Why is nobody in defence tech ready for AI search or SEO?
What running a defence consultancy taught me about marketing defence companies
I run two companies that have no obvious reason to talk to each other, and it has turned out to be the most useful accident of my career.
One is Blu Mint, the content and SEO agency I have run for a decade.
The other is Fortivus, a defence and resilience consultancy I co-founded last year, working with governments and critical infrastructure operators across Europe, MENA, APAC and the Americas. For a long time I kept them mentally separate, one client spreadsheet at a time.
Then I started noticing that everything Fortivus was teaching me about how defence buyers actually behave was directly contradicting how I would have marketed a defence technology company if someone had asked me to, cold, a year earlier.
So here is what I would tell that version of me.
Marketing defence technology is not the same job as marketing regular SaaS: the buyer is different, the sales cycle runs years rather than weeks, and the trust signals that convince a procurement officer look nothing like the ones that convince a Product Hunt audience.
The money got there before the marketing did
US defence technology venture funding passed $14.6 billion in the first five months of 2026 alone, ahead of the sector's previous full-year record, according to Crunchbase data.
European defence startup funding grew by 55% year on year, per a joint Dealroom and NATO Innovation Fund report.
Bessemer Venture Partners projects European defence spending will grow 3.4x over the next six years, making it the continent's fastest-growing sector. This is, by any measure, one of the most heavily capitalised corners of venture right now.
Here is the number that actually stopped me.Venture-backed companies still account for less than one percent of the $411 billion in US Department of Defense contracts awarded last year.
Read that twice. The capital arrived. The contracts mostly didn't follow it.
I have watched why up close.
Seed-stage defence investors are looking for a technical founder who can ship a working product, at least one person on the team who genuinely understands tendering and how a procurement office actually thinks, and an advisory board with ex-officers or defence-policy contacts, because those relationships open doors that cold outreach can't.
Marketing does not make that list. It is usually the last serious hire a defence technology company makes, if it makes one at all, which means a huge number of well-funded, engineering-led companies have nobody thinking seriously about how they are actually found.
That gap is not a small inefficiency.
It is the whole opportunity, and it is exactly why content marketing for defence startups deserves more serious thought than it currently gets.
Nobody in defence tech marketing is optimising for AI search
I spend a fair amount of time now reading the handful of defence tech marketing agencies out there, partly out of professional curiosity and partly because Fortivus needs to know who else is circling the same buyers.
What struck me, going through their sites one by one, is how identical they all still sound. Nearly every one leans on the same three ideas: tailored messaging for the ex-military and ex-Pentagon crowd now sitting inside the funds that back this sector, relationships with the handful of journalists who cover defence properly, and enough discretion in the copy to avoid saying anything that shouldn't be said publicly. All useful. None of it new.
Not one of them mentions how they would get a company cited by an AI system. As far as I can tell, no agency currently combines defence sector marketing experience with genuine multilingual SEO capability. That is the specific, checkable gap this piece is about.
That is the actual gap now.
A procurement officer, a journalist or a coalition partner increasingly researches a company by asking an AI tool which platform closes a specific capability gap, rather than typing a query into Google.
A company invisible to that question is invisible at exactly the moment trust starts forming, long before anyone picks up the phone. I have written elsewhere about how AI Overviews actually decide what to cite, and the short version applies just as well here: being the source an AI quotes is becoming as valuable as ranking on page one used to be.
Almost nobody selling marketing services into defence tech has caught up to that yet.
You cannot buy your way into a relationship business
Government and defence procurement runs on tendering cycles measured in years, not weeks. No amount of paid media converts a NATO procurement office. The budget runs out, the ad stops, and nothing about the relationship has actually changed.
Content behaves differently in a sales cycle this long. It sits quietly online, doing its job every time someone runs their own diligence on a company before a call ever gets booked. I have seen this work from the Fortivus side directly: the conversations that go somewhere are the ones where the other person has already read something we wrote and arrived half-persuaded, not the ones starting from a cold pitch.
What actually needs writing, in my experience, splits fairly cleanly into three audiences that B2G marketing keeps failing to separate properly:
A technical brief for the engineer evaluating whether the architecture actually integrates
An executive narrative for whoever is signing off on budget and schedule risk
Comparison content for buyers who have already shortlisted two or three named competitors and are looking for the tiebreaker
Miss any one of these and the whole effort reads as naive to exactly the audience it needed to convince.
Why a US and Nordic defence market needs multilingual SEO, not English only
Yes, a defence technology company expanding into more than one country needs a genuinely multilingual website, not a single English site with a translate button bolted on.
Denmark is investing roughly €6 billion a year in infrastructure protection. Finland is fast-tracking dual-use procurement. Both sit inside a Nordic and North American growth corridor that a lot of defence marketing quietly treats as one English-speaking market.
It is not one market.
A Danish procurement officer, a Finnish journalist and an American investor research a company in three different languages, through three different search habits. A site that only exists in English has already lost two of those three before the conversation starts.
I can point to proof rather than theory on this one, because it is genuinely the most useful thing Blu Mint has built. We designed and manage a forty-language website for Fortivus itself: language-first architecture, hreflang implemented properly rather than bolted on, English URL slugs retained even inside the Hebrew and Ukrainian sections so links stay shareable. Built on Squarespace, a platform with no native multilingual support at all, which should tell you something about what is actually achievable once the technical foundation is right.
A defence technology company expanding across the US and the Nordics at the same time needs exactly that kind of infrastructure under it, not a single English site with a translation plugin added after the fact.
Website localisation for government and defence clients is not a nice-to-have once a company is selling into more than one language market at once.
Compliant content marketing for export-controlled companies
Export controls, ITAR and dual-use classification decide which markets a company can legally sell into, and investors already treat a lack of fluency here as a sign of real risk on its own.
The same thing is true of content, and it took me longer than it should have to notice it. A company whose public material speaks confidently and specifically about its dual-use classification, and about exactly which markets it can and cannot serve, is telling a sophisticated buyer that someone actually checked.
Getting this right, market by market, is genuinely a writing and research problem as much as it is a legal one. Even something as small as which countries a company lists on its own homepage carries weight: claim a market your export licence does not actually cover, and you have told a careful reader that nobody on the team read their own paperwork before publishing.
What I have already said publicly, and why I am repeating it here
On the fourth anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I told EIN Presswire, in a piece later picked up by The National Law Review, that "governments are finally treating preparedness as policy, not aspiration. The question is whether we can actually deliver."
I still believe that, and I have watched the same argument prove itself from a dozen different angles since.
Supply chains have a cash flow problem as much as a capability problem: smaller suppliers cannot absorb the same shocks as prime contractors, and the shift from just-in-time to just-in-case procurement needs capital that is not yet moving freely enough through the system to support it.
Security and resilience have to be designed in from the start of a capability decision, not retrofitted once something has already gone wrong. And most organisations, mine included, are still working out how to manage people properly, while simultaneously being asked to build systems to manage AI on top of that.
None of those arguments needed a particular country or a particular conference stage to be true. That is roughly the test I now apply to any piece of content in this category: strip out the specific event it came from, and see whether the argument still stands up on its own.
If it doesn't, it was never really an argument. It was scenery.
Four questions I keep getting asked about this
Do defence technology companies need multilingual websites?
Yes, if they are selling into more than one language market. A Danish procurement officer, a Finnish journalist and an American investor each research a company differently, and an English-only site is invisible to two of the three.
How is marketing defence technology different from marketing SaaS?
The buyer is different and the sales cycle runs in years, not weeks. Content built for a SaaS trial signup rarely works on a procurement officer weighing tendering risk, security clearance and export compliance at the same time.
What agency should a defence tech startup use for marketing?
One with real proximity to how defence and government buyers actually behave, not SaaS marketing experience relabelled for a new sector. Ask what they have done outside a screenshot portfolio.
Which agencies specialise in both defence marketing AEO and SEO?
Vanishingly few. Most defence-focused agencies do not mention AEO capability at all, which is the specific gap this piece has been about.
The kind of defence technology company I want to work with
If you are asking which agency a defence tech startup should use for marketing, the honest answer is: whichever one has actually stood inside a procurement conversation, not just written about one from the outside.
Blu Mint works across SEO, AI search, content and growth marketing, and we have spent longer than most agencies actually inside the world we are writing about. That combination is rare enough that I am comfortable saying so plainly rather than dressing it up.
I am not pitching a government relations service, and I am not building anyone's embassy relationships for them. Here is the gap nobody else in this category is actually filling, and what Blu Mint offers to close it:
Technical SEO and AEO structuring — built to be cited by AI systems, not just ranked, drawing on what actually gets a page cited in AI Overviews
Multilingual content and site architecture — the same language-first, hreflang-correct approach built for Fortivus, applied to a US and Nordic expansion
Compliance-fluent content — written by someone who checks which markets a company can actually claim before publishing
A genuine editorial programme tied to real policy moments, not a content calendar guessing at relevance
None of it involves borrowing the phrase "capability gap" from a generic SaaS brief without knowing what it actually means.
If you are building or backing a defence technology company expanding across the US, Denmark, Finland, Sweden or Norway, and the funding arrived faster than the visibility did, that is the exact gap I would like to help close next.
Get in touch if that sounds like where you are.
