Hello marketers,

Getting tactical today.

Recently, we asked thirteen climate tech marketers where they land on what seemed like one of the biggest B2B marketing questions of 2025:

To gate, or not to gate?

We didn’t get a straight answer.

(Quick note — if this newsletter looks different to normal, it’s because we’ve recently migrated from Substack to Beehiv.)

Despite many voices on LinkedIn claiming that ‘gating is dead’, we haven’t spoken to a single marketer who claimed to be no longer gating anything. That said, things are definitely changing.

Rather than committing fully to gated or ungated strategies, many climate tech marketers are changing what they gate and how frequently they gate. All of this sits within a broader push to target more qualified leads in smaller volumes, and the abilities of various visitor intelligence platforms and analytics tools to share information about prospects before they’ve even handed over an email address.

In practice, this means gating less frequently, and being far more deliberate about it.

Most teams we spoke to are reserving gating for their most valuable, highly specialized assets (particularly those with original data or research) and being careful that the value exchange feels fair when someone does hand over their email.

This has always been the driving philosophy behind gated assets — give something worthy of trading an email for. But as research becomes easier to access and AI gets increasingly adept at delivering credible answers on demand, gated content has to clear a much higher bar to justify the exchange.

Some marketers see gating as a function of timing. Alexa Schirtzinger at Watershed, for example, described experimenting with an initial 30-day gated period before publishing the full content publicly, allowing it to be indexed more widely later with the intention of showing up in AI searches and summaries.

This approach also creates room for more creative, interactive microsites, which we’re seeing more teams experiment with as a way to make high-value content feel distinctive.

There’s also no need to treat gating and un-gating as an either-or decision. Teams can publish the content openly in a web format to support indexing and AI crawling, while still offering a downloadable PDF for readers who appreciate the convenience.

Others, including us at The Climate Hub, see gating as a function of format. A big part of the value of a gated asset is the PDF itself: well designed, easy to share internally, and easy to read offline without distraction. Many buyers are happy to exchange an email address for that convenience.

But this doesn’t mean the ideas stay locked away. We advocate for building hub-and-spoke content campaigns around gated assets, which, in practice, means dividing up your lead magnet into a number of shorter-form blog articles and social posts.

The end result is that most of what’s inside your gated asset is public knowledge — it exists on your website, but in a fragmented way that doesn’t offer quite the same experience as downloading a nice new PDF.

(I’m also of the skeptical view that much of what we as marketers put out in reports and guides may not actually get read. Instead, many people who download these assets will forward them on to team members, a seemingly selfless act that has the benefit of making the person appear well-read and up with the latest market information. Doesn’t mean these assets are not worth doing — quite the opposite. But it means the trusty old PDF format still has value, and that longer pieces do not necessarily make better marketing assets.)

Overall, we encourage marketers to experiment with different approaches to gating. It’s encouraging to see a move away from overly cagey, transactional tactics and toward providing real value earlier in the buyer journey. We don’t want marketers to think about gating as a way to protect information. It’s simply a way to offer prospects good information in a more convenient, shareable, or premium-feeling format.

This opens up a practical opportunity to rethink what gets gated. Rather than locking away broad thought leadership or educational content, many teams are finding success by gating bottom-of-funnel assets that are tightly aligned with the product itself. Demos, walkthroughs, explainers, and applied use cases performed strongly in 2025, and are set to play an even bigger role in 2026.

Used this way, gating becomes not a way to collect as many emails as possible — that’s so 2024, am I right? — but a way to collect as few emails as possible. Highly intentional gating should leave your sales pipeline a little emptier, maybe, but result in shorter sales cycles and easier, more productive conversations.

Perhaps, in 2026, gating is not a hack for filling sales pipelines but a filter for thinning them out (in a good way).

📚 Book: Everyone Who is Gone is Here, by Jonathan Blitzer
This book has been on my radar since it came out a couple of years ago, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it until Trump decided to make Venezuela his new pet project. I heard Blitzer on Ezra Klein’s podcast (no surprises there) and then immediately bought the book. Wow, what a ride — Blitzer’s reporting is nothing short of mind-blowing, and these stories are as heroic as they are haunting. I know I’m dreaming here, but I wish the people at the MAGA rallies and March for Australia events would read this book. I wish these stories would reach further than they do.

🎙️Podcast: The healthiest president of all time (Today Explained)
I know we’re all sick of Trump news (see what I did there) — either that or compulsively addicted to it — but this podcast was absolutely fascinating. You learn as much about the President’s health as the journalist featured on the show did when he was invited to the White House for his article on the topic. Meaning: you will learn nothing about the President’s health. However, the way key White House personnel talk about the President’s health is ultimately what is most revealing about this episode.