Don’t Write Off The Analyst Industry In 2026, Despite A Turbulent 2025

For all you AR professionals:

If you've been in a budget meeting recently, you may have fielded a version of this question: 

"Gartner's stock took a huge hit. Forrester continues to struggle. Are those subscriptions worth renewing?"

It's a fair question, and your leadership isn't wrong to ask it. The public research firms had a genuinely turbulent 2025 — stalled contract value growth, workforce reductions, and real pressure from AI tools that buyers are increasingly using to answer the questions they once paid analysts to answer. The numbers are real, and this piece walks through all of them.

That said: Don't give up on them. 

Here's what the financial headlines miss: the value of an analyst relationship has never been primarily about the health of the firm's balance sheet. It's about access to expert, independent, human judgment on complex technology decisions — and that judgment is arguably more valuable right now, not less. 

In a world where AI tools are synthesizing every piece of content about your category simultaneously, the credibility that comes from rigorous analyst coverage, strong peer reviews, and consistent analyst engagement doesn't disappear. It becomes one of the few signals buyers still trust.

So yes, the landscape is shifting. Some budget reallocation may make sense. But abandoning analyst relationships in the middle of this transition would be the wrong read of the moment. Here's what the 2025 numbers actually tell you — and what to watch for in 2026.

Full-year 2025 earnings results from Gartner, Forrester, ISG, Informa TechTarget, and S&P Global reveal an industry under real pressure and in genuine transition. In 2026, the stable hierarchy B2B marketing leaders planned around for two decades is no longer a safe assumption.

In 2025, on every earnings call for every public research firm, a looming question was heard:

“Are large language models coming for your business?”

Every one of them handled it differently.

Gene Hall at Gartner revealed that the company has a formal internal process requiring salespeople to document every instance when a client or prospect raises AI as a potential substitute for a Gartner subscription.

George Colony at Forrester called the dominance of public AI models “a very big misallocation of capital” and predicted that 70% of AI revenue will ultimately flow through private models.

Gary Nugent at Informa TechTarget argued that the company’s audience strategy is diverse enough that AI-driven shifts in how people find information don’t threaten its foundation the way they might a purely search-dependent media business.

ISG told a different story entirely. Rather than fielding questions about AI displacement, CEO Michael Connors reported that ISG tripled its AI-focused client engagements in 2025. The question wasn’t whether AI threatens ISG’s business — it was how quickly ISG can scale to meet demand.

That range of responses — from formal damage-tracking systems to outright dismissal of the threat — is one of the most telling signals to emerge from a full year of earnings reports across the five research and advisory firms that trade on public markets. The picture is neither the collapse that some have predicted nor the business-as-usual that others have projected. It is something more complicated and, for Analyst Relations professionals and B2B marketing leaders making decisions this year about engaging, renewing, or reallocating budgets, more important to understand.

These firms span three orders of magnitude in revenue and serve meaningfully different client bases. They are not the entirety of the research firm landscape — there are dozens of firms, including the formidable IDC, that are privately held and thus don’t report financials. What distinguishes this group is that they do. As of mid-March 2026, all five reported full-year 2025 results, giving us the opportunity to look across the entire public cohort. Comparisons are not always apples-to-apples. But taken together, their results tell a coherent story about an industry under pressure and in motion — one that is actively trying to figure out what it is in a world that now has a new way of answering questions.

There’s a lot to cover. Feel free to choose your own adventure through the sections below. Below you’ll find …

1. Discussion of what I call “AI as Threat, AI as Tool.”
2. Firm-by-firm financial snapshots
3. What AR and B2B Marketing Leaders Should Watch in 2026
4. Discussion of what I call “Generational Disruption. Consequential Opportunity.”

AI as Threat, AI as Tool

Let’s go back to that basic but profound question each of these firms heard – via investment analysts, pundits, board members, etc. – throughout 2025.

“Are large language models coming for your business?”

This is actually two questions that are easy to conflate but are worth separating.

The first is competitive: Are LLMs eroding demand for what these firms sell?

The second is operational: Are these firms using AI to change how they produce and deliver what they sell?

The answers are different, and in some cases point in opposite directions.

The Threat Question

The most revealing thing about how the five firms handled the AI displacement question is not what any individual CEO said — it’s the range of postures on display simultaneously.

Gene Hall at Gartner disclosed, for the first time on the Q4 call, that the company has a formal internal process requiring salespeople to document every instance a client raises AI as a potential substitute for a Gartner subscription. That’s a meaningful evolution from Hall’s Q2 posture, when he described the phenomenon as “essentially unmeasurable.” The Q4 revelation acknowledges the question is real enough to warrant systematic tracking, even if Gartner’s answer remains favorable.

George Colony at Forrester is the most outspoken of research firm CEOs on this question, and his framing has sharpened beyond what he said in the FY2025 earnings call. In The Private AI Model Explosion, which published as I was finishing this article, Colony argues that private models will ultimately replace company websites and that public models will evolve into something resembling enterprise software companies charging monthly fees to host private models. He also declared, “With AI, information will double in value every year. This will drive the value of the companies that own that data.”

For Forrester, sitting on decades of proprietary research data, that declaration is either the foundation of a compelling comeback story or a very confident bet on how enterprise AI actually unfolds. The “private research bank” framing is the most explicit attempt by any of these CEOs to turn the AI threat narrative into a positioning advantage.

At Informa TechTarget, the displacement question arrived at an angle — less about research subscriptions being replaced by ChatGPT and more about AI-driven search eroding top-of-funnel traffic. CEO Gary Nugent’s answer: less than half of the company’s top-of-funnel audience activity comes from traditional search engines, meaning the moat is the permissioned audience database, not content discoverability.

ISG received no direct displacement question — itself a signal. The AI narrative at ISG in 2025 was entirely about opportunity, not threat. S&P Global’s earnings call focused on matters far removed from technology research. At the scale S&P operates, 451 doesn’t register as a discrete earnings topic.

The Tool Question

The more operationally significant story — and the less-covered one — is what these firms are doing with AI internally.

Gartner’s most striking disclosure: Magic Quadrant production time has been reduced by 75% versus 2024 through AI-assisted content creation. AskGartner, launched in August 2025 and rolled out fully by October, handled 500,000 client queries in its first months — and users with AskGartner access are showing measurably higher renewal rates than those without. If AI-assisted access increases retention, the product is not just an efficiency tool but a stickiness mechanism. Gartner also reported more than 200,000 in-depth client AI conversations in 2025, separate from AskGartner queries.

Forrester AI Access — a lower-cost, self-service product tier launched in September 2025 and built on Forrester AI, the firm’s generative AI tool — is positioned explicitly to grow the accessible market. In March 2026, Forrester AI became available inside Microsoft Teams, meaning AI Access subscribers (who operate in the Microsoft ecosystem) can reach Forrester’s research directly within their daily workflow. The product generated over $5 million in bookings since launch and contributed to a 55% increase in unique Forrester AI users in Q4, with prompts up 65% year-over-year. The strategic logic is straightforward: if the subscription base is under pressure from buyers who perceive LLMs as a cheaper alternative, meet them with a lower-priced AI-native product that keeps them inside the Forrester ecosystem.

ISG Tango, ISG’s AI-powered sourcing platform, now processes more than $25 billion in total contract value — up from $7 billion the prior year. The AI Maturity Index acquisition, completed in January 2026, extends the same logic: a benchmarking platform that generates recurring, structured intelligence as a data product rather than a bespoke advisory deliverable.

The common thread: AI is not a future consideration for these businesses — it is already reshaping both what they produce and how they produce it. Firms that treat it as both an efficiency tool and a product mechanism are better positioned than those that treat it as only one or the other.

Firm-by-firm financial snapshots:

Gartner

FY2025 earnings reported Feb. 3, 2026

Gartner is the largest pure-play research and advisory firm in the world by a significant margin. All of the industry analyst research firms combined could not surpass Gartner’s $6.5 billion in FY2025 revenue. That scale underwrites the breadth of its analyst coverage, the reach of its conference infrastructure, and the depth of its client relationships. More than 510,000 direct interactions with more than 13,000 clients in 2025. Over 83,000 conference attendees in 2025. For AR professionals, Gartner’s scale is why it remains the default starting point for most vendor engagement programs, regardless of any “Netflix / Blockbuster moment” buzz.

About contract value, which appears throughout this piece: Contract value is the annualized value of all active subscriptions at a given point in time. It’s the single most important forward-looking health metric for a subscription research firm — more predictive of future revenue than any single quarter’s results. When contract value grows, the business is expanding. When it stalls or declines, the revenue trend will follow.

Core Metrics

• Revenue: $6.5B (+4%)
• Contract Value: $5.2B (-1%)
• Underlying operating profit: $1.6B (+4%)
• Operating cash flow: $1.3B (-13%)

Research Segment Revenue Trend:

• FY2021: ~$3.9B (+15%)
• FY2022: ~$4.5B (+16%)
• FY2023: ~$4.87B (+8%)
• FY2024: ~$5.18B (+6%)
• FY2025: ~$5.21B (~+0.6%)

The reported numbers tell a story of resilience at the top line and pressure underneath it. Revenue grew 4%, and conferences had a standout year — up 11% for the full year. But contract value growth, the metric that most directly signals the health of the subscription business, decelerated sharply. Contract value for GTS (Gartner’s technology products and services segment) was flat by year-end, down from 7–8% growth earlier in the year. The research segment grew just 0.6% for the full year. Operating cash flow fell 13%.

To truly understand why Gartner’s 2025 results sparked a great deal of banter, consider the historical context. For several years running, Gartner delivered the kind of growth that became its own standard: revenue up 15% in 2021; 16% in 2022. Contract value grew at double-digit rates quarter after quarter, reliably. That consistency shaped how the market valued Gartner, how vendors budgeted for Gartner engagement, and how the firm itself planned. Then the deceleration began: +8% in 2023; +6% in 2024; +4% in 2025. Contract value growth followed the same arc, landing flat by year-end 2025. The DOGE hacks to U.S. federal government contracts was the most visible drag. Gartner entered 2025 with approximately $275 million in federal contract value. By year-end, that figure had fallen to approximately $126 million. But the broader slowdown in enterprise decision-making — extended buying cycles, elevated approval authority, deferred decisions across the board — likely accounted for more lost momentum than any single budget category. The clockwork double-digit growth was in the rearview mirror.

The more forward-looking story at Gartner is the transformation of its research operations. In Q2 2025, Gartner renamed its Research segment Business and Technology Insights (BTI). This signaled a repositioning of its core product from written research toward continuous business guidance. The operational investment behind that repositioning is substantial: Magic Quadrant production time reduced by 75% via AI-assisted content creation; over 200,000 in-depth client AI conversations handled in 2025; AskGartner (Gartner’s LLM) launched in August and is showing measurably higher renewal rates among licensed users.

Gartner also sharpened its focus on customer insights. It divested Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice to G2 — consolidating all of its peer review energy onto Gartner Peer Insights (GPI). This is not a retreat from peer reviews. GPI is now Gartner’s sole review platform, with 815,000 reviews across nearly 16,000 vendors and 900 markets. AskGartner will surface GPI reviews directly, and persona-based reviews are coming in Q2 2026. For vendors, the message is clear: if you’re not actively managing your GPI presence, the integration with AskGartner and Magic Quadrants makes that an increasingly costly oversight.

2026 Guidance

• Revenue: at least $6.455B
• Research segment revenue: at least $5.19B
• Conferences revenue: at least $695M
• Underlying operating profit margin: at least 23.5% (a reset from recent levels, framed by management as intentional investment)
• Stock: As of March 20, 2026, Gartner trades around $162–167, against a 52-week high of $453. The ~23% single-day drop on February 3 was driven not by 2025 results — which beat estimates — but by 2026 guidance disappointment and the margin reset.

2025, Synthesized

The good news: The business is resilient at scale — and AskGartner is early evidence that AI investment can drive retention, not just efficiency.

The bad news: Contract value growth stalled in 2025, and the 2026 guidance is a reset, not a rebound.

Forrester Research

FY2025 earnings reported Feb. 12, 2026

Core Metrics

• Revenue: $396.9M (-8.2%)
• Contract Value: $292.4M (-6%)
• Underlying profitability: $22.2M (-21%)

Forrester is now in its third consecutive year of declining total revenue. Revenue peaked at $538 million in 2022, fell to $481 million in 2023, dropped to $432 million in 2024, and dropped further to $397 million in 2025. Within that, research revenue declined for the twelfth consecutive quarter in Q4 2025. It’s a streak that dates back to Q1 2022. Client count dropped from more than 1,900 at year-end 2024 to more than 1,700 at year-end 2025.

The reported net loss of $119.4 million for 2025 sounds alarming but is largely explained by $110.7 million in goodwill impairment charges taken across the year. Goodwill impairment is a non-cash accounting adjustment — it reflects the gap between the value of a company’s assets when acquired and what the market says they’re worth today. In Forrester’s case, the first charge was triggered in Q1 by a sustained decline in the stock price and a larger-than-expected drop in contract bookings. The second instance came from the annual impairment test in Q4. No literal cash left the building, but the charges do signal that the accounting system is responding to real pressure — a declining stock, a declining contract base. Strip away the impairment charges and Forrester generated $22.2 million in profit in 2025. The pressure is real and structural. What remains equally real is the quality of the analysts doing the work — and that’s what should drive your engagement decisions, not the income statement.

The multi-year Forrester Decisions platform migration has been the central strategic bet throughout this period. By early 2025, 80% of contract value was on the new platform — but the migration didn’t reverse the decline. A fresh restructuring announced in February 2026 — an 8% workforce reduction across functions and geographies, the second in two years — reflects the ongoing effort to align costs with a shrinking revenue base. The 2026 guidance projects a further decline in revenue of 9–13%.

Forrester exited strategy consulting in 2025. The exit was driven by a 50% decline in bookings for that segment, largely tied to instability in U.S. federal contracts. For vendors, the hopeful observation is that shedding that offering will help Forrester concentrate on what really drives value.

What makes 2025 different from the two years preceding it is Forrester AI Access. Launched in September 2025, it’s a self-service, lower-cost product built on Forrester AI — the firm’s generative AI tool, formerly known as Izola. AI Access is designed to put Forrester’s research in the hands of more stakeholders across client organizations (the per-seat price point becomes even more feasible as more seats are bought for the organization). In March 2026, Forrester AI became available inside Microsoft Teams. This is a significant distribution move that brings Forrester’s research into an ecosystem (Teams) where many users already work. The early results are the most encouraging signal in Forrester’s recent history:

• Deal cycles shortened by nearly 50%.
• Unique Forrester AI users rose 55% in Q4.
• Over $5M in bookings since launch.
• Q4 2025 saw the first sequential quarterly increase in client count since Q4 2021.

Whether Forrester AI Access marks a genuine inflection or a temporary interruption of the decline is the defining question for Forrester in 2026. But it is a real product with real early traction, and the streak, however long, is not the whole story.

How Colony is framing Forrester’s response to the broader AI threat — including his specific and developing thesis about where AI revenue ultimately flows — is addressed in the AI section below. It’s one of the more provocative arguments any of these CEOs has made publicly, and it’s worth reading on its own terms.

2026 Guidance

• Revenue: $345M–$360M (-9% to -13% vs. 2025)
• Underlying operating margin: 6.0%–6.5%
• Contract value expected to show modest growth in late 2026
• Stock: As of March 20, 2026, Forrester trades around $5.86–$5.97, against a 52-week high of $11.57. Market cap is approximately $111 million.

2025, Synthesized

The good news: AI Access produced the first quarterly client count increase in four years — the turnaround has a credible mechanism for the first time in recent memory.

The bad news: Twelve consecutive quarters of research revenue decline, and 2026 guidance projects further contraction before any recovery.

ISG (Information Services Group)

FY2025 earnings reported March 5, 2026

Before the numbers, let’s level set on what makes ISG a different kind of firm than Gartner and Forrester because the difference matters for how you interpret its results.

ISG is primarily a technology advisory and sourcing firm. Its core business involves helping enterprises evaluate, select, and manage technology service providers — work that is fundamentally about human expertise applied to complex decisions, not subscription access to a research library. ISG does produce research, and that side of the business is growing deliberately, but research functions as a complement to the advisory business rather than its engine. The two reinforce each other: advisory engagements generate proprietary data and market intelligence that feed ISG’s research products, and research gives ISG analysts credibility and visibility that attracts advisory clients. That flywheel — and the firm’s ambition to grow it — is increasingly central to ISG’s strategy.

Core Metrics

• Revenue (comparable basis): $244.7M (+7%)
• Underlying operating profit: $32.2M (+28%)
• Underlying profit margin: 13.2% (+3 percentage points)
• Operating cash flow: $29.0M (+46%)
• Note: Reported revenue was $244.7 million vs. $247.8 million (-1%), but 2024 included a business unit ISG divested in October 2024. The comparable growth rate of +7% is the more meaningful number.

ISG delivered its strongest financial performance in recent memory by several measures:

• Underlying operating profit up 28%.
• Operating cash flow up 46%.
• Profit margins expanded 3 percentage points.

These are the metrics of a business that is not just growing but improving its efficiency as it grows.

The research business specifically is expanding in scope and ambition. That expansion has been deliberate and acquisition-led: ISG’s 2023 purchase of Ventana Research — a firm tracking more than 2,000 software vendors with in-depth coverage of more than 250 — gave ISG the software industry analyst capability it previously lacked, and the integration appears to have paid off. ISG’s 2025 research agenda included 50 ISG Provider Lens reports and more than 135 ISG Buyer’s Guides. For technology vendors, inclusion and positioning in ISG Provider Lens reports are increasingly relevant AR objectives — particularly for vendors selling IT services, cloud, and AI-related offerings to enterprise buyers.

The research and advisory ambitions come together most clearly in ISG’s January 2026 acquisition of the AI Maturity Index, a benchmarking platform that assesses enterprise AI readiness at the individual and organizational level. With an early pipeline already exceeding 30 clients, this is a product-led move designed to create a recurring, data-driven intelligence stream that sits alongside ISG’s advisory work. It is a signal of intent: ISG is building toward a more integrated model that combines research, advisory, and data products rather than treating research as a secondary activity.

The broader AI story at ISG is noteworthy. The firm served more than 350 clients with AI-focused research and advisory services in 2025 — three times more than the prior year — and AI-related work accounted for nearly 30% of full-year revenue. ISG is explicitly targeting 50% of total revenue from AI-related services over the medium term. ISG Tango, its AI-powered sourcing platform, now processes more than $25 billion in total contract value, up from $7 billion the prior year. CEO Michael Connors framed the moment plainly: “Nearly every technology transformation now requires some element of AI, and this is fundamentally changing the value proposition for both service and software providers. We are at the center of this revolution.”

That ambition has organizational backing. In January 2026, ISG formed a dedicated AI Acceleration Unit led by Chief AI Officer Steve Hall. The group draws on expertise across advisory, research, and change management. It’s a structural signal that ISG’s AI positioning is not just a revenue narrative but an operating priority.

One regional note worth flagging: Asia Pacific revenues fell 22% in 2025 — a meaningful decline in a market that should be growing.

2026 Guidance

• Q1 revenue: $60.5M–$61.5M
• Q1 underlying operating profit: $7.5M–$8.5M
• No full-year guidance disclosed
• Stock: As of March 20, 2026, ISG trades around $4.00, against a 52-week high of $6.45.

2025, Synthesized

The good news: The strongest financial improvement in this group, driven by genuine market demand rather than accounting adjustments or one-time items.

The bad news: It remains a small firm with limited brand recognition among enterprise buyers — the momentum is real, but the foundation is still being built.

Informa TechTarget (parent company of Omdia)

FY2025 earnings reported March 11, 2026

Informa TechTarget is the newest entity in this group. The company was formed in December 2024 via the combination of TechTarget and Informa Tech’s digital businesses. Management explicitly described 2025 as a “foundation year.” That framing is worth taking seriously: Almost everything about this company’s 2025 results, good and bad, has to be read against the backdrop of a business that spent the year integrating, consolidating, and repositioning.

Core Metrics

• Revenue: $486.8M (~flat vs. combined 2024)
• Underlying operating profit: $87.3M (+11%)
• Underlying profit margin: 17.9% (+1.8 percentage points)
• Operating cash flow: $16.3M (turned positive from -$64.9M)

The operating story is better than the headline numbers suggest. Underlying operating profit grew 11%, margins expanded, and the business exited the year with Q4 showing nearly 30% profit margins — a meaningful demonstration of what the combined model can produce when operating efficiently. Operating cash flow swung from deeply negative to solidly positive. Cost synergies more than doubled the original $5 million plan, and integration execution was ahead of schedule.

The reported net loss of $1.008 billion probably stops you cold, and it deserves a clear explanation. The vast majority — $931.5 million — is a goodwill impairment charge. As noted in the Forrester section, goodwill impairment is a non-cash accounting adjustment reflecting the gap between book value and market value. The stock declined significantly after the merger was announced, and the impairment is the accounting system catching up with that repricing. No literal cash left the building. But it is real: it is the balance sheet acknowledging that the market has reset its expectations for this business downward from the value assigned at the combination. The adjusted operating numbers tell a more constructive story, but both things are true.

In 2025, Informa TechTarget completed the unification of Canalys, ESG, the former TechTarget research group, and Wards Intelligence under the single Omdia brand — simplifying what had been a fragmented portfolio of research and analyst identities into one market-facing proposition. That Omdia won the IIAR Analyst Firm of the Year award during this period is meaningful external validation. The distinction shows that the AR community views the consolidation favorably despite the turbulence. The practical implication for AR professionals is the simplification of access. Where vendors previously navigated separate relationships with Canalys, ESG, and others, there is now a single brand with more than 300 analysts and consultants.

Informa TechTarget’s structural differentiation from every other firm on this list is its permissioned first-party audience — approximately 57.6 million registered members across more than 220 targeted digital properties. These are not research subscribers. They are registered users of TechTarget’s editorial properties who have opted in to be tracked and targeted, and the intent data derived from their behavior is what technology vendors pay for. This is a fundamentally different business model than Gartner or Forrester: the audience is the product being sold to vendors, not the client base. The company’s pivot to a major account strategy reflects how that model works at scale — roughly half of a $20 billion addressable market is concentrated in approximately 200 companies, which is why revenue from the top 30 portfolio customers growing 10% is the metric management emphasizes most.

2026 Guidance

• Revenue: return to growth (no specific range disclosed)
• Underlying operating profit: $95M–$100M (+9% to +15% vs. 2025)
• Profit margin: further improvement beyond 17.9%
• Stock: As of March 20, 2026, Informa TechTarget trades around $3.77–$3.97, against a 52-week high of $15.55.

2025, Synthesized

The good news: The integration is ahead of schedule operationally, and Omdia emerged from a turbulent year with its analyst reputation intact.

The bad news: Revenue was flat, and the stock tells a story the operating profit figures don’t — the market has not yet been convinced.

S&P Global (parent company of 451 Research)

FY2025 earnings reported Feb. 10, 2026

451 Research belongs in this article — it is a relevant and active AR target for technology vendors, its analysts are accessible and engaged, and its research on AI adoption is among the most substantive in the market. But it cannot be covered the same way as the other four firms, and that difference is itself worth understanding.

S&P Global is a $15 billion financial data and analytics company. Through 2025, 451 Research sat within the Market Intelligence group. 451 is never broken out as a standalone financial unit; it’s never reported with its own revenue, client count, or contract value. The numbers that would let us evaluate 451’s trajectory the way we’ve evaluated Gartner’s or Forrester’s simply don’t exist in public disclosures. This simply reflects what happens to independent analyst firms when they are absorbed into large conglomerates: the brand persists, the analysts continue publishing, but the business becomes financially invisible.

Available data does show that S&P Global had a strong 2025. Revenue rose 8%, net income was up 16%, and the company operated at roughly 50% profit margins. 451 Research operates within that financially stable, well-resourced parent. One noteworthy example of 451 output: The “Voice of the Enterprise: AI and Machine Learning” research — including the finding that 58% of enterprises are actively pursuing AI agent capabilities — was among the most substantive buy-side AI research published in 2025. The report is an example of proprietary survey data that makes 451 a useful AR priority for vendors.

One developing story already in 2026: 451 Research is moving to S&P Global Energy Horizons, a new division within S&P Global Energy. The shift reflects the deepening intersection of AI infrastructure and energy demand — two areas where 451 has built genuine expertise. What it means for 451’s research mandate, client relationships, and AR accessibility is not yet clear. For professionals with active 451 relationships, it’s worth staying close to how the transition unfolds.

2025, Synthesized

The good news: 451’s analysts remain active, accessible, and producing research that matters — influence that persists regardless of organizational visibility.

The bad news: Six years inside one of the world’s largest financial data companies, 451 remains influential but under the radar — and the move to S&P Global Energy Horizons raises new questions about where 451 goes from here.

What AR and B2B Marketing Leaders Should Watch in 2026

The five firms in this piece are not interchangeable. Each of them has unique questions looming, and the answers will massively influence where they’ll stand a year from now. What follows is not a prediction for each firm — it’s a set of specific indicators that will tell you, over the course of the year, whether the trajectories visible in the 2025 numbers are continuing, reversing, or something more complicated.

Gartner: Will the BTI transformation produce better research, or just faster output?

The efficiency gains are real: Magic Quadrant production time is down 75%; AskGartner handles hundreds of thousands of queries. But efficiency and quality are not the same thing. For AR professionals whose programs depend on analyst depth, relationship access, and the credibility that comes from rigorous evaluation methodology, the question is whether faster production translates into more timely and actionable research or into shallower analysis at higher volume. AskGartner’s early retention data is encouraging. Watch whether that signal holds through mid-year renewals, and watch whether the BTI repositioning produces measurable contract value acceleration in the second half of 2026, as management has indicated it expects.

Forrester: Will AI Access reverse the decline, or just slow it?

The Q4 2025 client count increase was the first sequential quarterly gain since Q4 2021. That’s a genuinely encouraging signal after twelve consecutive quarters of research revenue decline. The honest assessment is that it is too early to know whether this is a durable inflection or a pull-forward of demand that would have come anyway. Watch Q1 and Q2 2026 client count figures. If the sequential gains continue through the first half of the year, the turnaround case becomes substantially more credible. If they stall, the Q4 bump was likely temporary. The 2026 guidance — revenue declining a further 9% to 13% — says management itself is not yet counting on a rapid recovery.

Informa TechTarget / Omdia: Can they hold the profit gains while returning to revenue growth?

The 2025 operating profit story is genuinely strong — margins expanded to 18% full year and nearly 30% in Q4, with 2026 guidance pointing to $95–100 million. The harder task is converting that operational efficiency into top-line growth. For AR professionals, the more immediate watch item is whether the Omdia brand consolidation creates a more coherent vendor engagement model as it matures, or whether the compression of four analyst identities into one creates friction in briefing, inquiry, and contract relationships.

ISG: Is the AI advisory demand durable, or a one-cycle spike?

ISG’s 2025 numbers are the strongest in this group by multiple measures. The underlying question is whether that demand reflects a sustained shift in how enterprises seek guidance on AI adoption, or whether it reflects a concentration of initial AI sourcing decisions that will not repeat at the same intensity. Watch whether recurring revenue growth, which hit 13% in Q4, holds through 2026 as the leading indicator of whether the model is sticking.

S&P Global / 451 Research: What does 451 look like by late 2026?

The more pressing question for AR and marketing professionals isn’t what happens to S&P Global’s Market Intelligence segment after the Mobility spin-off — it’s what the move to S&P Global Energy Horizons means for 451 Research as an AR target. The transition is recent and still unfolding. Watch how 451’s coverage priorities, client engagement model, and research agenda evolve under the Energy Horizons umbrella. If the move deepens 451’s focus on AI infrastructure and energy demand, vendors in those spaces may find 451 more relevant than ever. If it creates organizational disruption or pulls analyst attention toward energy-sector clients, the implications for traditional technology vendor AR programs are worth monitoring.

Generational Disruption. Consequential Opportunity.

For most of the past two decades, the analyst-related playbook for AR and B2B marketing professionals had a stable foundation. There were firms you had to prioritize. There was a hierarchy reliable enough to build budgets, programs, and strategies around. Gartner, IDC, and Forrester were the so-called “big three.” Next came tiers of firms that mattered depending on your category and geography. Last were independent analysts and analyst-expert hybrids, depending on value, interest, and bandwidth. You knew the model. You knew what engagement would look like. You knew, roughly, what you would get.

2025 was the year that foundation became unreliable. Not because any single firm collapsed — none did — but because the assumptions underpinning the hierarchy stopped holding simultaneously. Gartner’s contract value stalled and its stock lost nearly two-thirds of its value from its 52-week high. Forrester ended its third consecutive year of revenue decline, with a fourth projected. IDC had its fair share of challenges and transitions, even if we can’t see the financial specifics we would from a public company. The firms that were supposed to challenge the top tier were each, for different reasons, consumed by their own transitions.

As the first quarter of 2026 nears its end and we consider the set of full-year 2025 financial results, a few things are clear:

• The legacy notion of the Big Three is gone
• Even the most stalwart performers wobbled
• Efforts, and the desire, to evolve are real

But the most important shift isn’t financial. It’s environmental. These firms are under pressure because the role analyst firms play in the buying journey is changing. Buyers are forming opinions earlier, through more channels, shaped by more inputs than any single research subscription can capture. LLMs are synthesizing analyst coverage, customer reviews, peer validation, employee sentiment, and thought leadership simultaneously. Answer engines are defining what makes sources credible. The authority that came from being Gartner, IDC, or Forrester is not gone — but it is no longer automatically conferred.

None of this diminishes the value of the firms in this piece. Analysts matter. Expert, independent, human perspective on complex technology decisions is not a casualty of the AI era. If anything, the proliferation of AI-generated content makes trusted human judgment more valuable, not less. What’s changing is how and when that judgment reaches buyers.

The AR and marketing leaders who will navigate this landscape well are the ones who see all of it as connected. They will orchestrate analyst relationships, customer advocacy, thought leadership, and peer validation not as separate programs, but as parts of the same challenge: To build the kind of credible, consistent presence that surfaces when AI tools go looking for answers on behalf of buyers.

The research firms in this piece are evolving because of that reality, and toward it. The question that defined so many discussions and earnings call in 2025 — are large language models coming for your business? — is also the question defining every AR and marketing strategy worth building right now. Investment analysts asked it of these CEOs. Buyers are living it. And the professionals who work with these firms every day are navigating it in real time. We are witnesses to the most consequential period of threat, opportunity, and change the research and advisory industry has seen in a generation. The research firms that adapt will matter more, not less. So will the AR and marketing leaders who adapt alongside them.