

Anonymized, by industry and stage

The story is the shape of the deal, not the brand.

Attribute	Profile
Industry	Cyber risk quantification: assesses a company’s security exposure in financial terms, maps real attack paths, and prioritizes what to fix
Stage	Growth financing of over $100M, publicly announced February 2021 (per company funding-announcement blog post). Not labeled Series A in the public record
Backers	Round led by a global private-equity firm (a top-tier European PE firm) with an existing tier-1 venture investor. Round disclosed by the company in February 2021
Team	Founder-led (a CEO publicly named on the funding announcement, redacted here). Total employee count is not publicly disclosed. 500+ organizations served (company-self-published)
Status	PE-backed. Customers include global tier-one and Fortune 500 companies, including portfolio companies of the lead investor (per the company’s own funding announcement)
Proof	Serves financial services, healthcare, critical infrastructure, technology, and retail (publicly stated across the company’s blog post series). Specific attack-path and exposure figures are not publicly disclosed

What the pricing tells you about the deal

No public price: pricing is custom and sales-gated (pricing page exists but redirects to a demo request); ACV figures are not in the public record
Enterprise deals at this level are sold as custom bundles of platform + embedded expert services; the company has not publicly disclosed ACV figures
The #1 rankings sit on the exact queries a CISO or board searches before approving spend: board-ready reporting, decision velocity, and quantification in operations

AI visibility

The answer to “did our share of voice go up?”

AI engine	Citations of client domain	Source pages
Google AI Overviews	50	18
ChatGPT	5	4
Google AI Mode	4	6
Perplexity	4	5
Copilot	3	3
Gemini	1	1

50 Google AI Overview citations plus 17 assistant-engine citations is measurable AI share of voice: the number to compare against next month. It is domain-level, not proof our articles are the cited pages. Source: Ahrefs, 21 September 2026. We also report honestly that top-3 organic share of voice fell in the same window, so any increase is in AI visibility, not organic top-3 position.

How this was measured

The honest version

Where the data comes from: Ahrefs, an independent third-party SEO data provider. Its figures are estimates, not Google’s own data and not the client’s.
Rank positions: live captures of the Google search results on a single date (21 September 2026), not a tracked history.
No client analytics: we did not use the client’s sessions, conversions, or revenue numbers. Those are client-side and we will not present them as ours.
Declines are reported as declines: where a number fell in the window, it is shown as measured, not smoothed over.
Strict attribution: only the 2026 articles matching our drafts are claimed. Pre-engagement pages that happen to rank for similar topics are excluded.

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