Ditch the Gate: How to Build Trust and Demand with Ungated Content in 2026

What you’ll learn in this blog post:

• The "death of the MQL": Why gates fail in 2026
• Step-by-step: How to ungate without losing attribution
• Common mistakes: When ungating goes wrong
• Examples & templates for high-intent ungated assets

As tech marketers, we're constantly on the hunt for the latest and greatest growth strategies. And for years, gated content has been one in that playbook. Who doesn't want more leads to feed into their funnel?! Gated content doesn't work as well as we think it does, and it's time to start exploring other options.

In B2B tech demand generation, the main focus is on creating interest for your product or service. Gated content can most definitely be a lead generation tool, but it's not the most effective way to drive demand.

The internet is filled with ebooks, checklists, and what not, hidden behind a form fill. B2B tech buyers are tired of giving out their private information only to be bombarded with sales calls and spammy email pitches. Or worse, to discover that the content they requested doesn't really do... well, anything.

Discovering that your "leads" often hide behind email addresses such as 123@123.com and generic job titles like "business owner" is a sign your gated content doesn't provide much value. Not to mention, it undermines the credibility of your marketing team. It's hard to justify the effectiveness of a campaign when a significant number of the leads it generates turn out to be fake.

The leads generated through gated content often fail to convert into paying customers, too. Or if they do, the sales cycle is typically much longer than expected. The reason for this is: these leads are often not yet ready to make a purchase when they download a piece of gated content.

So if gated content isn't the answer, what is? Creating content that's valuable enough to promote without a gate! One that provides tangible value to your target audience and encourages them to take the next step in their buying journey when they feel ready to do so (without exchanging their personal info for it!).

In this blog post, we'll discuss why it’s time to move away from the old lead generation playbook that relies on gated content. Instead, tech brands should focus on a demand generation approach that emphasizes ungating content to better reach and engage with potential customers.

Why Gates Fail in 2026?

Gated content tends to turn off potential buyers. Let's say you're searching for an answer to a specific question and come across an article that promises to provide the solution. You click on it, only to be presented with a form requiring you to hand over your contact information before you can read it.

Chances are, unless this article is something unique and irreplaceable, you'll move on to another site. Why should you give up your personal information for content that's likely available elsewhere?

When buyers are presented with a gate, they're being pushed into something. Especially when it's their first time discovering your company and they don't yet have an idea of what you offer or how it helps them. With so many companies creating content (many of them doing it without much attention to quality), buyers approach conversion forms with quite some skepticism. 

Gated content also limits the reach of your marketing efforts. Sure, you can generate a few leads, but think about all the people who see your article and decide not to fill out the form. These buyers would've been a great audience to target with additional content, but now they're lost.

And there's the issue of fake leads, of course. As mentioned earlier, gated content can often fill your tech sales funnel with leads looking for freebies that are not ready to buy or have no intention of becoming a customer. These “leads” take away from your conversion rates and waste time and resources that could've been put to better use.

They can create a false sense of success as you end up measuring vanity metrics: visitors, leads, MQLs, conversion rates. But these metrics do not necessarily translate to revenue generated by your marketing efforts. In other words, gated content may give the appearance of progress, but it can weaken your ability to drive growth.

Does that mean gated content has no place in B2B tech demand generation? Not necessarily. There are situations in which gated content may be the best solution. Let's dive in!

When Should You Consider Gating Content?

If your content offers something truly unique and valuable, a highly detailed case study, exclusive data you can't get elsewhere, original research with insights highly beneficial to your target audience, gating it may not be a bad option.

This is especially true if you plan on providing additional content: more in-depth studies or follow-up case studies, that can only be accessed by people who have already filled out the form.

What if you already have pieces of gated content that perform well? Let your conversion rates be your guide. If they are high and you feel like you're getting quality leads, keep gating the content. Same for the opposite, if your landing page conversions are low and your gated content turns into a bottleneck, your best bet is to move away from the gates and look for alternative options.

Why Should Gated Content Be Excluded From Your Demand Generation Strategy?

Gated content should be excluded from your demand generation strategy because it prioritizes short-term data collection over the long-term trust and brand authority required to turn a tech audience into loyal customers.

In 2026, demand generation is about maximizing the consumption of your expertise, which is fundamentally at odds with the restrictive nature of a lead gate:

• Prioritizes quantity over quality: Gating content focuses on capturing a high volume of low-intent "leads" rather than nurturing high-quality opportunities. This results in a CRM full of fake contact info rather than a pipeline of educated buyers.
• Stifles brand authority: The goal of demand generation is to establish your brand as a market leader. When you hide your best insights behind a form, you limit your reach and prevent your thought leadership from being shared across networks.
• Prevents relationship building: Trust is built through value-first engagement! A gate creates a transactional relationship ("give me your email for this PDF") rather than an educational one that encourages prospects to return to your site as a trusted resource.
• Inhibits the natural buyer loop: Demand generation is an ongoing process. Forcing a user to fill out a form every time they want to consume a piece of your knowledge creates friction that breaks their research momentum and signals that your value is conditional.
• Reduces content ROI: By ungating, you allow your content to work harder for you: generating SEO value, earning backlinks, and circulating through "dark social" channels where your next big customer is likely hanging out.

How Does Gated Content Disrupt the Modern Buyer’s Journey?

Gated content disrupts the buyer’s journey by creating high-friction barriers at the exact moments when prospects need information most, effectively stalling their self-education and pushing them toward competitors who offer ungated transparency. In 2026, the B2B tech buyer expects a seamless, "on-demand" experience across all three stages of the funnel:

• The awareness stage (problem research): Buyers are looking for education, not a sales pitch. When you gate top-of-funnel content like eBooks or blog posts, you prevent your expertise from reaching the 95% of the market that isn't ready to buy yet.
• The consideration stage (solution evaluation): At this point, prospects are comparing technical specs and case studies. Forcing a form-fill here interrupts their research flow and often results in them using a competitor’s ungated documentation to build their internal business case instead of yours.
• The decision stage (final validation): Buyers need pricing, product tours, and comparison sheets. Any friction at this stage risks the entire deal by signaling that your company is difficult to work with.
• The AI chatbot visibility and (AI) SEO gap: Beyond the human experience, gated content is invisible to AI chatbots and search engines. By locking away your best insights, you lose out on organic rankings, backlinks, and the "dark social" shares that happen when people text or Slack a link to a colleague.

Why Do Marketers Still Rely on Gated Content?

Marketers continue to rely on gated content mainly because it provides a familiar, low-effort way to capture contact data for attribution and meet short-term MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) targets. While the buyer landscape in 2026 has shifted toward privacy and self-education, several legacy factors keep the "gate" alive:

• Fear of losing attribution: Lead forms offer a concrete "source" for a lead, making it easy to report success to stakeholders, even if the lead quality is low.
• The "incentive" myth: There is a lingering perception that a form creates a sense of exclusivity or value, though modern buyers usually view it as a barrier.
• Ease of implementation: Gating a PDF is way easier than building an interactive, high-value web experience that keeps a reader engaged without a login.
• Legacy KPIs: Many marketing teams are still incentivized by the quantity of leads rather than the velocity of the sales cycle or total revenue generated.

Conclusion

Gated content may help capture leads, but it won't do much to generate demand. Which is why it shouldn't be a part of your tech demand generation strategy.

So focus on creating actionable content and make it available to everyone - without asking them to submit their personal information first. This will help you reach more people and give them the information they need to make an informed decision.

If you're looking to generate more demand for your tech product, focus on creating content that provides real value and is easy to access. Invest in educational content that will be accessible to everyone throughout the buyer's journey. That way, you'll be able to generate more demand and build relationships!

FAQs

1. What does "ungated content" mean?

Gated content is material that is only accessible to users who provide some form of information (such as an email address) or who have an existing membership. Ungated content is freely available without any barriers.

2. What is the difference between gated and ungated?

• Gated: A lead generation strategy used to capture contact data, often resulting in higher friction but more "leads" in the CRM.
• Ungated: A demand generation strategy meant to improve SEO, increase brand awareness, and build trust by maximizing content consumption.

3. How do I get leads if I stop gating my content?

• Shift focus from "capturing" leads to "generating" intent.
• Replace lead forms with high-intent CTAs (e.g., "Book a Demo" or "Start Free Trial") inside the content.
• Focus on the quality of the hand-raisers—people who have read your content and are now ready to buy, rather than those who just wanted a free PDF.

4. Will ungating my content hurt my AI visibility score and SEO?

• No, it significantly improves it. Search engines and AI crawlers cannot index content hidden behind forms.
• Ungating allows your best insights to earn backlinks, rank for keywords, and be cited by AI search engines as an authoritative source.

5. How do I measure success without MQLs?

• Track pipeline velocity: How fast accounts move from discovery to closed-won.
• Monitor account engagement: Use de-anonymization tools to see which target accounts are consuming your ungated pages.
• Use self-reported attribution: Add a "How did you hear about us?" field to your demo request form to capture the influence of "Dark Social.

6. What should I still keep gated in 2026?

• Personalized tools: ROI calculators or software trials that require a user account to function.
• Proprietary data: Original, primary research that is unique to your brand and cannot be found elsewhere on the internet.