What it is
A market study built to settle one thing: if you were opening a diagnostic practice in B2B, which categories would you go at first, and what would you build for them.
It ran as desk research in September 2026. 174 published templates were pulled apart and classified across 23 fields. 40 B2B industries were scored on 14 dimensions. 25 ICPs came out ranked by opportunity, with a demand-minus-supply gap and a confidence grade against each. 13 competing platforms were mapped, and 13 interactive formats were taxonomised on what each one runs on and what it is worth once a competitor copies it.
Everything below is from that study, and everything in it is a snapshot with a date on it.
The three findings that carry it
Nobody is benchmarking. Across 13 competing platforms, not one offers peer-cohort comparison. “How do we compare to firms like ours” is the highest-value thing a B2B assessment can answer, and it is unanswered across the whole category. It is also the only shape that compounds: every response makes the next comparison denser, and a competitor starting a year later starts a year behind.
The top half of the market builds its own. The most sophisticated assessments in the sample were not built on assessment software at all. Large consultancies and enterprise platforms built custom, one of them on a general-purpose website builder. That is a systematic avoidance, and it is the clearest evidence available that the upper end of B2B is being served badly.
Agency supply is thin. Named specialist agencies in this work number in the low single digits, cluster in one country and skew towards coaching, wellness and e-commerce. Not one was positioned around a single B2B vertical.
The inversion that should decide a roadmap
Across those 174 templates, the library holds one calculator, one benchmark tool, one maturity assessment and no graders. Against 34 self-assessments and 26 scorecards.
Supply is piled into the two things that run on nothing but writing, which a cheap AI builder now reproduces in an afternoon, and absent from the three that run on data it cannot fake. Every pound of traffic in this category is being pushed at the copyable half: a grader, which needs live crawling; a benchmark, which needs a multi-tenant dataset; and a survey, which needs a dataset you go and generate. AI collapsed authoring. It has not touched data.
The sequence that follows is the highest-value move in the taxonomy and almost nobody runs it: the survey manufactures the dataset, then the benchmark rents that dataset back to individuals indefinitely. Template libraries ship both halves and never connect them.
Where it says to start
Managed IT and accountancy practices come out top, on both opportunity score and the gap between demand and available supply, and they are the two where the underlying evidence graded high confidence rather than medium. The widest gap is also where a pound of spend travels furthest.
Legal services carries the largest gap in the entire set. It is flagged rather than recommended, because zero observed deployments may be a compliance constraint rather than an opening, and that needs a proper review before anyone spends money on it.
Marketing agencies are the one segment the study argues against outright. It is the only negative gap in the 25: more supply than demand, a category that already knows every move you are about to make, and the fastest way to spend a year of budget on leads nobody closes.
The four open questions
Four things the study set out to answer and did not, published here because research that reports only its successes is an advert with a chart on it.
- Installed-base counts for any platform in the category. The obvious source returned a bot wall, and no reliable second source was found.
- Any independent cross-format conversion dataset. Nothing comparing a scorecard against a calculator against a static page, run by anyone with nothing to sell. This is why no conversion-lift figure appears anywhere on this site.
- Deal value and lifetime value by B2B vertical. Available in fragments, nowhere consistently enough to rank on.
- The partner-network size of the largest vendor in the sweep. Its own two published user figures contradict each other, so neither was used.
Two premises that moved underneath it
Both matter to anyone sizing a compliance-driven opportunity, and both invalidate older analysis that is still in circulation.
CSRD was cut back in 2026 to organisations above 1,000 employees and above 450 million euro turnover, in force from 18 March 2026. The high-risk duties in the EU AI Act were deferred to 2 December 2027. A readiness assessment built on either of those in 2025 is now aimed at a much smaller room.
The deadlines that still bite are NIS2, DORA, Cyber Essentials from April 2026, UK MEES in 2028 and 2030, and CMMC, effective 10 November 2025. A readiness assessment is the highest-intent thing in the taxonomy and the shortest-lived, so check the date before you fund one.
How to read it, and how to get the data
Treat every figure as a September 2026 snapshot. The counts are a census of what was publicly visible in that window, not a measure of what agencies build privately for clients, and anything date-sensitive should be re-checked before it moves a budget.
The full dataset behind this, the ranked ICP table, the 40-industry scoring, the format taxonomy and the template census, is available as CSV on request. There is no form on this page and no download gate: ask for it and we will send it.