The yardstick for AI in marketing, calibrated for marketing leaders.

How we test, score, and publish

Yardstick Research is an independent software research and consulting agency for B2B AI tools. We test the tools ourselves, score them on outcomes that matter, and publish the results. Methodology in plain sight, so your CMO, board, and finance partner can check our work. For CMOs, VPs of Marketing, VPs of Demand Generation, VPs of Brand, and Heads of Marketing Operations, we weight Data Readiness and Tool Stack heavily because in marketing your martech stack sprawl, your attribution posture under General Data Protection Regulation, California Consumer Privacy Act, and the Apple App Tracking Transparency prompt, your brand-safety guardrails on generative content, your pipeline accountability to revenue, and the content-velocity-versus-quality tradeoff are what every vendor has to land inside. Pipeline-sourced revenue, marketing-qualified leads, and channel customer-acquisition-cost are the preconditions for any production marketing AI. Here's how that actually happens:

1. 01

   We evaluate every marketing vendor on this list using public information and free-tier hands-on.

   Our researchers evaluate each vendor on the list using a defensible mix of inputs: vendor documentation and pricing pages, free-tier or trial-seat hands-on where the vendor offers one, video walkthroughs, third-party reviews (G2, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights), published customer case studies, practitioner discussion (Marketing Week, AdAge, CMSWire, MarketingProfs, MarTech.org, Scott Brinker's MarTech 5000 landscape map, Forrester marketing reports), and recent funding and news coverage. Where we can sign up and exercise the product directly, we do, and grade the output against a sample workflow: in the marketing case, a content brief-to-draft pass, a paid-media bid-optimization run, a multi-touch-attribution model output on a sample event stream, or a campaign-brief-to-creative generation. We do not pay for paid tiers and we do not run a held-out attribution benchmark through every tool. Both are cost-prohibitive at the scale this guide covers.

   Every claim in a tear-sheet is labelled MEASURED (free-tier hands-on observation, or output graded against a sample workflow), ESTIMATED (cost-per-seat efficiency derived from the vendor's pricing page and feature limits), or CITED (vendor-published or third-party benchmark, with the source linked).

2. 02

   We score on outcomes buyers care about, with weights we publish.

   Vendor decks sell features. Marketing operators actually buy outcomes: pipeline-sourced revenue, marketing-qualified leads, content velocity, channel customer-acquisition-cost, and brand-recall lift. We score five dimensions: Strategy & Use Cases, Data Readiness, Tool Stack, Team & Workflow, and Budget & Procurement. Industry benchmarks for mature marketing operators sit at 60 / 55 / 55 / 55 / 60 percent of each dimension's maximum. The dimensions and benchmarks are public so your CMO can sign off, and so vendors can't quietly negotiate them. The audit also captures your operating baselines (customer-acquisition-cost payback window, return on ad spend, marketing-qualified-lead-to-opportunity conversion, email click-through-rate, brand share-of-voice, cost per piece of content, and client or net-revenue retention for agency holding companies) and fans return-on-investment scenarios out per selected baseline.

3. 03

   We publish. Vendors check facts. Affiliate links are disclosed.

   Every vendor receives their scored tear-sheet seven days before publication and can flag factual errors (wrong pricing tier, misquoted feature, integration listed as native that's actually via a third party). Rankings can't be appealed; only factual corrections are accepted. Where the guide links to a vendor's product, that link may earn us a commission. Disclosed on every page where the link appears. Vendors do not pay for inclusion, placement, or ranking.