How’s Your Martech Stack Shaping Up?

Why It Matters

Benchmark data helps marketers identify gaps, prioritize AI investments, and control rising stack costs, shaping competitive advantage in digital advertising.

Key Takeaways

• SEMrush launches 2026 State of Your Stack survey with Scott Brinker
• Survey probes AI agent adoption, data integration challenges, and spend trends
• Results will benchmark martech health against peers across industries
• Participation takes ~5 minutes; findings will be published later this year

Pulse Analysis

The 2026 State of Your Stack survey arrives at a pivotal moment for marketers grappling with an ever‑expanding technology ecosystem. As AI agents move from pilot projects to production‑grade tools, firms need concrete data to gauge whether they are early adopters or laggards. By partnering with industry authority Scott Brinker, SEMrush leverages his "Chiefmartec" credibility to attract a broad cross‑section of marketers, ensuring the resulting dataset reflects real‑world stack compositions across B2B, B2C, and agency environments.

Beyond AI, the survey tackles perennial pain points such as data integration and cost inflation. Marketers often cite siloed platforms and hidden licensing fees as barriers to ROI, yet few have a clear benchmark to compare against competitors. The forthcoming report promises to surface average spend per tool, the proportion of legacy systems still in use, and the rate at which organizations are consolidating vendors. These insights will enable finance and marketing ops teams to negotiate better contracts and rationalize their technology portfolios.

For the broader industry, the survey’s findings will act as a leading indicator of where investment dollars are flowing next year. Analysts can track shifts toward unified customer data platforms, the rise of generative‑AI content engines, and the decline of under‑utilized analytics tools. Marketers who act on these trends early can secure a strategic edge, while those that ignore the data risk falling behind in an increasingly AI‑driven marketplace.