Four competitors, measured. Then where the gap is.
4BIS, Intrust IT, LayerCake and MIS Solutions are the businesses that hold the
Cincinnati map and the local search results Obviam wants. We measured their authority, every
keyword they rank for, the pages that actually earn their traffic, and the structure of their
sites, then compared all of it to obviam.com. This page is what we would do about it.
Prepared for obviam.com · 28 August 2026 ·
4,470 competitor keywords ·
1,447 competitor URLs · 8 live SERPs
01The four, measured
Same instruments used on obviam.com in the search opportunity report, pointed at
the businesses beating it. Reviews are the Google Business Profile counts from the Cincinnati map
pack.
Business
Domain rank
Ref domains
Ranking keywords
Reviews
Pages
Obviam obviam.com
164
59
29
0
176
Intrust IT intrust-it.com
251
458
666
113
709
4BIS 4bis.com
206
275
297
365
390
MIS Solutions mis.tech
248
392
468
138
276
LayerCake layercaketech.com
149
54
3,039
28
72
The honest position Obviam places last of five on ranking keywords and holds the only zero in the reviews
column. On authority it is fourth of five by domain rank and fourth by referring
domains, ahead of LayerCake on both.
That last detail is the useful one. LayerCake has 54 referring domains against
Obviam's 59, and ranks for 3,039 keywords against 29.
Whatever separates those two results, it is not link authority, because Obviam has slightly more of
it. This page does not argue the gap away. It finds the places where the gap does not decide the
outcome, and section 02 starts by taking that 3,039 apart.
02Where their traffic actually comes from
A keyword count is not a customer count. We pulled the pages earning the traffic
behind those numbers, and most of the volume is not commercial at all.
Read the page names
MIS Solutions' single biggest page is its careers page. 4BIS's is
an explainer about Google Assistant, and its second is about reopening closed
Chrome tabs. Intrust IT's third biggest is what is two factor authentication. These pages
pull real visitors who are looking for a job, a browser tip or a definition, and none of them is
shopping for a security partner.
LayerCake is the sharpest example. It ranks for 3,039 keywords,
which reads like the strongest content operation in the group.
2,936 of them, 97%, resolve to a single URL: the homepage.
Its Cincinnati location page earns a traffic value of 8.
The practical consequence: a keyword total is not the measure. The measure is
how many of those keywords bring a buyer. On that measure the
field is much closer than the totals in section 01 suggest, and the contest is decided on a small
number of commercial pages.
03What this market is actually searching for
Every keyword these four rank for and obviam.com does not, filtered to search
terms that name a service and a place, with close variants collapsed to one row each. Columbus
appears because LayerCake ranks there and Obviam has named it as a market. This is the local
demand that exists today.
top 3, where buyers click 4 to 10 11 to 20 21 and beyondSame colors as the search opportunity report.
Keyword
Vol/mo
Best competitor
Who holds it
cincinnati managed services
390
3
Intrust3MIS84BIS30
managed it services columbus ohio
390
9
LayerCake9
managed services columbus ohio
390
11
LayerCake11
cincinnati managed it services
320
5
Intrust5MIS9LayerCake224BIS66
it services cincinnati
210
6
MIS6Intrust194BIS21
it services columbus ohio
210
12
LayerCake12
cincinnati it consulting
170
10
MIS104BIS22Intrust30
it support columbus ohio
170
26
Intrust26LayerCake41
it support cincinnati
140
9
Intrust9MIS124BIS15
it consulting columbus
140
32
LayerCake32
cybersecurity cincinnati
110
29
MIS294BIS38
managed service providers cincinnati
70
5
Intrust5MIS64BIS36
dayton it support
50
3
Intrust3MIS19
security companies in dayton ohio
50
39
Intrust39
ohio hb 96 cybersecurity
40
14
Intrust14
managed services ohio
20
14
MIS14
Needs a decision The local demand in this market is for managed IT, not for cybersecurity. Across
the local terms competitors rank for and Obviam does not, managed IT and IT support phrasing
accounts for 2,670 searches a month against
200 for security phrasing. Close variants are collapsed before those
totals are added, so word order and a state suffix do not count twice: 32 measured terms
reduce to 16 distinct searches.
That is a positioning question before it is a search question. Managed IT is Modern Office
Methods territory, not Obviam's stated offer, and we are not going to quietly rewrite what Obviam
sells in order to chase a keyword. Someone at Obviam has to decide whether the security
brand should compete for managed IT language at all.
Our recommendation, and the decision stays Obviam's: do not chase managed
IT on obviam.com. Take the security terms in the next section, which are small but unowned, and
treat managed IT as a Modern Office Methods question rather than a search one. We need the answer
inside month one, because it decides whether the Columbus terms, which only LayerCake holds today,
are in scope or out.
04Nobody owns cybersecurity in Cincinnati
Eight security searches, run live from inside Cincinnati, to a depth of twenty.
Here is who page one actually belongs to.
The opening 36% of the page one results across those eight searches are not competitors
at all. They are universities, job boards and directory listings: the University of
Cincinnati's college of education, Cincinnati State, ZipRecruiter, GoodFirms, Built In. On
soc 2 compliance cincinnati the top two are accountancy firms. On
penetration testing cincinnati page one carries two job boards and a directory, and the
security firms that are present sit at positions two and five.
A market whose search results are held by colleges and job boards is a market where few
firms have published a serious local page and none dominates. The demand is modest, which
is the likely reason. Two of the eight are list style searches, where a single firm's page rarely
displaces a directory, so those two are not the target. It is also why a small number of genuinely good pages can take it, which is the
opposite of the national picture in section 02 of the search opportunity report, where Obviam would
be arguing with IBM and CISA.
05Page against page
The commercial pages that carry this contest, measured the same way. Word count is
not quality, but a page that never names the city it serves cannot rank for the city.
Page
Words
Sections
Says “Cincinnati”
Local business markup
Intrust IT Managed IT services
1,824
15
6
no local markup
Intrust IT Cyber security
1,385
13
3
no local markup
MIS Solutions Cincinnati managed IT
2,137
11
32
LocalBusinessaddress
4BIS Cincinnati IT services
3,513
12
31
no local markup
LayerCake Cincinnati location
609
5
9
ProfessionalServiceaddresshours
LayerCake Managed cybersecurity
768
5
1
ProfessionalServiceaddresshours
Obviam Cybersecurity consulting
720
5
0
no local markup
The gap in one line Obviam's cybersecurity consulting page runs 720 words and mentions Cincinnati zero times.
MIS Solutions' Cincinnati page runs 2,137 words, names the city 32 times, and carries
FAQ, LocalBusiness and star rating markup. 4BIS's runs 3,513 words and names it 31 times,
with no structured data at all, which is a gap of its own on a page that is
otherwise beating Obviam.
One caveat on markup, because it changes what is worth doing. MIS
Solutions also carries FAQ and star rating markup. Google restricted FAQ rich results to government
and health sites in 2023 and reconfirmed it in May 2026, and a star rating a business writes about
itself has never been eligible for a review snippet. Neither of those earns MIS anything in
the results, so copying them would be work with no outcome. The column above therefore
measures the markup that does still do something: telling Google this page belongs to a business
with an address, hours and a service area. Obviam and 4BIS have none of it.
None of this requires a link budget. It is writing and markup on pages Obviam already
owns.
06The eight pages Obviam already owns
Obviam has industry pages for the exact verticals its competitors monetise. They
were measured in the search opportunity report as orphaned. Here is what is actually on them.
Page
Words
Has an H1
Sections
financial-services
253
none
0
healthcare
252
none
0
higher-education-and-colleges
255
none
0
insurance-companies
253
none
0
k-12
252
none
0
law-firms
253
none
0
manufacturing
252
none
0
retail
252
none
0
The cheapest inventory Eight pages, 252 to 255 words each, no heading and no sections on any of
them, and nothing on the site links to them. Their parent page,
industries we serve, runs 1,021 words by comparison.
LayerCake publishes 24 pages on this same shape, law firms, manufacturing,
higher education, nonprofits, government, accounting, construction and small business, across its
three service lines. Obviam already has the verticals. It has published a paragraph where a page
should be, then left the paragraph unlinked.
This is the highest ratio of result to effort on the entire engagement,
because the pages exist, the subjects are right, and the work is writing and linking rather than
earning authority.
07What each site is made of
Every URL in each sitemap, grouped by section. This is the shape of the competition.
Three different bets Intrust IT has built 224 pages under a single areas directory,
one per neighbourhood and town it serves. 4BIS and MIS Solutions have bet on blog volume, 317 and
221 posts, which is where the Google Assistant and careers traffic in section 02 comes from.
LayerCake made the opposite bet: 72 pages in total, no blog, arranged as three service lines
crossed with industries.
Obviam's 176 URLs include 102 tag archives, more than half the sitemap,
against 5 service pages. Tag archives are generated
by WordPress, thin by nature, and are not what anyone searches for. The site is not small. It is
allocated to the wrong things.
08Where we would start, and why
Ranked by result against effort, using what the measurements above actually support.
The sequencing sits inside the 120 day roadmap; this is the reasoning behind it.
First, because the assets already exist
Link and rewrite the eight industry pages. Obviam owns the verticals LayerCake monetises and
currently publishes 252 words with no heading on each
Put Cincinnati into the service pages. The consulting page names the city zero times against
32 on the page outranking it
Add LocalBusiness markup with address, hours and service area to the commercial pages.
Obviam has none, and neither does 4BIS, which still outranks it
Then, because the field is weak rather than because the term is big
One serious page per security service, written for Cincinnati, aimed at the eight searches in
section 04 where page one belongs to colleges and job boards
Reviews on the Google Business Profile, which is the input the map pack actually weighs and
the only column in section 01 where Obviam scores zero
What we would not do
Copy the blog volume. 317 posts earned 4BIS a Google Assistant explainer at
the top of its own site. That traffic does not buy security services
Copy Intrust IT's 224 area pages. That is a large build against
thin measured demand, and a pattern Google's doorway guidance warns against
Chase managed IT language until Obviam decides section 03 is a market it wants
to be in. That decision belongs to Obviam and Modern Office Methods, not to us
09Terms worth taking first
Local terms where a competitor already ranks, Obviam does not, and the best
competitor position is outside the top eight, so the result is contestable rather than entrenched.
Keyword
Vol/mo
Best competitor
Advertiser bid
managed it services columbus ohio
390
9
$72.72
managed services columbus ohio
390
11
not measured
it services columbus ohio
210
12
not measured
cincinnati it consulting
170
10
$98.12
it support columbus ohio
170
26
$65.78
it support cincinnati
140
9
$71.61
it consulting columbus
140
32
$14.59
cybersecurity cincinnati
110
29
not measured
Volumes here are modest by design. These are the terms a buyer in this metro
actually types, and the whole local market is small, which is exactly why the map pack work in the
search opportunity report carries more weight than the blue links.
10Cincinnati first, and why it is not the biggest market
The sequencing question, answered with the two numbers that decide it: how much
demand each metro has, and whether Obviam can appear there at all today.
Metro
Security searches/mo
Business profile
Map points held
Cincinnati
100
yes
126 of 196
Columbus
280
none
0 of 147
Philadelphia
240
none
0 of 147
Cleveland
160
none
0 of 147
Pittsburgh
130
none
0 of 147
Sequence, not preference Cincinnati is the smallest of the five markets and still has to go first. It carries
100 security searches a month against Columbus at 280, and it is the only metro where
Obviam appears on the map at all, because it is the only one with a Google Business Profile. Map
presence follows a listing, and a listing needs a real address and a verification process measured
in weeks.
So the order is forced. Cincinnati is where the profile fix, the reviews and the
localised service pages pay back immediately, and it is where the method gets proved on a market
Obviam already half holds. Everything in sections 11 and 12 below is Cincinnati work that
starts now and needs no decision from anyone.
The trap to avoid is treating that as a reason to wait on the rest.
Columbus has nearly three times the demand and zero presence, and the only thing standing between
Obviam and it is a location decision that takes months to act on once made. Cincinnati first, the
locations decision in parallel, in month one.
11The Cincinnati profile, item by item
The Google Business Profile is the single strongest lever in this market and the
one place Obviam is starting from zero on every count. Pulled live from Google.
Business
Primary category
Extra categories
Services listed
Reviews
Photos
Obviam
Business to business service
0
0
0
1
Intrust IT
Computer support and services
4
60
113
91
4BIS Cyber Security & IT Services
Computer repair service
6
45
365
22
MIS Solutions- Cincinnati Managed IT Services Company
Computer support and services
7
58
138
131
LayerCake Technologies
Computer support and services
1
25
28
12
Cequence Security, Inc
Computer security service
0
31
3
1
Five fixable gaps
Obviam has one photo, no additional categories, no listed services, no reviews, and a
primary category that describes no service it sells. These are the two gaps named in the
search opportunity report, category and reviews, plus three more the profile data exposes. The four named competitors above it
average 64 photos and 4.5 additional categories, and the middle of that
field runs 113 to 138 reviews.
Read the category column again, because it is the cheapest fix on this page. Not one of
these firms uses Business to business service. Three use Computer support and
services. Cequence Security, sitting above Obviam on three reviews, uses Computer security
service. Obviam is the only cybersecurity firm in this pack not filed under a
technology category.
The photo gap is the least glamorous and the most immediately fixable: 1
against 64. Photographs of the team, the Blue Ash office and the work are supplied by
Obviam and uploaded by us.
The services column is the one that explains the rest. Google groups the
services a business can list underneath the categories it has chosen. Cequence Security's
31 services all sit under Computer security service. Intrust IT's 60 sit
under Computer support and services. Obviam's category offers no security services to
list, and Obviam lists none.
That is the mechanism behind the whole category argument, and it is visible rather than
inferred: the category does not merely label the business, it decides the vocabulary Google has to
match a query against. A profile filed under Business to business service has nothing to
put in front of someone searching for penetration testing. Of Cequence's list, 11 are services Obviam sells today and cannot
list under its current category.
One more field, and it is the only free text Google reads. Obviam's
profile description runs 656 characters, describes a national reach, and
contains the words Cincinnati, Blue Ash, Ohio and Kentucky exactly
0 times between
them. A profile that tells Google it operates nationally, filed under a category that
names no technology, is describing a different business from the one that would win these searches.
The profile is claimed, and Obviam reports Google showing it as confirmed by the business six
weeks ago, so this is a wording decision rather than a neglected listing.
11bThe experiment on Obviam's own street
Proximity is the largest single factor in local ranking, which usually makes
comparisons unfair. On Lake Forest Drive it is held constant for us. Ranks below are the Cincinnati
map pack for cybersecurity company, searched from Blue Ash.
Map rank
Business
Primary category
Reviews
Address
4
Cequence Security, Inc
Computer security service
3
4555 Lake Forest Dr #220, Blue Ash, OH 45242
9
NuTech Logix
Software company
0
4555 Lake Forest Dr, Cincinnati, OH 45242
15
Obviam
Business to business service
0
4747 Lake Forest Dr Suite 100, Cincinnati, OH 45242
Cleanest evidence here
Same street. Zero reviews each. Six places apart.
224metres between Obviam and
Cequence Security, both on Lake Forest Drive
0reviews held by NuTech Logix, the same
number Obviam has
9where NuTech Logix ranks on the
same street
15where Obviam ranks, six places
behind a profile with no reviews either
NuTech Logix sits on the same street and outranks Obviam by six places
while matching it on every profile signal we can measure. Both have
0 reviews, 0
additional categories, 0 listed services and
1 photo each. Obviam has more of one thing: a
656 character description, where NuTech's is empty. What differs is the category.
NuTech is filed as a software company, Cequence as a computer security service, and Obviam as a
business to business service.
This is as close to a controlled test as local search offers. It does not isolate
category perfectly, because site authority and listing age are not visible to us, but proximity,
reviews, photos, additional categories and listed services are all matched, which leaves the
category as the difference we can see. It is also why the category correction sits in week one of the roadmap rather than
further down. The fix is a form field and it costs nothing. The two businesses closest to
Obviam's own front door are both ahead of it on the strength of theirs.
12The local links that actually exist
Every referring domain for the three Cincinnati competitors and for obviam.com,
filtered to sources that are local or civic. Totals here come from a live crawl on 28 August and
run slightly below the summary index used in section 01. Four domains the filter caught were
checked by hand and removed: chamberofcommerce.com is a national directory, and
itservicescincinnati.com, cincinnaticruiser.com and cincytech.org do not resolve.
Target list, with a warning
Between them the three competitors hold links from the Cincinnati Regional Chamber, the
Northern Cincinnati Chamber, the Fairfield and Anderson Area Chambers, Entrepreneurs' Organization
Cincinnati, REDI Cincinnati, the Better Business Bureau, the University of Cincinnati, LinkNKY,
the NKY Tribune, Ohio Business Magazine and OnCincy. Every one of those was opened and checked
on 28 August; the list above is what survived. Obviam holds 1: centralohioissa.org, the Central Ohio
chapter of ISSA, which is a Columbus organization. Obviam has no local link in the city it
actually operates in.
The warning. We also checked what all four competitors share, expecting a
citation moat, and found the opposite: MapQuest, Superpages, bizhwy and a scattering of scraper
sites. There is no shared local link advantage to buy your way into. The real
sources above are individual memberships and local press, they are earned by joining and by having
something to say, and there are roughly a dozen of them in total.
That is a small, finite, cheap list, and it is worth doing. It is not a link
building program and we would not sell you one. In a market this size the map pack and
the pages in section 05 move the needle first, and this list supports them.
13The 224 page build, measured before we advised against it
Section 08 says not to copy Intrust IT's area pages. That is a strong claim about a
competitor's live strategy, so we tested it rather than asserted it. The pages are a matrix of 28
services across 8 cities. We fetched five, stripped the navigation, replaced every city name with
the word CITY, and compared what was left. If the pages are genuinely local, normalising the city
should leave them looking different.
Pair compared
Word overlap
Sentences
Identical
Share
ai-consulting blue-ash vs cincinnati
92%
39
32
82%
ai-consulting blue-ash vs dayton
90%
39
27
69%
ai-consulting cincinnati vs dayton
99%
39
28
72%
voip cincinnati vs blue-ash
89%
18
8
44%
The swap test, failed With the city names removed, the pages are between 89% and
99% the same text. On the AI consulting pages, 32 of 39 sentences are
byte identical across two different cities. The place name changes. So does the odd synonym: one page reads “It revolutionized the way businesses communicate by offering cost-effective solutions”
where the other reads “It revolutionized how businesses communicate by providing cost-effective solutions”.
The template even leaks. The VoIP page for Cincinnati contains the
sentence “Whether you're a small startup in Over the Rhine or a corporate giant in Blue Ash”. The same sentence, naming the
same suburb, sits on the Blue Ash page. The example city was never swapped.
This is what Google's own guidance describes as a doorway page: pages generated for a list
of locations that are substantially the same as each other. Intrust IT ranks well in this
market despite these pages, on the strength of the 458 referring domains
in section 01 and a library of posts going back to at least 2013, not because of them. Obviam has neither, so the same build would carry the risk
without the cushion. That is why section 08 refuses it, and why the recommendation is a smaller
number of pages that are actually about the place they name.
14Review velocity, and why the leader is exposed
Total review counts describe the past. What moves local rank is recency, so we
pulled the date of every recent review for each business in the pack. The last column is the number
of days since anyone last left one.
Business
Total
Last 30 days
Last 90
Last 365
Silent for
4BIS
365
6
19
75
4 days
MIS Solutions
138
2
11
41
17 days
LayerCake Technologies
28
0
3
17
76 days
Intrust IT
113
0
0
1
271 days
Obviam
0
0
0
0
never
What the totals hide Intrust IT holds the top of this pack with 113 reviews and has not
received one in 271 days. One review in the last year. LayerCake, at
position three, has been quiet for 76 days. Both are living on a stock of
reviews they built and stopped adding to.
Only 4BIS is actually running a program: 6 reviews in
the last thirty days, 19 in ninety, 75 in a year, the most recent
4 days ago. MIS Solutions is steady at 11 in ninety days.
This changes the target. Obviam is not chasing 113 reviews. It
is chasing a cadence, because recency is the part of the signal that decays. At one review
a fortnight, Obviam would be producing more recent review activity than Intrust IT or LayerCake
inside the first month, on a profile that currently has none at all.
What we would not promise. Catching 4BIS on volume is not realistic here.
At its current rate it will hold roughly 390 reviews by month four while Obviam, starting
at zero and asking properly, might reach eight or ten. The goal is to stop being the only profile
in the pack with nothing, and to be the freshest, not to win a counting contest.
15The service terms, mapped and dated
Five service searches a buyer would actually type, each run at all 49 grid points
across the metro on 28 August 2026. This is the zero that month four gets measured against, and it
is not a uniform zero.
Search
Obviam present
Who holds the pack
penetration testing
0 of 49
49Penetration Testing
vciso
0 of 49
49vCISO Services, LLC
soc 2 compliance
0 of 49
no map pack returned anywhere
managed detection and response
0 of 49
no map pack returned anywhere
cybersecurity consulting firm
36 of 49
36Intrust IT204BIS Cyber Security & IT Servi
Three problems, one number Obviam scores zero on four of these five, and the reason is different each time.
Two of them have no map pack at all. soc 2 compliance and managed detection and response returned no
local results at any of the 49 points. There is nothing to be absent from. No amount of profile work
wins those searches, and any plan that promises local visibility on them is promising something
Google is not offering. They are organic and paid territory.
Two are held by a business whose name is the search. On
penetration testing, a company called Penetration Testing holds the pack at all 49 points.
On vciso, vCISO Services LLC does the same. An exact name match is close to immovable
locally, which is why section 08 sends those terms to paid search instead.
And one is already half won. On
cybersecurity consulting firm Obviam appears at 36
of 49 points, alongside Intrust IT and 4BIS. That is a service phrase, not a business qualified one,
and it is the shape of term the category correction is most likely to move.
16The strongest link Obviam already owns
Obviam is a Modern Office Methods company. Nothing in this report is easier to act
on than that sentence, because both sides of it are inside the same organization.
Domain
Domain rank
Ref domains
Ranking keywords
Traffic value
momnet.com
235
500
344
$1,111
obviam.com
164
59
29
$35
And here is how much of that reaches Obviam, measured on
the three pages every visitor sees.
Page on momnet.com
External links
Links to Obviam
Says “Obviam”
Says “cyber”
homepage
9
0
0
2
services
9
0
0
2
about
9
0
0
2
Free, and nobody has used it momnet.com carries 500 referring domains against Obviam's
59, ranks for 344 US keywords against 29, and links
to Obviam exactly 2 times. Both of those links sit in blog posts. The
homepage, the services page and the about page carry no link to Obviam and do not use the word
once, while each of them mentions cyber twice.
Anchor text on both existing links is the single word Obviam, which tells Google
the name of the destination and nothing about what it does.
What this is worth. A link from the parent's structural pages is the
highest authority link available to Obviam that requires no outreach, no budget and no third
party's permission. It is a decision by one company about its own website. Alongside it, the
parent describing what Obviam actually does, in words like managed security, penetration testing
or compliance, gives Google the association the 29 keyword profile currently
lacks.
And a measurement that puts that in proportion. Obviam has
56 referring domains in total. The largest by a distance is
optimizedit.net with 185 links, the retired brand's own
domain, against 7 for the next one down. The parent company sends
3. A domain Obviam no longer trades under is doing
61 times more linking than the company that owns it.
The honest limit. This is not a substitute for the 500
referring domains momnet has earned, and links between two sites owned by the same company are
worth less than independent ones. It will not close the gap in section 01 on its own. It is
simply the cheapest correct thing available, and it has been sitting unused.
17What the AI assistants say when nobody names Obviam
Buyers increasingly put the question to an assistant instead of a search box. So we
asked three of them, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, five buying questions each with live web
search on and the location set to Cincinnati. Then we asked each one a sixth question: what is
Obviam. That sixth question is the control, and it is why the other fifteen mean something.
Question type
Probes
Obviam named
obviam.com cited
Five buying questions, three assistants
15
0
0
Asked about Obviam by name control
3
3
2 of 3
Known by name, not by need All three assistants describe Obviam correctly when asked directly, listing virtual
CISO, penetration testing, threat exposure management, a 24 hour operations center and compliance
work, and two of the three cite obviam.com to do it. The site explains itself well enough for a
model to read it back. That is the control passing, and it is the reason the next number counts.
Across fifteen buying questions, Obviam was named zero times and obviam.com was
cited zero times. Not once, on any assistant, on any of the five questions a real buyer
would ask.
The questions were the ordinary ones: who are the best cybersecurity companies in
Cincinnati for a mid sized business, who offers penetration testing, who provides a virtual CISO,
who can get a manufacturer SOC 2 compliant, who are the best managed security providers near
Cincinnati. Every one of those is a service Obviam sells.
They did name other people. This is who, counted across the
fifteen answers.
Firm named
Answers naming them
4BIS
10
Intrust
8
BlueHat
5
Astute
4
Nexigen
4
CBTS
3
Clark Schaefer
2
SpliceNet
2
4BIS is winning outright 13 Cincinnati firms were recommended across the fifteen answers. 4BIS appears in
10 of them and Intrust IT in
8. One or both of them appear in
11 of the fifteen answers. After those two the field thins fast: BlueHat
5, Astute 4, Nexigen
4, CBTS 3.
This is not a crowded position, it is a two horse race with an open field
behind it. Seven of the thirteen were named once or twice, which is the level a correctly
listed and reviewed profile can reach. Section 14 already showed 4BIS is the only competitor
running an active review program, and this is the same finding arriving from a different direction.
Note who is missing. LayerCake and MIS Solutions, two of the four domains this report
benchmarks, were each named once or not at all. The businesses that beat Obviam in the map pack are
not the businesses winning the AI answers.
The assistants read search indexes. Gemini reads Google.
Copilot is built on Bing and ChatGPT search draws on it, so we measured that index directly, in a
browser, on six of the same questions.
Same shape on Bing Bing knows the site perfectly well. Ask it for Obviam by name and obviam.com takes
the top result with 30 of its pages on the first screen. Ask it
who to hire and Obviam is absent from all 6 queries.
Page one belongs to directories, job boards and national vendors. On
cybersecurity company cincinnati, 8 of 10 organic results are directories or listicles; 4BIS is the only local firm on the page. On virtual ciso
cincinnati, Indeed, ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn take three of the ten slots and the rest are
national vCISO services. On soc 2 compliance cincinnati no local security firm ranks at
all; the one Cincinnati name is an accounting firm.
Two engines, two indexes, one pattern. The site is findable by name and
invisible to intent, and the fix is the same in both places. It is the listings.
Two things Google missed Bing carries paid ads on 4 of these 6 searches. The zero
paid finding in section 18 is about Google and about the four competitors we measured, and it
should not be read as an empty auction everywhere.
And the map pack there is polluted. On penetration testing company
cincinnati, two of the three local results are a paternity testing lab and an environmental
testing laboratory, because the word testing is ambiguous to a mapping engine. It is a small thing,
and it is the kind of gap a correctly categorized profile is well placed to take.
The directories are the door
Both the assistants and the Bing pages lean on the same listing sites, so we checked whether Obviam
is in them. Each directory was searched with a site restricted query, and a firm we know is listed,
Intrust IT, was run through the identical check so a zero could be trusted.
Obviam is absent from four of the six. Intrust returns
13 pages on GoodFirms and
20 on The Manifest where Obviam returns none.
Obviam does appear on bbb.org, filed under the former name Optimized IT, whose old
domain still links to obviam.com today. On clutch.co the control came back empty as
well, so that one is unmeasured rather than absent.
That is the missing link between the two measurements above and the recommendation below.
The assistants and Bing both read these pages; four of them do not contain Obviam; the four
submissions are free.
The national terms are worse
Separately from the assistants, every one of the 12 highest value national
searches in the opportunity report now returns an AI Overview, carrying 195
citations between them. 0 go to Obviam, Intrust IT, 4BIS, LayerCake or MIS
Solutions. The cited set is national product vendors, plus YouTube and Reddit:
youtube.com13synack.com9gartner.com7tierpoint.com6nomios.com6underdefense.com6
This is why section 09 routes those terms to paid search rather than content.
An overview assembled from Synack, CrowdStrike and IBM is not a result a regional firm displaces in
four months. The Cincinnati questions are the winnable ones, which is what the fifteen probes above
are about.
What we did not measure
One run per assistant per question, on one day, from one unauthenticated session. Assistant answers
vary between runs and personalize to the account asking, so treat the fifteen as a probe rather than
a survey. What it can carry is the contrast: the same three assistants, on the same day, answered
the control correctly and the buying questions without Obviam in them.
Copilot itself could not be queried directly, since it requires a signed in Microsoft
account, so we measured the Bing index it is built on instead. Repeating all of this monthly, with
accounts, is part of what month four gets compared against.
18Six months of movement
Every other measurement in these documents is a photograph taken on one day. This is
the same five domains tracked month by month from March 2026 to August 2026, which is the only view that
shows direction rather than position.
Business
Keywords Mar
Keywords Aug
Change
Value Mar
Value Aug
Change
obviam.com ★
31
26
-5
$29
$35
+6
intrust-it.com
848
712
-136
$1,914
$1,302
-612
4bis.com
429
319
-110
$830
$843
+13
layercaketech.com
no record
2,981
not comparable
no record
$3,241
not comparable
mis.tech
633
490
-143
$4,367
$10,883
+6,516
The leaders are declining Intrust IT has lost 136
ranking keywords and about
32%
of its estimated organic traffic value in six months. 4BIS has lost
110 keywords over the same period.
Section 14 found the same two businesses have stopped collecting reviews. The pattern is
consistent: the Cincinnati leaders are living off work they did earlier.
Obviam is flat, which in this company is not the worst place to be. It
moved from 31 keywords to 26, with
traffic value drifting from $29 to
$35. Five keywords down, a few dollars of estimated value up, on
a base small enough that either could be noise. Nothing is collapsing. Nothing is being built
either.
The honest reading. A declining competitor is easier to pass than a
climbing one, and that is genuinely favorable. It is not a promise: none of this movement is
caused by anything Obviam did, and a competitor that notices can reverse it. It also cuts the other
way for the two we do not compete with directly. LayerCake appears in this data from a standing
start, which usually means a domain newly indexed rather than a sudden win, and MIS Solutions is
growing in Houston, not here.
Nobody is bidding here All five domains, Obviam included, run zero paid search keywords on Google. Not a small
number. Zero, on every one of them. Before reporting a zero we ran the same endpoint against three
domains that do advertise and got progressive.com at 541, hubspot.com at 34, rapid7.com at 3, because a measurement that can only return zero is
not a measurement.
That cuts two ways. The cost per click figures in the opportunity report are what Google
estimates an advertiser would pay, and in this market nobody is paying it, so they are a guide to
commercial intent rather than proof of a competitor's budget. It also means none of the four
competitors in this report would be bidding against Obviam in month one. That is not the same as an
empty auction. Firms outside this set, including several the answer engine named in section 17,
were not measured for paid activity, and national advertisers bid on these terms everywhere.
19The calendar, and what it does to month four
Demand for these services is not flat across the year. This is twelve months for the
94 buying intent terms in the keyword set, the ones containing words like services, company,
provider, cost or assessment. Each term is measured against its own yearly average and the middle
term is plotted, so 1.00 is a normal month and no single search can move the line.
Aug 2025
1.25 +25%
Sep 2025
1.81 +81%
Oct 2025
0.86 -14%
Nov 2025
0.61 -39%
Dec 2025
0.60 -40%
Jan 2026
0.70 -30%
Feb 2026
0.77 -23%
Mar 2026
1.32 +32%
Apr 2026
0.88 -12%
May 2026
0.83 -17%
Jun 2026
0.61 -39%
Jul 2026
0.69 -31%
Month four lands in the dip December is the weakest month of the year at -40%, and
September is the strongest at +81%, a spread of
3.0 times. January, the month most people assume is a fresh budget peak, sits
at -30%.
Both ends of this engagement sit on a slope. A September start takes the
opening baseline at or near the high point of the year, and month four lands in December, the
weakest month of the year, or January, which also runs about 30% below normal. Compare the two directly and the work is being
asked to climb a hill that has nothing to do with the work.
What we would do about it. Report month four twice: against the baseline
taken on 28 August 2026, and against the same calendar month a year earlier, with the seasonal
position of the month stated. Where a year earlier does not exist, say so rather than compare across
seasons. The roadmap's targets are written that way. It costs nothing and it removes the one
argument that could make a genuinely good result look like a bad one, or a poor one look like
progress.
Why the middle, not the sum
Adding the searches up would have produced a different and wrong chart. One phrase, managed
security services provider, runs around 16,508 searches a month and prints
74,000 for January alone before falling back. On a total, that single line would have turned
the year's weakest stretch into an apparent January peak.
The same trap sits in the wider keyword set: security awareness training moves
from 135,000 at its August peak to 3,600 at its floor, an annual training cycle rather
than buying behavior. Indexing each term against itself and taking the middle one removes both
without anyone having to decide by hand which searches to leave out.
20What their reviewers actually talk about
Google reads competitor reviews and publishes the themes it found, in its own
words. It surfaces roughly ten per business rather than the full text, so this is what Google chose
to summarize, across 424 mentions.
Business
Reviews
Themes Google extracted
Security themes
Intrust IT
113
helpful staff30quick response15pleasant staff7ease of use7immediate support3
Two mentions out of 424 Of the 424 theme mentions Google surfaced from these reviews, 2 are
about security, both of them the phrase data safety on one profile. The rest is help desk language: helpful staff, response time, printer setup,
password issues, computer repair, phone support.
What Google chose to summarize from several hundred reviews reads as an IT support company
every time. That is not proof no customer ever wrote the word security, but the themes are the part
Google publishes and a buyer sees, and they come from a source none of these firms controls, which
is why they support section 04 rather than repeat it.
What it changes, practically. When Obviam asks for a review, the request
should name the work: the penetration test, the compliance assessment, the incident that was
caught. A profile with ten reviews that say cybersecurity reads differently to Google, and to a
buyer, than four hundred that say the technician was pleasant. That is a wording choice in the
request, not a budget line.