Black Hat 2026 Buzzword Index

Did the show floor really get more buzzwordy?

BH 2026 felt more buzzwordy than usual, and we wanted to know whether the data backs that up. So naturally, we analyzed the BH profile and landing page of every sponsor to quantify exactly which buzzwords appeared most often. AI and “agentic” dominate across the board, but there were a few surprises.1

A term counts as a buzzword when it shows up on sponsor pages far more often than on 53 control B2B sites, or far more often than security vendors used it before the AI wave. Nobody hand-picked the list; the buzzwords fall out of the math.

The index

Bars show the share of 445 sponsor landing pages using each term this year, ranked from most to least used. Color shows momentum: orange terms are spreading, blue terms are fading. Hover any bar for year-by-year numbers and example companies.

The pitch shifted from AI for security to security for AI

AI-assisted defense peaked last year: “AI-powered” went 5.8 → 13.8 → 10.7% of sponsor profiles from 2024 to 2026. The emphasis now is on securing the AI itself: AI Security (30% of landing pages), guardrails (20%), Shadow AI (14%), AI Governance (12%), and prompt injection (7%) were all near zero two years ago. The 2024 pitch was AI that does security, while the 2026 pitch is securing whatever your AI is doing.

“Machine speed” is having a moment

It appeared in 0% of BH profiles in 2024, and 4.5% in 2026 ones, appearing on 14% of landing pages. Attackers move at machine speed, so you should buy software that does too. That is the argument for 1/7th of the show floor.

“Game changer” refuses to die

After two decades of parody, 7.9% of Black Hat sponsors still use it, vs 1.9% of mainstream B2B sites. Security marketing holds onto its superlatives longer than the rest of the software industry.

How we measured it

Sponsor rosters come from blackhat.com's event archives: 466 companies for US 2026, 387 for 2025, and 358 for 2024, counting all paid tiers and excluding media and association partners. The 2026 landing-page corpus uses live homepage text for 411 companies; for the 34 sites that block automated fetching, the sponsor's own Black Hat profile stands in. Buzzword inference compares sponsor pages against two references: 53 mainstream B2B and consumer homepages fetched the same way, and 43 established security vendors' homepages as the Wayback Machine archived them in mid-2021.1234

Membership in the chart is one rule: a term qualifies when at least 6% of sponsors use it and it runs at least six times its rate on the control sites, or six times its 2021 rate. Color comes from the profiles sponsors wrote for blackhat.com each year: the ratio of a term's 2026 profile share to its 2024 share, on a log scale that reaches full orange at 8× growth and full blue at an 8× drop.

A company counts once per term no matter how often it repeats it. Terms are one-to-four-word phrases with plurals and hyphen variants merged. Profiles run much shorter than homepages, so profile percentages sit lower than landing-page percentages for the same term; compare within a corpus, not across.