The State of Inbound 2026

What 10,258 B2B conversion paths actually ask a buyer

Formidable rendered and parsed the inbound conversion path of 10,258 companies on 28–29 August 2026 — the demo form, the contact form, the booking link, the free-trial button — and read every field label, every dropdown option, every required flag and every submit button off the page. This report is what that corpus says. It measures what companies ask. It does not measure what happens next: we never submitted a form, so there is no conversion rate, no response time and no lead-quality data anywhere in this document, and no sentence here should be read as evidence that one design outperforms another.

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1. Method and sampling frame

What the universe is

The universe is 17,286 domains assembled from five named acquisition lists. It is not the internet, not a random sample of B2B, and not a census of anything. Every company in it was selected because a technology detector saw a CRM or marketing-automation product on its domain, or because a VC had it in a portfolio, or because it tripped a visitor-resolution pixel.

Any claim of the form "B2B companies do X" is really "companies that had a CRM tag, a HubSpot tag, a VC on the cap table or an intent hit in July–August 2026 do X." The frame is pre-filtered for companies that already bought sales software. We state it once here and it applies to every number in the report.

One list is a different population altogether. diginius-intent-2026-08 resolves whoever tripped a pixel, and its contents are radio stations, regional news sites, corporate newsrooms and local service businesses — not B2B software. Its conversion profile is visibly a different distribution. It is reported separately wherever it matters and never pooled silently.

How each page was read

Stage one is pure code. A headless browser (Firecrawl) renders the homepage with JavaScript executed, so forms injected at runtime actually appear. A small language model reads the page's link list and picks up to three further pages worth visiting; a deterministic pass overrides one pick if the most prominent call-to-action points elsewhere. Cap: four pages per company. Those pages go through a real HTML parser — every <form>, every input, every label resolved through label[for], a wrapping label, or aria-label; every scheduler and chat widget matched against a fingerprint list. This stage cannot invent anything.

Stage two is a model choosing, never writing. The extracted facts go to alibaba/qwen3.7-flash at temperature 0, which decides which of the extracted forms is the real conversion form and which extracted fields are signal rather than a newsletter box. Its answer passes a validation gate: every label it keeps must appear verbatim in the deterministic extraction, the scheduler must be one actually fingerprinted, the conversion URL must be a page actually fetched. Field objects are copied from the extractor by construction — the model physically cannot rename, retype or fabricate a field. Of 10,258 classified companies, 10,156 (99.0%) were structured within the gate and 102 (1.0%) fell back to deterministic selection.

Measured versus inferred — the line this report holds

Label quality is itself measurable. Across 48,667 field observations, 38,052 (78.2%) came from a real accessible label — label[for] 32,967, wrapping label 3,668, aria-label 1,417. The other 21.8% came from a placeholder (7,061) or a raw name attribute (3,554), which are weaker evidence of what a company means to ask.

The inference is fallible in a known direction. 175 captured "conversion forms" (2.3% of 7,534) contain a password field — those are signup screens, not sales forms. That is a small error rate but a real one, and it inflates the short-form end of the distribution.

The crawl outcome, and the correction that matters

The naive read of the crawl log says a third of the universe is dead. It is not.

Parsing the stored error string on every failed row shows that 5,678 of the 6,189 "unreachable" rows (91.7%) failed with getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND api.firecrawl.dev — our own crawler could not resolve its own API host. Those 5,678 domains were never contacted. They are not dead; they are unattempted, and every one of them falls on 29 August. Zero occur on 28 August.

The correct denominator for any reachability claim is 11,608 attempted, not 17,286.

The real dead-domain rate in this universe is 4.4% (511/11,608), not 35.8%. We flag this prominently because the wrong version is the more quotable one, and because it materially changes the per-list picture: recomputed against domains actually attempted, list survival is 87.4% (multi-CRM), 87.9% (VC portfolio), 95.6% (HubSpot BuiltWith), 70.8% (intent) and 94.3% (hand-triaged) — a real spread, but a fraction of the 51.8%-versus-95.6% gap the raw log appears to show.

The survivorship caveat, stated precisely

Findings here describe 10,258 domains that (1) appeared on a July–August 2026 CRM-install, technographic, VC-portfolio or intent list, (2) were among the 11,608 our crawler actually attempted after a DNS outage silently dropped 5,678 on 29 August, (3) resolved and served a page inside 35 seconds without a bot wall, and (4) exposed at least one conversion path our renderer could see. Each filter selects toward companies that still exist, still pay for sales tooling, and still ship a server-rendered conversion path.

The dropped 5,678 rows are indistinguishable from the survivors on every pre-crawl attribute we can test within the CRM and intent lists. Within the VC-portfolio list they are not: the outage ate the entire final ingest batch, which happens to be the tranche nobody had reviewed. Portfolio-company findings therefore skew toward the older, already-vetted portion of that list.

Two instrument biases that push in our favour, disclosed

Crawl depth predicts the answer. Mean form length rises from 4.59 fields on companies where only the homepage was read (n=284) to 6.58 where all four pages were read (n=5,315). Our field counts are a floor. Separately, the pages-crawled = 2 cell shows 62.4% scheduler presence against a 26.9% baseline — that is the crawler stopping early because it hit a booking page, not a real concentration.

Half the classified set hit the four-page cap (5,315 of 10,258, 51.8%), which means for half the set there may be a better conversion page we never opened.

What this dataset cannot support

• Anything about conversion rate, lead quality, routing or response. postSubmit is unknown for 100% of the 7,577 form-bearing companies. We never submitted a form.
• Any trend. The crawl window is two days. There is no time axis. No sentence in this report says "rising," "falling," or "increasingly."
• Any geographic finding. The country field is 45.9% blank and its encoding is collinear with source list — 'US' (n=3,286) and 'United States' (n=173) are the same country and show 24.0% versus 4.0% scheduler adoption, because all 173 come from one list. Geography here is a source-list cut wearing a hat, and we publish none of it.
• Any ICP-scoped claim beyond n=257. 7,365 of the classified set (71.8%) carry no ICP judgement at all, including all 6,089 companies in the largest list slice. This dataset supports claims about how companies convert. It does not support claims about how our ICP converts.
• A single pooled headline for anything that varies by list — scheduler adoption in particular, which ranges from 3.8% to 59.5% across the five lists.

Where this report references the well-known relationship between form length and conversion rate, that is external context from published marketing research, not a measurement from this crawl, and it is labelled as such every time.

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2. The headline findings

1. The form has not been replaced. 7,577 of 10,258 classified companies (73.9%) put a form on the primary path between a buyer and a conversation. Self-serve signup as the only front door is 419 companies (4.1%) — and that 4.1% is an upper bound.

2. But the forms are not qualifying anybody. Of 7,519 parsed forms, 90 (1.2%) ask about budget or timeline on a strict label match; the looser semantic classifier in §4 finds budget on 147 (2.0%) and timeline on 64 (0.9%). 425 (5.7%) ask company size on the strict match, 546 (7.3%) on the loose one; industry is 369 (4.9%) strict, 510 (6.8%) loose. The median form asks zero questions that would tell you whether the buyer is worth a call. The industry's story about long forms — that sales insists on qualifying — is not what the pages say.

3. The friction number everyone quotes is roughly 50% too big. The median form has 6 fields but only 4 required, and 3,447 of 7,519 forms (45.8%) require three fields or fewer. Quote the total and a prospect who counts the asterisks on their own form will conclude you cannot read a page.

4. The best-resourced marketing teams went the other way. Among the 659 companies running Marketo or Pardot — platforms nobody deploys without a demand-gen team — 349 (53.0%) ask eight or more fields, against 1,847 of 6,859 (26.9%) on HubSpot or hand-rolled forms. Only 22 of 659 (3.3%) ask three fields or fewer. This replicates in all three major source lists.

5. The scheduler brand, not the scheduler, tells you whether there is a sales team. Of 328 companies running ChiliPiper, 222 (67.7%) have a sales leader listed on Apollo. Of 1,937 running Calendly, 339 (17.5%) do — below the 34.6% base rate. Ten Calendly companies out of 1,937 have a double-digit sales bench. Treating "has a scheduler" as one feature destroys the strongest signal in the dataset.

6. Product-led is a layer, not a replacement. 2,611 companies (25.5%) have a self-serve signup path, and 2,192 of them (84.0%) also run a form, a scheduler or a contact page. Companies that add PLG do not lighten the sales side: their demo forms are statistically the same length, still demand a phone number 60.9% of the time, and are more likely to ask company size.

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3. The shape of inbound

The primary conversion mechanism

The conversionKind label is inferred — a model chose which mechanism is primary. The underlying artefacts (form fields, scheduler scripts, signup links) are measured.

The shape is substantially an artefact of sourcing

This is the table that most needs saying out loud, because the one above looks like a fact about B2B until you cut it by list.

Scheduler presence — any booking tool detected anywhere on the path — ranges from 3.8% to 59.5% purely by list:

A "% of B2B now offers instant booking" headline is a number we could set anywhere between those poles by choosing the list. We publish no pooled scheduler-adoption figure. The high end is partly a bundling artefact — HubSpot ships Meetings in the box, and 100 of that list's 912 are literally hubspot-meetings — though only partly: within the HubSpot cohort, Calendly still outnumbers HubSpot Meetings 667 to 100. What the HubSpot list mostly selects for is marketing-stack maturity, and stack maturity is what determines the shape of the front door.

A note on our own labels: self-signup rates and conversion shapes appear to vary sharply by icp_status, and they do not. icp_status is almost perfectly collinear with source list — all 6,089 CRM-pull companies are unreviewed. Holding source constant, verified and unverified companies are indistinguishable (HubSpot cohort: 34.3% versus 36.5% self-signup). That table describes our labelling, not the market, and we do not report it as a finding.

How many routes in?

Three independent, non-exclusive routes derived from the evidence rather than the single primary label: a form (provider detected or ≥1 field read), a scheduler (booking script or embed), a self-serve signup.

Only 543 companies (5.3%) offer all three. Two-fifths of them (229) come from the 1,533-company HubSpot cohort — 14.9% of that list against 3.7% of the CRM pull. The modern multi-path funnel is real, but it is a small minority and it is over-represented in exactly the list you would build if you were sourcing on marketing stack.

Adding live chat as a fourth route (detected on 1,673 companies, 16.3%) moves the picture only slightly: 1,138 companies (11.1%) present none of form, scheduler, signup or chat. Chat is the only route for 148 companies (1.4%).

contact_only and none — 1,296 companies with nowhere to go

These two buckets are 12.6% of the classified set, and they are the most misread rows in the table. They are not "companies with no CTA" — that is a separate crawl outcome. These are companies the crawler mostly read three or more pages of (1,065 of 1,296, 82.2%), with CTAs harvested, and still found nothing to convert into.

Demo-intent CTAs by bucket, among companies where any CTA text was captured:

Of the 541 companies where we found no conversion mechanism, 196 had CTAs captured and 144 of those (73.5%) carry a "Book a Demo," "Request a Demo" or "Contact Sales" button. The button is measurably there; what it opens was not reachable within four pages.

Two readings are live in the same rows and we hold both:

• A share of these are genuinely broken funnels — a company loudly promising a demo whose button leads to no form, no calendar and no signup. That is the most actionable shape in the dataset.
• A share are JavaScript-gated forms our renderer could not see. One large global payroll platform sits in the adjacent no_cta bucket with a title reading "Global Payroll, Compliance, HR Solutions," and it unambiguously has a demo CTA. Our renderer found zero forms on a heavily client-rendered React homepage.
• A share were never trying to convert a B2B buyer at all. The none bucket is 21.8% country-code-TLD domains (118/541) and 4.3% edu/gov/org (23/541), against 8.8% (508/5,787) and 1.1% (62/5,787) for form. (ccTLD here means a two-letter national TLD, excluding .io, .co, .ai, .me and .tv, which are sold generically; counting those as ccTLDs raises both figures to 30.1% and 18.9% and shrinks the gap.) Sampled business summaries include a UK news site, a Spanish hospitality job board, a Pennsylvania school district and a North Georgia electric co-operative — organisations that got into the frame because they had a CRM installed.

Treat "73.5% of none companies advertise a demo they do not deliver" as an upper bound on a real phenomenon, not a clean count.

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4. Form anatomy

This is the material nobody else has: 48,667 field observations read off 7,534 rendered forms. The working set below is the 7,528 forms on companies whose primary conversion kind is form or both, less nine reporting 41–468 fields (page-level parse failures — the worst read an entire multi-page intake wizard as one form), leaving 7,519 forms and 47,700 measured fields. Where a table below is computed on a wider set it says so.

The distribution is tighter than the folklore

Median 6 fields. Interquartile range 4–8. Mean 6.34. Percentiles: p10 = 2, p25 = 4, p50 = 6, p75 = 8, p90 = 10, p95 = 12, p99 = 20.

The fourteen-field monster demo form is real but rare: 501 of 7,519 forms (6.7%) have twelve or more fields. The mass sits at 4–8 fields, where 4,723 forms (62.8%) live.

The 1-field bucket is the noisiest part of the distribution. 617 forms (8.2%) have exactly one field, and 383 of those (62.1%) are a single <input type="email"> — 420 (68.1%) once text inputs labelled "email" are counted too. Some are genuine progressive-capture demo requests; eighteen have the submit label "Subscribe," which means our inference picked a newsletter box. Read the short end with that in mind.

Total fields is the wrong friction number

Nearly half of all forms in this universe require three fields or fewer. This replicates across all four major lists (mean required 3.47–3.98; the share requiring ≤3 runs 44.0%–53.7%). If a report leads with "the median form asks six questions," it is quoting a number the reader can disprove on their own site in ten seconds.

Phone is the field to watch. 4,241 forms (56.4%) ask for a phone number and 2,258 of them (53.2% of askers, 30.0% of all forms) mark it required. Nearly a third of forms in this set will not accept a submission without a phone number — while the requirement rate on phone fields (52.0%) sits well below email's (80.1%), which suggests companies are themselves ambivalent about it.

The free-text box runs the other way: of 3,578 forms with a message field, only 1,267 (35.4%) require it. The one place a prospect could say something genuinely qualifying is optional in two-thirds of forms.

The label corpus: what the questions actually say

Normalised labels (lowercased, punctuation and asterisks stripped), ranked by how many distinct companies ask them. % required is measured off the required attribute.

The first eleven entries in the entire corpus are name, email, phone, company and country. The first thing that is not a piece of contact information is "message," at rank 8.

These are identity forms, not qualification forms

Applying Formidable's classifier to all 47,700 measured labels. The labels are measured; the mapping from "Number of seats" to "company size" is our judgement.

Rolled up:

At the form level, on a stricter label match:

• 90 of 7,519 forms (1.2%) ask about budget or timeline.
• 425 (5.7%) ask company size or headcount; 369 (4.9%) ask industry.
• Median qualification fields per form: 0. Mean 0.39.
• 1,459 forms (19.4%) are nothing but identity fields — no message box, no dropdown, no qualifying question at all.
• 2,789 forms (37.1%) are identity fields plus an optional free-text box, and nothing else.

We sampled the unclassifiable bucket to check it was not hiding qualification. It is not: the top entries are organization, zip code, role, nom, description, prénom, organisation, address, mobile number, nombre, empresa, pays. It is overwhelmingly more identity, in other languages — so the 67.7% identity share is understated and the conclusion is stronger than the table shows.

The prevailing story about B2B demo forms is that they are long because sales insists on qualifying. The data does not support it. The median form in this universe collects who you are and where to reach you, and asks nothing about whether you are a fit.

The modal form is the 1998 contact form

Collapsing each form to its set of semantic categories, 7,519 forms produce 1,301 distinct signatures.

Nine of the top ten shapes are permutations of the same five ingredients.

Two measured details inside "name" and "email": of the 6,349 forms asking a name, 4,097 (64.5%) split it into separate First and Last fields, spending two fields where one would do. And of the 6,787 asking an email, 2,176 (32.1%) demand a "work," "business," "corporate" or "professional" address in the label. The most common act of qualification in the entire corpus is not a dropdown — it is a gate written into an email field's label.

How forms get long, and it is not qualification

Presence of each category by form length:

The accretion order is legible: email → name → free text → company → phone → job title → location → consent and industry. Company size, budget and timeline never take off. Even in the 15–40 field bucket — forms four times the median length — only 14% ask company size, 10% ask budget and 6% ask timeline.

So what is in a twelve-plus field form? Of the 3,007 unclassifiable fields on long forms, 1,789 (59.5%) are checkboxes — measured examples: interest[], services[], area-of-interest[], automationtype[] — and 2,436 of the 3,007 (81.0%) are optional. Long forms are long because of multi-select interest arrays and postal-address blocks.

Note the collapse in the right-hand columns: 55% of 1–2 field forms make everything mandatory, against 4% of 15–40 field forms. Teams that build long forms know they are long and hedge by marking most of it optional — which means those fields deliver neither data nor a clean experience.

Consistent with that, even among the longest forms:

Among companies asking sixteen or more questions, at least 71.1% ask nothing that would qualify the lead. (The 16+ cell is thin at n=190, and its numerator of 55 is carried over from before the nine parse-failure forms were dropped — so 28.9% is a ceiling on the share that do qualify, and 71.1% a floor on the share that do not.)

Dropdowns: what companies try to learn when they bother

6,433 select and radio fields across 3,347 forms carried option lists. Our extractor truncates option lists at 12, and 2,223 of 6,433 fields report exactly 12 — roughly a third of dropdowns are truncated and their true option counts are unknown. Median observed options is 7; read anything at 12 as "12 or more."

There is no standard company-size taxonomy. Across 368 forms the most common bands are 501-1000 (42), 1-10 (35), 11-50 (31), 1000+ (27), 51-200 (26), 51-100 (25), 201-500 (25) — but 1-50, 1-5, 21-50, 25-50, 51-250 and 101-250 all appear. Every one of these 368 companies invented its own segmentation, which means the field is not comparable even between two companies that both ask it.

When companies build a picklist, the modal option is "none of the above." In industry dropdowns (434 forms) the most common option is "Other" at 158 occurrences — ahead of education (89), construction (78), healthcare (65), automotive (64), government (62) and manufacturing (59). Same in job-title dropdowns (263 forms): "Other" (129) leads Director (40), Manager (39) and Student (29). Same in attribution picklists (284 forms): Other (183), then LinkedIn (113), Social media (98), Referral (58).

Timeline questions are so rare (64 forms) that the corpus is almost entirely bespoke — nine forms say simply "Timeline" and the rest are one-offs.

The submit button says nothing

7,059 of 7,519 forms exposed a submit-button label.

The single most common thing a B2B conversion button says is "Submit" — 2,586 sites, 36.6% of every form we could read. Widen the class to include Send, Send message, Continue, Next and OK and the share of buttons that describe a database operation rather than the thing the buyer is about to receive runs to between 49% (3,466 of 7,059, exact labels) and 58% (4,093, any label containing one of those words) depending on where you draw the line. Median submit-label length is one word.

The most expensive real estate on the page — the last thing a hesitating buyer reads before committing — carries the HTML default on more than a third of these sites.

(Page headings tell a similar story — contact us 445, get in touch 176, book a demo 134 — but heading extraction sometimes grabs an unrelated h1 on template-heavy sites, so we report it directionally only.)

The most-written bespoke question is about marketing, not the buyer

The measured long-form questions (real <label> elements, 25–95 characters, containing a "?") that appear on more than one site:

How did you hear about us? (258 sites) · What can we help you with? (20) · What are you interested in? (20) · Anything else we should know? (9) · What do you need help with? (8) · Which best describes you? (7) · What product are you interested in? (6) · What would you like to discuss? (5) · What is your company's annual revenue? (4) · Are you an existing customer? (4) · What challenges are you looking to solve? (3) · Where is your company headquartered? (3) · What are you trying to solve? (3)

The most common question a B2B company writes onto its own form, by a factor of thirteen, is "How did you hear about us?" — an internal attribution question, asked of the prospect, at the moment of highest intent, marked required on 45% of the forms that ask it. At the form level it is more common than company size, industry, budget and timeline (622 forms against 546 / 510 / 147 / 64).

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5. The vendor landscape

Market share on the conversion path

native is a residual bucket, not a vendor. The provider enum is closed at five values, so "native" means not a HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot or Typeform embed — it silently contains Webflow, Gravity Forms, Formstack, Unbounce, Salesforce Web-to-Lead, Zoho and hand-rolled React. Read it as "no recognised marketing-automation embed," never as "built it themselves."

Excluding the BuiltWith list entirely, HubSpot is 1,133 of 8,725 (13.0%) — the list inflates its share by about two percentage points, not by an order of magnitude. Typeform's n=1 is a measurement limit, not a finding: we only recognise a Typeform embed, so a Typeform reached by outbound link lands in native. Do not cite it.

Calendly is not the leader; it is the category. It outnumbers every other booker combined by 2.5 to 1.

All prevalences are lower bounds — a widget that loads lazily, sits behind a consent gate, or uses a CDN we do not fingerprint is invisible to us.

Half the market runs no named vendor at all

5,062 sites expose no recognised marketing-automation form, no recognised booker and no recognised chat widget. Some fraction genuinely runs a vendor we do not fingerprint, so treat 49.3% as an upper bound on "truly unvendored." Even discounting heavily, the modal inbound funnel here is a hand-assembled form on a page, with no routing layer and no way to book. Only 1,796 sites (17.5%) have both a form and a scheduler.

Scheduler choice is determined by form stack, and it inverts

Native-form shops pick Calendly over ChiliPiper 11.8 : 1. HubSpot-form shops pick ChiliPiper over Calendly 1.12 : 1; Marketo shops 1.47 : 1. That reversal is not a BuiltWith artefact — excluding the HubSpot-sourced list entirely, HubSpot-form shops still run 75 ChiliPiper against 52 Calendly.

Read from the vendor's side: 56.3% of all ChiliPiper installs (187/332) sit on a marketing-automation form stack, against a 21.6% base rate — a 2.6× over-index. Cal.com is at 3.1% (4/128), a 6.9× under-index. ChiliPiper is not competing with Calendly for the same buyer; it is a routing layer sold to the team that already owns the form. The behaviour confirms it: 279 of 332 ChiliPiper sites (84.0%) put a form in front of the booker, against 1,255 of 1,964 (63.9%) for Calendly.

How the booker is installed says the same thing. Native shops link out to a Calendly page (32.1% of their installs are a plain href); Marketo and Pardot shops embed the booker inside a page they control (78.6% and 69.0% script embeds, 9.5% links) so they can pass hidden fields to it.

A technographic tag is a claim about a tag, not about a page

1,533 companies were selected because BuiltWith saw HubSpot on the domain. On the actual conversion path:

Nearly half of a list of confirmed HubSpot customers has no HubSpot on the page where the money enters. The tag is on the site; the money page is a native form, a Marketo instance or a Calendly link. Buying a list on "installs X" and pitching against X is a 54% hit rate at best. (Caveat both ways: BuiltWith records may be stale, the tag may live on a subdomain we did not crawl, and our own iframe sentinel proves we sometimes see a HubSpot form we cannot read — so 53.6% is a floor.)

HubSpot does not own its own customers' funnels either. Of 1,555 sites running a HubSpot form, only 83 (5.3%) also run HubSpot Meetings and 26 (1.7%) run form + Meetings + Chat. Among HubSpot-form shops that book meetings at all, 272 of 355 (76.6%) book on somebody else's tool. Running it the other way, 131 of the 313 HubSpot Meetings installs (41.9%) sit on sites with no form at all — it is being adopted as a free Calendly substitute more than as part of a HubSpot funnel.

Your form platform predicts your form length

All counts are visible fields on the rendered primary conversion form, 1–40 fields.

The ladder is monotonic and it replicates in all three major lists (the gap between enterprise marketing automation and everything else runs 20–36 percentage points on the ≥8 measure in every one, though the per-list Marketo-plus-Pardot cells are thin outside the CRM pull — n=73 in the VC-portfolio list and n=37 in the BuiltWith list — and are supporting evidence, not standalone findings).

What the extra fields are matters more than how many there are:

(Denominators differ by row: the native row is all 5,368 companies with a native form, the others are the ≤40-field working set. Every cell moves by less than 0.3 points either way.)

Native forms are conversational; vendor forms are structured. A native form is the most likely to include a free-text box and the least likely to include a dropdown. Marketo inverts that — 85.7% carry a <select> and 68.1% ask for country. The extra Marketo fields are not a longer conversation; they are picklists feeding routing, territory assignment and lead scoring.

Label vocabulary confirms it: the top twenty labels account for 70.4% of Marketo fields and only 45.7% of native fields, which use 9,169 distinct labels across 33,364 fields including a long non-English tail. Marketing-automation forms converge on a shared machine-readable vocabulary; native forms are idiosyncratic.

One instrument artefact, do not cite: only 12.3% of Pardot form fields carry a required attribute in the DOM, against 55.8% native, 78.0% HubSpot and 86.6% Marketo. Pardot validates server-side and does not mark the markup. Pardot's "asks phone" figure is sound; its "requires phone" figure is a measurement floor.

Chat widgets are three different products wearing the same UI

Three clusters:

• Qualified is the enterprise marketing-ops widget. 62.0% of Qualified sites run a recognised MAP form, nearly 3× the 21.6% base rate — 15.3% of Marketo sites and 13.8% of Pardot sites run it, against 1.2% of native sites. Qualified sites also carry the longest forms of any widget cohort (7.27 mean). The AI chat agent is layered on top of the long form, not instead of it.
• Intercom and Crisp are the product-led widgets. 52.3% and 48.3% have self-signup against a 25.5% base — roughly 2× — and they carry the shortest forms (5.34 and 5.00).
• HubSpot Chat is a bundling artefact. 302 of its 675 installs are on HubSpot-form sites.

Qualified's 5.9% scheduler rate is not evidence that its customers cannot book. We cannot see booking that happens inside a chat widget, and routing a live visitor to a rep in-conversation never produces a Calendly or ChiliPiper fingerprint in the markup. The honest statement is: on Qualified sites the visible page offers a long form and nothing else. Drift's 14.8% is directionally the same story.

Finally, 28 of the 695 no-CTA sites had a chat widget and nothing else. For those companies the widget is the funnel.

A measured defect: 334 embeds that never painted

The extractor records hubspotFormDetectedNotRendered when it sees a HubSpot embed script but finds no rendered <form>. 334 sites (3.3%) hit that condition — 285 where another form rendered alongside it (two forms, two destinations, one page) and 49 where there was nothing else, of which 45 have no scheduler fallback either. The four we looked at by hand were an analytics vendor, a manufacturing-software vendor, a compliance vendor and an ESG-reporting vendor, all on a /demo-style path.

What is measured: on 334 domains, an automated visit to the company's own stated demo page produced a HubSpot script tag and no form. What is inferred: that any human ever saw the same thing. Script timing, consent gating, geo-blocking and bot detection all plausibly explain it. The distribution across lists (134 multi-CRM, 101 HubSpot-BuiltWith, 87 portco) is consistent with a real phenomenon rather than one list's quirk.

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6. Product-led versus sales-led

Self-signup is common; self-signup instead of a sales path is rare

9,298 of 10,258 (90.6%) offer at least one route to a human. In this universe the sales-led motion is the near-universal substrate and product-led is a layer added on top of it.

Self-signup is also badly under-counted by the primary label. Read as a secondary route it appears on 23.7% of form companies, 30.1% of both and 28.3% of scheduler — six times the 4.1% you get from the primary column. Roughly a quarter of every form-fronted company in this set is simultaneously running a product-led path; the form is competing with a "start free" button on the same page.

Evidence quality: of the 2,611, 1,458 (55.8%) had a /signup-style URL captured and 287 (11.0%) a free-trial URL — 66.8% anchored to an unambiguous pattern. The remaining 866 rest on the model's read of a less obvious URL and are softer.

The 4.1% "pure PLG" figure is an upper bound, and the error runs one way

Of the 419 companies classified self_signup, 280 had CTAs captured, and 147 of those (52.5%) advertise a demo, a sales conversation or a call on their own homepage. What happened is that the crawler followed the conversion URL to a /sign-up page, found no form fields to parse, and the model labelled the whole company self-signup.

A worked example from the set: one localisation platform is classified self_signup with conversionUrl: /sign-up — and its captured CTA list is three separate "Book a demo" buttons pointing at /book-a-demo/, a page the crawler visited and whose title was "Book a Demo." The demo form did not render for extraction.

The measurement error converts sales-led companies into apparent PLG ones, never the reverse. Any "sales-led is disappearing" claim built from this distribution is inflated by it. (The mirror risk exists — the crawler can miss signup routes too — but a /signup link in a nav bar is a far easier target than a JavaScript-rendered multi-step form, so the errors are not symmetric in magnitude.)

Adding PLG does not lighten the sales side

The naive comparison suggests it does — 6.51 mean fields without self-signup (n=5,624) against 5.84 with (n=1,895). That gap is composition and noise: PLG companies skew toward the both bucket, which has shorter forms regardless, and they carry twice as many 1–2 field email-capture boxes (18.1% against 9.2%) that our inference picked up as "the" form.

Holding conversion kind constant and excluding forms under three fields:

The common-language effect size — the probability a randomly picked sales-led form is longer than a randomly picked PLG-cohort form — is 0.514 for form-only companies, a coin flip. The content is likewise near-identical:

Two things stand out. PLG companies are more likely to ask company size — the one field that exists purely to route a self-serve user toward or away from sales. And 60.9% still demand a phone number on a site where the visitor could have created an account thirty seconds earlier without one.

And they use schedulers more, not less

Form ownership is flat while scheduler ownership is 5.7 points higher. The two-funnel company does not remove the sales path; it adds the lower-friction sales path alongside the form it already had.

Two-thirds of scheduler adopters keep the form

Of the 2,756 companies whose primary conversion kind involves a booking tool, 1,790 (64.9%) also run a form and 966 (35.1%) are booking-only. (2,757 companies carry a scheduler fingerprint; one of them converts primarily through a form.) The modal behaviour when a company adds a scheduler is addition, not substitution.

The one signal that does point toward shorter

Companies offering a scheduler alongside a form run a shorter form, and this holds in every provider and every list:

Both tables count companies with a parsed form of 1–40 fields, split by whether any booking tool was fingerprinted anywhere on the path.

The Marketo and Pardot scheduler cells are n=42 each — thin, and supporting evidence only.

Four of four providers and three of three lists move the same direction. This is correlational and confounded. Apollo finds a marketing leader at 37.3% of form companies (n=5,680) but only 15.0% of scheduler-only companies (n=954) — smaller companies run shorter forms and are likelier to bolt on a calendar. It is not evidence that shortening a form caused anything, and we do not present it as such.

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7. GTM team shape versus stack

Joining apollo_leadership_census (10,083 domains, 98.3% of the classified set and zero rows outside it — it is strictly downstream of a successful crawl and inherits every bias above).

Apollo absence is not organisational absence. has_sales = 0 means Apollo lists no sales leader, and Apollo coverage rises with company size and US-market profile. Read the ordering as the finding, never the absolute levels. Where it matters, figures are repeated under a coverage control — restricted to companies where Apollo lists at least one founder (n=5,621), which at least proves Apollo has the company indexed.

The second survivorship layer: a readable funnel is not a reachable human

36.1% of companies whose conversion form we can read in full have no founder, no marketing lead and no sales lead listed on Apollo. Reading the funnel and reaching the owner of the funnel are two different survival filters, and only 63.9% clear both.

That gap tracks conversion sophistication, which is itself a warning: companies with the weakest inbound machinery are the least visible on Apollo (43.2% for none, against 66.8% for form and 70.1% for self_signup). Any list built as crawled ∧ enriched is doubly skewed toward the well-resourced end — the companies least likely to need a diagnosis.

Stack predicts team, at 2–3× the base rate

Under the coverage control (Apollo lists ≥1 founder, n=5,621) the spread widens rather than collapsing: Marketo 92.4% marketing / 92.7% sales, ChiliPiper 75.2% / 81.1%, Calendly 27.6% / 28.3%, against a controlled base of 48.2% / 50.6%.

And it is not the BuiltWith list leaking. P(marketing leader) computed inside each source:

Marketo lands at 64–80% against a 32–33% base in all three, including the VC-portfolio slice where companies are younger — though the Marketo cells outside the CRM pull are thin (n=56 and n=28) and the n=28 cell should not be quoted on its own. Calendly sits below base in all three.

Two schedulers, opposite signals

This table counts sales leaders Apollo lists with an email, a stricter measure than the persona-present flag used in the table above — which is why ChiliPiper shows 47.0% with none here and 32.3% under the looser flag.

Ten Calendly companies out of 1,937 have a double-digit sales bench. ChiliPiper implies a sales team to route to; Calendly implies there is nobody to route to and the founder takes the meeting. This is mechanically sensible — ChiliPiper is lead routing, only worth buying when there are multiple reps — and it means the scheduler brand on a page is a cheap, purely measured proxy for whether there is a sales team behind the booking.

Consistent with that, scheduler-primary companies are the least likely to have an identifiable sales leader (16.6%, n=954) of any conversion kind. The calendar there is a substitute for a sales team, not a tool of one.

What the form asks predicts team shape better than how long it is

Counting distinct qualification classes asked:

Monotonic to three classes, then it plateaus. "How did you hear about us" is the cleanest pure-marketing artefact in the dataset — it exists only if someone is accountable for attribution, and it lifts P(marketing leader) by 18.2 points.

Raw field count reverses at the top end (8–11 fields: 47.4% marketing, n=1,665; 12+: 37.0%, n=505) because the 12+ bucket is 75.4% native forms — job applications, registration flows, or an inference failure. That reversal is an artefact, not a finding.

Form length is otherwise a weak forward signal: median length moves only from 5 to 7 fields across the entire range of team shapes.

Team shape and stack are correlated, not locked — and the mismatches are the interesting cases

307 companies that Apollo says have a founder, a marketing leader and a sales leader have no detectable form and no detectable scheduler on their conversion path. Another 118 route a full GTM org through a personal-calendar link and a hand-rolled form. That is 425 companies — 20.1% of the fully-staffed cohort — whose org chart has outgrown their inbound plumbing.

Caveat honestly: part of that 20.1% is our renderer failing to see a JavaScript-gated form, not a company failing to build one. The two are indistinguishable from the outside, which is itself the point — if our headless browser cannot find the form, some share of real buyers on slow connections and locked-down browsers cannot either.

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8. What this means

For a company reading this about its own funnel:

1. Count your required fields, not your fields. The median form here shows six and demands four. 45.8% demand three or fewer. If you are benchmarking your form against an industry number, make sure you are comparing the same thing.

2. If your form is long, it is probably long for the wrong reason. In this corpus, long forms are long because of address blocks and multi-select interest checkboxes — 81.0% of which are optional — not because anyone is qualifying. If you are asking sixteen questions, there is at least a 71.1% chance none of them tells you whether the buyer is worth a call.

3. You are probably not qualifying at all. On a strict label match 1.2% of these forms ask budget or timeline and 5.7% ask company size; on the looser semantic classifier used in the category table the same figures are 2.0% and 7.3%. Either way it is a rounding error. The most common bespoke question anyone writes is "How did you hear about us?" — a question that serves your attribution reporting, not the buyer's next step, asked at the moment of highest intent and marked required by 45% of the companies that ask it.

4. Read your own submit button. 2,586 of 7,059 say "Submit." The last thing a hesitating buyer reads before committing describes a database operation.

5. Check whether your CTA actually goes anywhere. 144 of the 196 none-classified companies whose buttons we could read advertise a demo that leads to no form, no calendar and no signup within four pages. A further 334 have a form embed that did not render for an automated visit. Some of these are our renderer's failure; some are real. The only way to know which is to test your own page in a cold browser.

6. If you are buying lists on installed technology, discount them. 46.4% of a list of confirmed HubSpot customers had no HubSpot anywhere on the path a buyer walks. The tag describes what a company bought, not what a prospect touches.

7. The scheduler brand on a page tells you more than the form does. ChiliPiper means there is a bench to route to (67.7% have a sales leader). Calendly usually means there is not (17.5%). If you are building a target list or a routing rule, do not collapse them into "has a scheduler."

What this report deliberately does not say: that shorter forms convert better. We measured what forms ask, never what fraction of visitors completed them. The best-resourced demand-gen teams in this sample — the 659 running Marketo or Pardot, who have the testing budget to know — went the other way: 53.0% of them ask eight or more fields and 3.3% ask three or fewer. A "shorter is better" pitch would send a Marketo customer to check their peer set and find the opposite. The defensible statement is different and stronger: your form collects six contact fields, requires four of them, and asks nothing that would tell you whether this buyer is worth a call — and neither does most of your peer set.

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9. Limitations, and what we would need next

Structural limits of this dataset:

What we would need to answer the next question. The question this dataset raises and cannot answer is whether any of this costs anybody anything. To get there we would need:

1. A second crawl. One more pass at a meaningful interval turns a cross-section into a panel and makes every "is this changing" question answerable. Nothing else in this list matters as much.
2. Submission telemetry. Even a small consented panel of companies willing to share form-completion data would convert every anatomy finding into a performance finding. Absent that, we are describing questions, not outcomes.
3. A rendering fallback for JavaScript-gated forms. The 334 non-rendering embeds, the 541 none rows and part of the 695 no_cta rows are one problem. A second-pass renderer with a longer wait and click-through on modal CTAs would tell us how much of the "broken funnel" segment is real.
4. A size or revenue field. Almost every stack finding here is confounded with company size, and segment and tier are 72.4% and 61.7% empty. Firmographic size would separate "Marketo predicts a marketing team" from "Marketo predicts money."
5. A non-technographic control list. Every finding is scoped to companies that already bought sales software. A list assembled without that filter — even a small one — would tell us how much of the shape is the market and how much is the frame.
6. ICP labels on the CRM pull. 6,089 companies, 59.4% of the classified set, carry no judgement at all. Until they do, this dataset describes how companies convert, not how our buyers convert.

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Appendix: raw distributions

A1. Universe and crawl outcome

A2. Per-list survival, against domains attempted

A3. Conversion kind (classified set)

A4. Route combinations (form / scheduler / self-signup)

A5. Form field count (7,519 forms, 1–40 fields)

A6. Required field count

A7. Field type (all 48,667 measured fields)

A8. Label provenance (48,667 observations)

A9. Providers

A10. Pages crawled

A11. Apollo leadership shape (10,083 joined)

A12. ICP labelling (classified set)

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Source: data/leads.db, tables v2_companies (17,286 rows), apollo_leadership_census (10,083 rows), lead_lists. Crawl 28–29 August 2026. All analysis performed with read-only queries. Percentages rounded to one decimal place; exact n given throughout.