![\"2025](\"https:\/\/chiefmartec.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/martech-map-marketing-technology-landscape-2025-slide.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\ntl;dr The martech landscape grew again since last year, up 9% to 15,384<\/strong> solutions. While new AI natives continue to blossom, the previous generation is consolidating more. There\u2019s also an exploding \u201chypertail\u201d of custom software. We cover all of this and more in our new State of Martech 2025<\/a><\/strong> report (free and ungated).<\/em><\/p>\n Over 15 years ago, I tossed a bunch of martech logos on a slide to present the Rise of the Marketing Technologist<\/a> to a room of CMOs, making the case that marketing was becoming a very<\/em> technology-integrated discipline. (For our younger readers: \u201cmarketing technologists\u201d were what we called go-to-market engineers back in the day \u2014 you know, before electricity and indoor plumbing.)<\/p>\n The next year, I formalized the slide into the first official marketing technology landscape<\/a>, with a whopping 150 \u2014 gasp!<\/em> \u2014 solutions categorized. From there, things got surreal. The market of martech grew exponentially to thousands and thousands of products. Every year, pundits predicted it would collapse within the subsequent year. And every subsequent year, empirical reality proved otherwise.<\/p>\n Which brings us to today\u2019s release of the 2025 marketing technology landscape<\/strong>, now with 15,384 solutions<\/strong> organized in 49 categories. Yes, it grew. Again. Up 9% from last year\u2019s 14,106<\/a>. Massive credit goes to Frans Riemersma, who has been co-producing the landscape with me since 2022 with a small army of researchers and volunteers.<\/p>\n Of course, as a mere slide, it\u2019s been completely unreadable for years. But to prove that it\u2019s not just random dots on a page, you can:<\/p>\n \u201cIf you keep squinting at all those little logos, you\u2019ll go blind!\u201d I\u2019m sure my mother would have advised. So let\u2019s step back and look at the growth quantitatively, year-over-year. The headline \u2014 literally \u2014 is that the martech landscape has grown 100X<\/strong> since 2011. Or 10,156%, which seems larger. (Yeah, I\u2019m bad at math.)<\/p>\n Now, before you accuse us of sandbagging this by including anything thrown our way with a URL and a favicon, I\u2019ll note that we actually evaluated 11,133 new candidates this year, out of which only 2,489 qualified. At the same time, we removed 1,211<\/strong> from last year\u2019s landscape that vanished either through acquisition or simply shutting down. That\u2019s a churn rate of 8.6%<\/strong>. (Again, being bad at math, the 1,211 number feels larger to me.)<\/p>\n You might expect that most of those that went away were flash-in-the-pan products from last year\u2019s massive explosion of new AI-native products that surged after the release of ChatGPT. In fact though, 2\/3 of the ones that went away were from the previous decade, 2010-2020.<\/p>\n Yes, the consolidation of that first big wave of martech products is finally<\/em> happening. The laws of gravity can be defied only so long. While many of the ones that disappeared were smaller, organically funded solutions in the \u201clong tail,\u201d the more newsworthy ones had raised significant venture capital as the darlings of their time.<\/p>\n A toast to them from Four Weddings and a Funeral<\/em>, \u201cMay we all in our dotage be proud to\u00a0say, \u2018I was adored once too.’\u201d<\/p>\n But that hasn\u2019t dissuaded others from diving in. With AI further lowering the barrier to entry for building software \u2014 while simultaneously widening the vista of new opportunities for innovation \u2014 martech startups continue to be born at an unrelenting rate.<\/p>\n Last year, there was an incredible explosion of new startups in content and sales, at 35% and 47% growth rate respectively. These were two domains that immediately benefited from the conversational magic of generative AI.<\/p>\n This past year, growth has been somewhat more subdued \u2014 and more evenly distributed \u2014 with ~7-10% growth in each of our 6 major martech landscape domains.<\/p>\n Digging down into subcategories, it was interesting to see SEO<\/em> had the highest percentage growth of all \u2014 an eyebrow-raising 24% \u2014 albeit more modest in absolute numbers, expanding from 212 to 262 products. It\u2019s ironic, given all the \u201cSEO is dead\u201d talk of the past year. But in martech as in life, when one door closes, another one opens: there are new product to help you optimize your content for AI services, AI Optimization (AIO), which we\u2019ve lumped into this subcategory.<\/p>\n With the continued proliferation of new products, especially AI-native ones, the average tech stack grew a little last year<\/a>, by 2.2%. For more mature marketing teams though, the fluidity of their toolset has been balanced by aligning and integrating these new AI products with an established platform at the center of their stack.<\/p>\n We re-asked the question of which platform martech and marketing operations leaders considered to be the center to see any shifts from 2024 to 2025. In B2B companies, there was very little change: most consider either their CRM or their marketing automation platform (MAP) to be the center.<\/p>\n One notable change in the B2B segment was the 5X rise of \u201cOther\u201d as an answer, from 2% to 10%, which includes custom-built martech platforms. While that\u2019s still a small slice of the pie, it\u2019s an interesting reversal of a decade-long shift from custom to commercial martech.<\/p>\n With B2C and hybrid B2B\/B2C companies, the most notable change was with CDPs, which dropped from 26.9% to 17.4% of those surveyed citing them as the center of their martech stack.<\/p>\n CDPs appear to have been squeezed between two layers of the stack. At the data layer, we saw cloud data warehouses rise as the identified center platform, from 20.9% to 23.9%. At the engagement layer, we saw marketing automation platforms (MAP) and customer engagement platforms (CEP) grow from 19.4% to 26.1%. CRMs also grew from 17.9% to 19.6%. CDP capabilities seem to be moving to either the warehouse layer (\u201ccomposable CDPs\u201d) or the engagement layer, where they are increasingly embedded into customer-facing platforms.<\/p>\n But arguably the most fascinating development in martech isn\u2019t the long tail landscape of commercial products. It\u2019s the rapid proliferation of custom-built apps and agents, what we call the hypertail<\/strong>.<\/p>\n There\u2019s always been the option for businesses to build their own custom software solutions. For most companies, that represented a small amount of their tech stack \u2014 if any at all \u2014 because custom software was expensive to develop and maintain, requiring engineering skills that weren\u2019t readily at the disposal of most marketing teams.<\/p>\n But the rise of low-code\/no-code platforms over the past 5-10 years has steadily changed that equation, making it easier, faster, and cheaper to build, giving rise to \u201ccitizen developers\u201d who could increasingly scratch their own itch by creating lightweight apps and automations.<\/p>\n As with nearly everything else it touches, AI is having a massive multiplier effect on this. It\u2019s accelerating software creation at a blindingly fast rate. Professional developers now rave about \u201cvibe coding\u201d \u2014 whipping up new programs in a matter of hours that used to take days or weeks to construct.<\/p>\n For citizen developers it\u2019s an even bigger boon. If they can describe something in a natural language prompt, the AI can build it for them. True, today that works best for simple apps and automations. But this is Clay Christensen\u2019s classic pattern of disruptive innovation: serving the underserved with simple use cases, and then steadily climbing up the hill to more advanced ones. In our last report, we called this \u201cinstant software\u201d \u2014 just add ideas.<\/p>\n And it gets wilder. Popular AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini \u2014 that have millions of non-technical subscribers \u2014 are often creating software programs behind the scenes to do the bidding of their users without those users even knowing that software was built and run on their behalf.<\/p>\n The result? Not millions but billions<\/em> of custom software programs proliferating companies\u2019 digital operations. Probably trillions, many blinking in and out of existence on demand.<\/p>\n That is the hypertail.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve just touched on a few of the many findings and insights from the full State of Martech 2025<\/strong><\/a> report, which is available to download, free and ungated.<\/p>\n We want to thank GrowthLoop<\/a>, Hightouch<\/a>, MetaRouter<\/a>, MoEngage<\/a>, Progress<\/a>, and SAS<\/a> for sponsoring our research. We also want to thank Goldcast<\/a> for providing the events platform for our #MartechDay sessions, which you can still watch on-demand for the month of May by registering at martechday.com<\/a>. And we also thank G2<\/a> for sharing ratings data with us for our analysis of the martech landscape.<\/p>\n Subscribe to my newsletter to get the latest insights on martech as soon as they hit the wire. I usually publish an article every week or two \u2014 aiming for quality over quantity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" tl;dr The martech landscape grew again since last year, up 9% to 15,384 solutions. While new AI natives continue to blossom, the previous generation is consolidating more. There\u2019s also an exploding \u201chypertail\u201d of custom software. We cover all of this and more in our new State of Martech 2025 report (free and ungated). Over 15 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":233994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[7538,3576,3426,8402,23265],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-233993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing","tag-100x","tag-chief","tag-growth","tag-marketing","tag-technologist"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\nDeath of a Martech Salesperson<\/em>? For some, yes<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\nYet the great circle of
life<\/s> martech continues\u2026<\/h2>\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\n1,000,000X more martech that\u2019s out of sight<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\nDownload The State of Martech 2025<\/em> for free<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/figure>\nGet chiefmartec.com directly in your inbox!<\/h3>\n