The State of MarTech 2026

Two facts describe the marketing technology market better than any trend list. The number of products available has never been higher, and the proportion of purchased capability actually being used has spent most of the last five years falling.

Those facts sit uncomfortably together, and reconciling them is most of the story of 2026.

1. The market kept growing

The most widely cited census of the category, the annual landscape compiled by Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma, counted 15,384 marketing technology products in its 2025 edition, a rise of about 9% on the previous year.^[1] Against the roughly 150 products in the first edition in 2011, that is growth of more than 100 times in under fifteen years.^[2]

It is worth being precise about what that number measures. It is a count of products that exist and can be identified, not a measure of adoption, revenue or quality. A category with 15,000 entrants is not necessarily a healthy one, and much of the recent growth sits in AI-adjacent tooling built quickly on top of general-purpose models.

For a buyer, the practical consequence of a market this size is that shortlisting has become the hard part of purchasing. There is no realistic way to survey a category exhaustively, which puts weight on how a shortlist is assembled in the first place.

2. Utilisation is the number that should worry CMOs

Gartner has tracked the proportion of martech stack capability that organisations actually use for several years, and the trend is not flattering.

Utilisation fell from 58% in 2020 to 33% by 2023, before recovering to 49% in the most recent reading.^[4] The recovery is real and it still means that roughly half of purchased capability sits unused. Gartner also reports that only about 15% of organisations qualify as high performers on martech, defined as meeting strategic goals while demonstrating positive return.^[5]

Set against martech accounting for close to a quarter of total marketing spend,^[5] an unused half is not a rounding error. It is the largest identifiable inefficiency in most marketing budgets.

The uncomfortable read: for most organisations, the cheapest available performance improvement is not a new tool. It is using the ones already paid for.

Why stacks go unused

The published research does not settle causation, and three explanations are commonly advanced by practitioners. Capability is bought ahead of the data or process needed to run it. Ownership is unclear, so nobody is accountable for adoption after purchase. And staff turnover removes the institutional knowledge that made a tool useful, with no handover.

Each implies a different fix, and none of them is a purchase.

3. Budgets have flatlined

Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found marketing budgets holding at 7.7% of overall company revenue, identical to the prior year.^[3] The survey was conducted in February and March 2025 among 402 CMOs and marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe, with most respondents at companies above one billion US dollars in revenue.

Two details matter more than the headline. First, 59% of CMOs reported having insufficient budget to execute their strategy, although that was an improvement of five percentage points on 2024.^[3] Second, the average conceals a wide distribution, with half of CMOs reporting budgets at or below 6% of revenue.

Sources: Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey^[3]; Gartner martech research^[5]; Chief Marketer reporting on Gartner findings^[10]

Paid media remains the largest line at 30.6% of budget, and Gartner notes that media price inflation means each dollar buys less than it did.^[3] Meanwhile 39% of CMOs planned to cut agency budgets and 39% to reduce labour spend, with overlapping-role consolidation and headcount reduction the most cited methods.^[10]

4. AI is being adopted, and its footprint is smaller than the discourse

Two credible sources point in the same direction. Gartner found that GenAI investment was a priority for effectively every CMO surveyed, with just 1% saying it was not currently a priority, and that reported returns came primarily through time efficiency (49%), cost efficiency (40%) and increased content capacity (27%).^[3]

The CMO Survey, fielded in January 2026 among 308 US marketing leaders, put a number on how far it has actually spread: generative AI is applied to 15.12% of all marketing activities.^[6]

Near-universal priority, roughly one-seventh of activity. Both things are true, and the gap between them is where most of 2026's implementation work sits.

There is a second-order effect worth noting. Gartner found 22% of CMOs saying generative AI had allowed them to reduce reliance on external agencies for creative and strategy work.^[3] That is a meaningful early signal about where AI productivity gains are landing commercially, and it is consistent with the agency budget reductions reported in the same survey.

The CMO Survey also recorded training budgets falling to 3.8% of marketing spend and headcount growth halving year on year.^[6] Adopting a technology that requires new skills while reducing the budget that builds them is a tension the published data does not resolve.

5. The cookie deprecation that did not happen

For roughly five years, martech roadmaps were built around the assumption that third-party cookies would disappear from Chrome. On 22 April 2025, Google confirmed it would not proceed with a standalone prompt for third-party cookies and would instead retain existing controls in Chrome's privacy settings.^[7] Third-party cookies were not deprecated.^[8]

The tempting conclusion is that the preparation was wasted. It was not, for two reasons. Browser policy has now changed direction more than once and could change again, so a stack whose economics depend on third-party cookies remains exposed to a decision made by someone else. And the other constraints that drove first-party data investment, including mobile platform tracking restrictions and privacy regulation across multiple jurisdictions, are unaffected by anything Chrome does.

The durable lesson is about dependency rather than cookies. Capability that rests on another company's product decision is capability you do not control.

6. Retail media keeps taking share

EMARKETER's December 2025 forecast put US retail media spend at 60.32 billion dollars in 2025, rising to 71.09 billion in 2026, an increase of roughly 10.8 billion in a single year.^[9]

Growth at that rate in a maturing advertising market means the money is being redirected from somewhere else. For marketers the operational difficulty is not whether to participate but that networks define and report their metrics differently, which makes cross-network comparison unreliable in any rigorous sense.

What we take from this

The evidence supports four conclusions and does not support a fifth that is widely asserted.

Supported. The market is larger than any team can evaluate exhaustively, so shortlisting method matters more than feature comparison. Roughly half of purchased capability is unused, making adoption the highest-return project available to most CMOs. Budgets are flat in nominal terms and shrinking in real terms against media inflation. And AI is a near-universal priority whose measured footprint is about a seventh of marketing activity.

Not supported. The claim that AI has already transformed marketing operations at scale. The most reliable measure available puts it at 15.12% of activities,^[6] which describes meaningful early adoption rather than transformation. Both the enthusiasts and the sceptics are overstating their case, in opposite directions.

References

Every figure in this report is drawn from the sources below. Where a source reports its own survey, the sample and field dates are stated in the text. Links were live at the date of publication.

1. Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma, “2025 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: 100X growth since 2011, but now with AI”, chiefmartec, May 2025. chiefmartec.com ↩
2. “The Martech Supergraphic Has Grown Up: 15,000-Plus”, CMSWire, 2025. cmswire.com ↩
3. Gartner, “Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey Reveals Marketing Budgets Have Flatlined at 7.7% of Overall Company Revenue”, press release, 12 May 2025. Survey conducted February to March 2025 among 402 CMOs and marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe; the vast majority of respondents reported annual revenue above 1 billion US dollars. gartner.com ↩
4. Gartner Marketing Technology Survey findings, reported in “Utilization of MarTech Stack Capabilities Drops Again”, Marketing Charts. marketingcharts.com ↩
5. Gartner, “Marketing Technology” research hub, on martech utilisation and high-performing organisations. gartner.com ↩
6. The CMO Survey, Duke University Fuqua School of Business, reported in “CMOs Face Headwinds Even as Marketing Value and AI Impact Grow”. Survey fielded 7 to 29 January 2026 among 308 marketing leaders at for-profit US companies, 97% of whom were VP-level or above. fuqua.duke.edu ↩
7. Google, “Next steps for Privacy Sandbox and tracking protections in Chrome”, Privacy Sandbox blog, 22 April 2025. privacysandbox.google.com ↩
8. “Google Chrome will now continue to use third-party cookies”, Digiday, April 2025. digiday.com ↩
9. EMARKETER retail media forecast, December 2025, reported in “FAQ on retail media networks: How marketers should allocate budgets in 2026”. emarketer.com ↩
10. Gartner, “39% of CMOs Plan to Reduce Labor Costs and Cut Agency Allocations”, reported by Chief Marketer, May 2025. chiefmarketer.com ↩