5 ways to automate security questionnaires
There are several approaches to handling security questionnaires, from refusing to fill them in to using specialist AI tools. Here's what works, what doesn't, and when each approach makes sense.
Last updated: December 22, 2025
As your company grows and starts selling to larger customers, security questionnaires become unavoidable. Here are five approaches companies take to deal with them, roughly in order of maturity.
Just say no
When startups first start receiving security questionnaires, they often try to decline filling them in. Some founders have quite proudly told me “we just say we don’t do questionnaires, if the customer walks away, they walk away.” Sometimes they’ll send over a few policies instead and the prospect will accept it.
This approach has two problems.
First, if you consistently say no, you limit yourself to smaller businesses and will never close larger deals in a repeatable way. Second, and more importantly, it marks you out as naive and inexperienced. Any customer of a certain size will have a requirement, whether regulatory or due to their own SOC 2 or ISO 27001 policies, to conduct security due diligence on all suppliers. This is standard practice for any large organisation, especially in regulated industries like healthcare, fintech or government.
You might have some limited early success with just saying no, but it is by no means a sustainable strategy.
The artisanal approach
In this approach, you treat each questionnaire as a special project that needs to be handled from scratch. In a small organisation, this usually means the CTO or Head of Engineering does it themselves.
The problem is the sheer amount of time it takes. Every question gets answered individually, often directly inside Excel. You frequently don’t have a good reference point for the answer, so you end up describing what you typically do rather than pointing to documented processes. For example, you might know how your team tests backup restores, but if there’s no policy documenting it, you’re writing that explanation from scratch each time.
A typical questionnaire can be 200 or 300 questions. This means questionnaires can take days to complete, which delays revenue and creates significant costs, stalls contract renewals, and distracts senior people from much more important work like making the next key hire or building the product.
Spin up a knowledge base
After going through the artisanal approach a couple of times, most teams take the first step towards building a process: creating a knowledge base.
This could be a spreadsheet, a Notion database, or some kind of wiki where you keep previous questions and answers. Instead of crafting each answer from scratch, you can copy and paste from your knowledge base.
This helps, but it has limitations.
Each questionnaire is often worded differently from the last. “Do you encrypt data at rest?” and “Are files encrypted on your servers and storage?” are asking the same thing, but a simple cmd+f won’t find the match. Without careful management, the knowledge base also becomes out of date and fills up with duplicates. It requires ongoing discipline to keep everything relevant and accurate.
For more on making this work, see our guide on how to maintain your security questionnaire knowledge base.
Do SOC 2
At some point, companies often think “let’s just do SOC 2, then the questionnaires will stop.”
They don’t stop.
As mentioned earlier, many companies have a regulatory duty or hard internal policy requiring security due diligence on all vendors, especially for business-critical applications. Having a SOC 2 report helps, you’ll have better internal processes and a solid set of policy documents to reference, but it rarely eliminates questionnaires entirely.
The same applies to ISO 27001. These certifications are valuable for many reasons, but “making security questionnaires go away” is generally not one of them.
Use a specialist AI tool
The final approach is to use a tool built specifically for responding to security questionnaires. This is why we built ResponseHub.
With ResponseHub:
- Always up-to-date knowledge base. New questions and answers are added after each questionnaire, and duplicates are flagged automatically.
- Policy ingestion. Upload your policies and they’ll be used to generate answers alongside your knowledge base.
- Semantic search. We match based on meaning rather than keywords, so you don’t have to worry about different phrasings of the same question.
- Citations and confidence ratings. Every answer includes full citations back to your source material and an independent confidence rating, so you know exactly where to direct human review effort.
Using a specialist tool means you can complete questionnaires in hours rather than days. More importantly, it means you can delegate them. Rather than requiring the CTO or a senior technical resource, an operations person can do a first pass using ResponseHub, get a high degree of confidence on most answers, and hand off just the remaining few questions for technical input before a final review.
Where to start? If you’re still in the early stages, getting your policies documented and building a basic knowledge base is a reasonable first step. Once questionnaires start consuming real time, more than one or two a month, it’s worth looking at automation.
Learn more about security questionnaire automation and how ResponseHub can help your team save time and close deals faster.