In April 2021, Gartner permanently cancelled the requirement for vendor-supplied customer references in its Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities research. That decision started a series of changes that fundamentally altered the competitive dynamics of analyst relations.
The old model was a “push” system: vendors submitted curated lists of satisfied customers, and analysts interviewed them. The new model is a “pull” system: Gartner extracts interest signals from its own internal data and from the broader market. The metric at the centre of this shift is the Customer Interest Indicator (CII)—a composite, algorithmic score that quantifies a vendor’s relative market gravity across multiple data streams.
During the 2023 and 2024 evaluation cycles, the CII became the explicit, mandatory gatekeeper for inclusion in several high-profile Magic Quadrants, from Cloud Database Management Systems to Observability Platforms and Data & Analytics Governance. In these markets, vendors that fall below a CII threshold—typically the top 16 to 25 organisations—are excluded from the graphic entirely. No amount of product innovation or visionary strategy will compensate.
For vendors on the wrong side of that line, this is not a permanent verdict. The CII is a composite metric, and composite metrics have levers. The question is which levers to pull.
What Feeds the Algorithm
The CII aggregates signals over a rolling 12–18 month window from two categories. Internal signals draw from Gartner’s own client interactions: the volume and frequency of analyst inquiries where a vendor is discussed, and client search behaviour on Gartner’s proprietary portal. These are high-intent data points—paying Gartner clients actively researching procurement decisions. External signals capture broader market presence: Peer Insights review volume and diversity, competitor mentions in reviews, job listings requiring vendor-specific skills, public search trends, and social media engagement.
The architectural principle is straightforward: the CII is designed to resist single-channel manipulation. You cannot brief your way to a higher score. You cannot buy your way there through advertising. You need sustained, multi-source interest—and that requires orchestration across the organisation.
Four Levers for Excluded Vendors
1. Turn Your Customers into Inquiry Drivers
Client inquiry volume is the most heavily weighted internal signal. When a Gartner client calls an analyst to discuss your solution, that creates a data point qualitatively different from any briefing you could deliver yourself. This is earned interest, and the algorithm weights it accordingly.
The practical task is identifying customers who hold active Gartner inquiry seats and encouraging them to share their implementation experiences organically. A customer who contacts their Gartner analyst to say “We just completed a major deployment with Vendor X—here are the results” feeds the internal signal pipeline directly. Pair this with a regular briefing cadence of three to four analyst interactions per year, building an iterative narrative rather than repeating product specifications. As the Analyst Observatory’s research consistently shows, continuous storytelling builds coherent analyst narratives that both human relationships and algorithmic systems favour over fragmented coverage.
Events such as the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo serve as interest accelerators. These are where many clients begin their research, generating immediate spikes in search and inquiry volume. Securing a 1:1 analyst meeting at these events allows you to deliver a strategic narrative that the analyst will then reference in subsequent client conversations.
2. Optimise Competitor Mentions on Peer Insights
Most vendors misunderstand Peer Insights’ role in the CII. They assume high star ratings automatically translate to CII improvement. The algorithm is more nuanced.
The CII values diversity and competitive context over raw scores. A vendor with 500 reviews from a single industry in one region may generate a lower interest signal than one with 100 reviews spread across multiple verticals and geographies. This “Review Market Coverage” factor captures whether interest is a localised phenomenon or a global trend.
The less obvious but more actionable lever is the “competitors considered” field. When a customer reviewing Vendor A names your firm as a competitor they evaluated, that creates a signal of market consideration—proof that you are part of real-world procurement conversations. AR teams should encourage customers who participated in competitive evaluations to note this in their reviews, regardless of outcome. And the Peer Insights strategy should be targeted: if coverage is strong in North America but weak in Europe, prioritise European customer submissions. The goal is coverage breadth as much as review volume.
3. Standardise Your Visible Market Traction
Gartner’s web-crawling tools monitor two particularly actionable external data streams: the labour market and public search behaviour.
Job listings that specify experience with your product as a required skill serve as a proxy for installed base maturity. Coordinate with your HR team—and with the HR departments of your customers and partners—to standardise product naming in job descriptions. A posting for “Senior Cloud Engineer with experience in [Product Name]” generates an indexable data point. Inconsistent naming and generic descriptions dilute this signal. The marginal cost is negligible; the cumulative effect can be substantial.
Public content and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) feed the CII’s awareness metrics. Marketing teams should align content with the terminology Gartner analysts are using to define the market. If Gartner is publishing on “Active Metadata Management” or “Agentic Governance,” your blogs and product pages should build around those terms. As generative AI increasingly mediates how IT leaders research vendors, structuring content for AI crawlability becomes a parallel priority.
4. Target Honorary Mentions as a Stepping Stone
For vendors that cannot yet reach the inclusion threshold, an “Honorary Mention” or “Cool Vendor” designation is not a consolation prize—it is a strategic foothold. When a Gartner client reads the MQ report and encounters your name, that name enters their consideration set. If they then search for you on Gartner.com or raise your name in an inquiry, those actions feed directly into the CII for the next cycle. The mention itself becomes a catalyst for the interest signals the algorithm requires.
Securing this status means presenting a distinctive point of view or a differentiated technical roadmap. Study the most recent Hype Cycle and Planning Guide publications for your market. Align your messaging with Gartner’s published strategic planning assumptions—AI readiness, composable architecture, platform governance—to increase the probability that an analyst flags you for mention.
The Orchestration Imperative
The common thread across all four levers is that CII improvement cannot be achieved by the AR function alone. The CII is, by design, a multi-source metric. Effective improvement demands coordination between analyst relations (briefing cadence and narrative), customer success (client advocacy and Peer Insights mobilisation), marketing (content alignment and SEO/AEO), HR (job listing standardisation), and product management (roadmap alignment with market trends).
The timeline is realistic but not instant. The CII operates on a rolling 12–18 month data window, so actions taken today will take at least one full evaluation cycle to register. Plan on a two-cycle horizon: the first to establish baseline signals, the second to demonstrate sustained momentum.
The CII is a relative ranking, not an absolute score. You do not need to match the hyperscalers’ market gravity. You need to generate more interest than the vendor currently holding the last qualifying position in your target market. This is an exercise in targeted competitive displacement—and that is a problem analyst relations teams are built to solve.
