Ungate the Argument. Gate the Utility.

To gate or not to gate... that is the question.

There’s a question that comes up in every B2B content strategy meeting: should we gate this?

It’s a fair starting point. But the better discussion to be had is deciding which parts of a piece should be freely available, and which parts are actually valuable enough that someone would trade their email for them.

Sometimes the gated content fails that test. The form itself isn’t the problem; the problem is what marketers keep putting behind it. Gate the tool, not the framework. Gate the deeper benchmarks (if you must), not the headline findings. Gate the template, the calculator, the implementation kit — the thing that helps someone do the work — and let your actual ideas be read and crawled by the internet. This is what I break down in today’s episode of the Zero Click Marketing podcast.

A form’s friction is sometimes fair. If I’m registering for a live session with someone whose time is worth my attention, take my email. If I’m downloading a template that will save me three hours or accessing a real benchmark, fair trade. But if I’m trading my email for a 9-page PDF that tells me to “define my goals, know my audience, and measure my results” — I’m not your lead. I’m a hostage.

This is the bargain that broke. The original deal — give us your email, get something genuinely useful — got stretched into something worse, where buyers were asked to pay for information they could find faster elsewhere. It worked for a while because there wasn’t much elsewhere. Now there is. There’s more content on the internet today than there ever was before, and a lot of it is free (as in, no email trade required). AI search, Reddit, YouTube, podcasts, private communities, and your competitor’s ungated blog post are all sitting between your form and a buyer’s curiosity, and they’re winning that race more often than not.

That changes the job of content. Your best ideas need to be findable. They need to be quotable. They need to show up in the public record around your category — in AI answers, in search results, in the Slack channels where buyers actually decide what they think. If your sharpest argument is hidden behind a form, you’ve protected the asset and weakened its reach at the same time.

You got the email, but did you earn the memory? You got the download, but did you actually change how the buyer thinks? You got the MQL, but did you create demand, or just count it?

Because a form fill is not demand generation. It’s a countable event that may or may not represent intent. Sometimes the person filling it out wants to talk to sales. Sometimes they want the template. Sometimes they’re a competitor snooping around. Sometimes they’re racing against the clock to complete a slide deck, and they just need one stat that helps them make their case.

But we persist anyway with our gated content because downloads, registrations, and cost-per-lead fit into dashboards. Influence doesn’t; it’s mostly invisible. But now, when buyers form opinions long before they fill out a form, influence is what actually matters. It’s someone citing your framework in a meeting three weeks after they read it. It’s your name showing up in an AI answer because the model has seen your ideas most often. It’s the buyer arriving on the sales call already warmed up because your thinking was doing the work before your attribution software could see it.

Before gating the next ebook or “toolkit,” try a better set of questions. Would a smart buyer with options find this gate annoying, or fair? Is the asset actually valuable enough to survive in a world where AI, Reddit, and your competitors will all happily answer the same question for free? And — the one that stings — are we gating this because it serves the buyer, or because we need something countable for the report?

Ungate the argument. Gate the utility. Let your best thinking travel. Then, when you do put something behind a form, make sure it’s worth the email.

Much more over the podcast.

Petits Fours

Four delicious considerations because this newsletter is, after all, called the “Menu.”

Aleyda Solis and the Finchling team launched Trending PR Campaigns: This is a free resource that shows the PR campaigns earning the most media coverage right now, updated daily, ranked by coverage, and browsable by industry. Finchling also explains why each campaign gained traction and what marketers can learn from it, which is especially useful if your current PR brainstorm process is “stare at a calendar and hope a relevant but admittedly obscure awareness day appears.”

Lily Ray built an LLM Content Visibility Scanner: This free tool helps you catch obvious visibility issues, showing what AI crawlers can actually see when they fetch your page’s raw HTML. If your important content depends on JavaScript to render, some LLM crawlers may not see it at all.

HubSpot has an AEO Grader: The tool gives you a one-time diagnostic of how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini represent your brand, including sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and competitive positioning. I’d treat any score like this as a starting point; it’s a quick way to see what answer engines think they know about you.

Have you pre-ordered Zero Click Marketing yet? I’m hearing rumors. Alarming ones. Anyway, pre-ordering directly through our publisher gets you the bonuses: SparkToro credit, an Alertmouse discount, and a seat at Zero Click Summer School. If you’re outside the U.S., international shipping is… rude. So if you want the bonuses without the shipping costs, grab the audiobook + ebook bundle instead. We’ll likely open pre-orders through Amazon, Kobo, and other retailers at the end of summer, but the bonuses are tied to publisher pre-orders.