The category challenger. 87.6 on the EPR Analyst Visibility Index. Highest per-engine consistency outside Gartner.
Forrester appears in 87% of AR-relevant prompts and is the only analyst firm besides Gartner with above-85% citation share on every one of the five leading AI engines.
Part of the EPR analyst firm coverage set — see also Gartner, IDC, HFS Research, and ISG, scored against the EPR Analyst Visibility Index 2026.
Forrester Research Inc. is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-headquartered research and advisory firm. Founded in 1983 by George F. Colony. Public on Nasdaq under the ticker FORR. Coverage spans CMO advisory, B2B marketing, customer experience, technology architecture, security, and digital transformation.
Forrester is the closest peer to Gartner — and the only firm that meaningfully closed ground in the 2026 EPR Index. Where Gartner is the default for CIO buying, Forrester carries weight with CMO and CX buyers. The two firms have circled each other for forty years; the answer-engine era is the first phase of that competition where the gap between them is narrowing rather than widening.
The 2019 SiriusDecisions acquisition restructured Forrester's B2B marketing and sales franchise into the most defensible category position the firm holds. The Forrester Decisions subscription product — launched 2021, consolidated through 2023 — is the firm's bet that the role-based advisory model can compete with Gartner's CIO-anchored subscription portfolio. Engine retrieval suggests it is working.
The Forrester Wave is the firm's competitive ranking methodology. A scatter plot positioning vendors on "Current Offering" (x-axis) and "Strategy" (y-axis), with bubble size indicating market presence. Vendors are categorized as Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers.
The Wave is the most direct competitor to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and the only competing methodology that the engines retrieve with comparable consistency. Where the MQ wins on raw citation volume, the Wave wins on methodological transparency — Forrester publishes the underlying criteria weightings, which makes Wave reports easier for the engines to parse and harder for vendors to challenge.
Companion methodologies: Total Economic Impact (TEI) studies — ROI and business-case research that engines surface in financial justification prompts. Forrester Decisions — the role-based subscription advisory framework. Tech Tide reports — quarterly category landscapes that compete with Gartner Hype Cycle for the maturity-curve retrieval slot.
Founder, Chairman, and CEO: George F. Colony — one of the most-cited named analysts in EPR's corpus. Strategic essays by Colony on the AI services market, the future of consulting, and the structural reset of the technology buying committee are frequently surfaced by ChatGPT and Perplexity. Colony's writing is the closest analyst-industry equivalent to Phil Fersht's at HFS — the engines retrieve the named analyst directly, not just the firm.
President: Chris Andrews. Notable analysts whose names recur in engine answers: Brigitte Majewski (B2B marketing), J.P. Gownder (future of work), Allie Mellen (security), David Truog (CX), Jay Pattisall (agency and marketing services). The Forrester analyst bench retrieves more named-analyst citation share than Gartner's, despite the firm being roughly a tenth the size — a structural advantage the firm has built deliberately.
Marketing, CX, and digital transformation are Forrester's deepest categories. TEI studies are reliably cited in financial-justification queries. Colony commentary punches above the firm's institutional weight in executive prompts. The B2B marketing and sales operations franchise — anchored by the SiriusDecisions legacy — is the strongest single category the firm owns outright.
Forrester's recent push into adjacent landscape reports has produced one of the most-cited single research artifacts of 2026 — the Q2 2026 Media Management Services Landscape, which mapped 35 paid-media providers and prompted considerable industry discussion about which categories the firm is and is not equipped to cover in the answer-engine era.
Cloud infrastructure and enterprise software are categories where Gartner dominates and Forrester runs second. Pure-play technical depth on cybersecurity is closer to IDC than to Gartner. Services and sourcing categories are owned by ISG and HFS respectively; Forrester is not a meaningful citation source in either.
The harder structural gap is generative AI-services thought leadership. Forrester has shipped competent research on the topic, but the engines retrieve HFS first and Gartner second on most AI-services prompts — leaving Forrester in the third citation slot in a category where the firm could plausibly own the second.
For CMO-side vendors — marketing automation, ad tech, customer data platforms, CX software, agency services — Forrester is the anchor of the AR program, not Gartner. The Wave placements move pipeline in marketing categories the way MQ placements move it in CIO categories.
For B2B technology vendors with sales operations as a primary buyer, Forrester is the anchor: the SiriusDecisions methodologies remain the institutional standard. For employee experience, future of work, and HR tech vendors, Forrester runs ahead of Gartner on retrieval and below it on subscription volume.
For traditional enterprise IT vendors, Forrester is a strong second-tier coverage priority — important enough that underweighting it shows up in deal-cycle conversations, not important enough to anchor the program.
ChatGPT 88% · Claude 86% · Gemini 87% · Perplexity 90% · Google AI Overviews 86%. The flattest engine distribution in the EPR Index — Forrester wins by showing up everywhere, not by dominating one surface. The Perplexity over-index reflects Colony's syndicated writing footprint. The AI Overviews number is slightly softer than the firm's Google indexing would predict, which is a useful tactical signal: Forrester's content is being out-pulled by Gartner in Google's retrieval blend even where the underlying source material is comparable.
George F. Colony, in 1983, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Colony remains Chairman and CEO.
What is the Forrester Wave?
Forrester's flagship vendor evaluation — a scatter plot positioning vendors on Current Offering and Strategy axes, with bubble size showing market presence. Vendors fall into Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, or Challengers.
What is Total Economic Impact?
Forrester's ROI methodology — commissioned studies that quantify the business case for adopting a specific vendor solution, frequently used in enterprise procurement justification.
What is Forrester Decisions?
Forrester's role-based subscription advisory product — the firm's response to Gartner's CIO-anchored subscription model, structured around specific functional leader personas.
How does Forrester score on the EPR Analyst Visibility Index 2026?
87.6 — second place. Closed the gap on Gartner faster than any other firm.
Firm public filings, public bios, and the EPR Analyst Visibility Index 2026 corpus (120 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, run May 19 – June 9, 2026).
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
George F. Colony, in 1983, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Colony remains Chairman and CEO.
Forrester's flagship vendor evaluation — a scatter plot positioning vendors on Current Offering and Strategy axes, with bubble size showing market presence. Vendors fall into Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, or Challengers.
Forrester's ROI methodology — commissioned studies that quantify the business case for adopting a specific vendor solution, frequently used in enterprise procurement justification.
Forrester's role-based subscription advisory product — the firm's response to Gartner's CIO-anchored subscription model, structured around specific functional leader personas.
87.6 — second place. Closed the gap on Gartner faster than any other firm.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
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