If you think a martech vendor’s category label tells you what it does, a new six-year study suggests you should look again. An analysis of digital experience platform homepages found vendors changing their self-descriptions far more often than their products, with one company cycling through six identities between 2020 and 2026.
The review, published by MarTech, pulled yearly homepage snapshots for 24 content and experience platform vendors. Twenty-three were usable. One vendor moved from Jamstack to composable DXP to a composition platform, then a visual workspace, then a plain DXP, and now an agentic DXP. Another ran five identities, two more ran four or three, while only four of the 23 kept the same category term throughout.
The sameness underneath the labels
B2B message-testing firm Wynter has measured how much this relabelling hides real similarity. CEO Peep Laja and his team ranked 445 category leaders across 61 B2B categories by how much of their messaging also appears on competitors’ pages. The findings: 99% of B2B software homepages claim AI, 86% claim to save time, and the average overlap between category leaders is 57%.
In a sharper test, Wynter took value-proposition copy from the five biggest CRMs, removed the company names, and asked 100 B2B marketing leaders to match each to its brand. They scored 1.86 out of 5, against 1.0 for random guessing; about 43% got one or zero right. Laja’s conclusion: “Your positioning isn’t bad because it’s wrong. It’s bad because it’s interchangeable.”
Do the names match the product?
The MarTech analysis then checked every vendor in Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, published Jan. 28, 2025, comparing homepages with dated release notes.
- 11 of 17 lead with AI or agentic language on their homepage.
- 13 of 17 are verifiably shipping AI capability; three are not, and one had no evidence either way.
- The homepage label matched the product in 11 of 17 cases. It overstated in three and understated in three.
Some overstating vendors were telling AI stories their changelogs didn’t support. One called itself an agentic experience platform, but only four of the 53 changelog entries it published in the six months after the rename mentioned AI, and the sole agentic release was a minor update to a component first listed the same week its homepage changed. Another agentic DXP had zero mentions of AI, agents or the connection standard that lets outside AI tools work with a product across 13 core release notes covering a full year; its agentic modules were separately versioned and marked beta. A third led with “AI-Tailored” but showed none in the platform release notes reviewed.
The understating cases matter just as much. One market leader whose product page title said nothing about AI shipped a release stuffed with it — content authenticity labelling, agentic permission management, AI search, AI-generated video captions and an agent beta programme. Another, whose homepage read “Marketers deserve tools that work as hard as they do,” had 11 changelog sections devoted to its AI assistant and related connectors.
Renaming isn’t the price of admission
Gartner’s May “Innovation Insight: Agentic CMS” report illustrates how weak the pressure to rename really is. It named six representative providers, including one that has called itself a headless CMS every year since 2020 and never adopted the new label. It got named anyway, and added AI agents to its product in September.
There is a real cost to holding your name: analysts organise research by category and buyers search by category, so refusing the popular term can make you harder to find when a shortlist is built. But chasing labels has its own cost. After Gartner published its agentic CMS report on May 12, one vendor sent a press release on May 21, and its homepage headline changed between May 26 and June 1 — under three weeks from analyst document to new homepage, while customers still had the same problems.
Three checks before your next vendor call
- Put the vendor’s homepage into the Internet Archive and read the page title once a year for five years. More than two changes means you’re evaluating a marketing decision.
- Open public release notes for the six months after a rename and count entries that relate to the new name. The gap between a company that repositioned and one that merely renamed shows up quickly.
- Ask what changed in the product the month the name changed, and read the release notes yourself.
The takeaway is simple: a vendor’s category label tells you what its marketing team decided this year. Dated release notes describe the thing you’re actually buying.
Source: MarTech
