The 2027 Digital Value Creation Baseline
Organic and GTM Performance from 1,407 PE-Backed Companies
The research private equity reads on value creation surveys investors. This study measures the companies: 1,407 PE-backed companies from 184 funds, read from public sources in October 2026: 544 companies that sell a service or a physical product, set against 371 vertical software companies built for their sectors and 492 technology companies. 15% of the service and product companies have a complete path from search to CRM, against 44% and 55%. One in four has the basic systems to trace its pipeline, and a third do not protect their email domain from forgery. We will measure the same companies again in October 2027.
Bain & Company's Global Private Equity Report 2026 puts the bar for a typical deal at around 10% to 12% average annual EBITDA growth, against about 5% in the 2010s, with holds near seven years. Gain's 2026 analysis of 15,502 PE investments attributes 57% of value creation over the last decade to revenue growth, and 75% in 2025. For a company that makes, builds, moves or services things, revenue growth means buyers who do not know it yet: in a new geography, for a new service line, or for an add-on brand.
Measured lever by lever, PE-backed service and product companies trail both technology companies and the software companies built for their own sectors at each step from search to CRM, and on email and transport security. The gap is widest at the homepage, where demand should turn into a recorded lead: 33% offer a primary action, against 76% of vertical software and 79% of technology companies.
The better yardstick sits inside the group. 27% of the service and product companies with the nine practices measured already run 6 or more. Their median organic search value is nearly seven times that of the rest ($33.3K against $4.9K a month), and 61% of them can trace their pipeline, against 11% of the rest.
Company classification by the product or service described on its homepage.
Software built for one industry goes to that industry: healthtech to healthcare; fintech, insurtech, payments and accounting software to financial services; proptech and edtech to real estate and education; construction and energy software to construction, trades and energy. Software and IT sold across industries is technology. A clinic network, a lender or a staffing platform goes to the industry of the service it delivers.
Technology is capped at 35%: 492 of the 613 technology companies measured, kept in proportion to each fund's share. Counting vertical software as technology too, software companies are 61% of the set, so each headline figure is given for the service and product companies on their own, with the two software groups beside them.
In each of the four sectors where both exist, software companies are at least 1.8 times as likely as the service and product companies beside them to have the complete path. In financial services, 49% of software companies have it, against 3 of 48 lenders, insurers, brokers and wealth managers.
Seven of the eight sectors sit between 14% and 21% on the complete path from search to CRM, so the gap is not a feature of one industry, and neither is the fix.
When an assistant names one for its category, it cites the company's own site 55% of the time, against 25% for vertical software and 24% for technology companies, whose answers draw on reviews, analysts and comparison sites.
Among companies one or two practices short of the leaders, the most common gap after booking or chat is a primary action on the homepage: 76% of those running four of the nine lack one, and 59% of those running five.
PE value creation priorities and observed portfolio company practices.
Revenue growth was 75% of PE value creation in 2025 (57% over the decade); deals now need 10-12% EBITDA growth a year.
41% of firms realised below 75% of planned value creation over the last 12 months.
M&A went from the lowest-ranked value creation lever to the top one, yet 25% see results within 12 months; one in three acquirers fully achieve the deal thesis.
80% of firms had cyber disruption in the hold; 26% saw a lower valuation or exit price.
86% of GPs say exit preparation lifted valuation; buyers want customer- and segment-level data.
Other firms' figures are market context, from surveys of investors and deal data. Lever 3 counts sponsors, not companies, and names none.
Branded queries account for half of search traffic to the median service or product company.
Demand that arrives by name grows only as fast as the company's reputation. A new geography, a new service line or an acquired brand has no name for buyers to search yet, and buyers choose early: in a 2025 survey of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, they chose a vendor from their Day One shortlist 95% of the time (6sense, market context). The demand is within reach: the median company ranks 4 to 20 for keywords with 11,650 US searches a month among its top 50.
AI assistants name 44% of service and product companies when a buyer asks for their category, and when they do, they cite the company's own website.
Companies found mostly by name are named 41% of the time, against 51% for those found beyond it, and 29% depend on their own name in both search and AI answers (technology 10%). 4 of 415 block an AI search crawler, so blocking does not explain the gap. For a service or product company, the answer is built from its own pages.
Revenue growth was 75% of PE value creation in 2025, up from 44% in 2019, as multiple expansion fell from 46% to 8%.
Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a search result in 8% of visits, against 15% for those who did not.
GenAI searches are now the starting point for B2B buyers, and the typical decision involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers.
On AI answers that keep people from clicking through: “the websites that make money on ads and conversions and other things ... can no longer do that.”
"15% of PE-backed service and product companies have a complete path from search to CRM, against 44% of the software companies built for their sectors."
61% of B2B buyers prefer to buy without a sales rep. 33% of service and product homepages offer a quote request, booking or order.
Project and service businesses, the largest model in the group (181 companies), offer a primary action, booking or chat 30% of the time, and 2 of 62 construction, trades and energy companies offer booking or chat. The median leader's organic search traffic would cost $33.3K a month to buy as ads, against $4.9K for the rest: about $341K a year of clicks it does not pay for. Buyer preference: Gartner, June 2025 (market context).
Publishing barely changes who finds them in search (52% of recent publishers get most traffic from non-brand searches, against 50% of the rest) and goes with being named by AI assistants more (47% against 41%).
15% of service and product companies have a complete path from search to CRM, against 44% of vertical software and 55% of technology companies.
In Alvarez & Marsal's 2026 survey, 41% of firms realised below 75% of planned value creation over the last 12 months (market context). Here, most companies drop out at the homepage: of those found beyond the name, 42% offer that buyer a way to act. 13% run a form or booking tool with no CRM we can detect, so the lead arrives as an email (technology 1%), and 36% have neither a way to act nor a CRM. HubSpot, then Salesforce, are the most common CRMs.
41% of firms realised below 75% of planned value creation over the last 12 months.
“firms that outperform will be the ones that close the gap between diligence and execution by building repeatable operating mechanisms ...”
“Some $1B-revenue businesses are still bought with no ERP and no CRM.”
On a portfolio company's most critical metric: “they didn't know their turnaround time at the company let alone the branch”
A $100M-$500M company runs as many go-to-market practices as a $10M-$30M one.
The median service or product company runs 4 of 9 practices in the smallest and the largest band, is about as likely to have a CRM (54% against 49%) and less likely to offer a way to act (37% against 49%). Its search footprint is larger; its median practice count is the same. M&A is now the value creation lever PE ranks first and the slowest to pay: 25% see results within 12 months (FTI 2026, market context). The practices have to be set up once, at the platform, before close, and rolled out to each add-on as part of integration.
Counts only; no fund is named. Technology portfolios: 12% without a CRM we can detect, a median of 3 platforms.
M&A went from the lowest-ranked value creation lever in 2025 to the top one in 2026: 24% name it the top value generator, up from 7%. It is also the slowest, with 25% seeing results within 12 months.
“M&A has re-emerged as the leading value driver, rewarding firms that treat integration and execution as a core capability.”
About one in three acquirers fully achieve their deal thesis objectives.
Platforms with more than five add-ons grow at over 18% a year, against 8% without, and poorly executed acquisitions can destroy value.
Platforms closed a fifth, a sixth and a seventh add-on in eight days of October: industrial refrigeration, defense networks and cleanroom distribution.
“Synergies only exist in Excel.” On an investment committee memo for a five-bolt-on buy-and-build plan in industrial services.
A third of service and product companies do not protect their email domain from forgery, twice the technology rate.
Kroll's 2026 survey found that 80% of PE firms had cyber disruption during the hold and 26% saw a lower valuation or exit price; business email compromise cost US victims $3.05B in 2025 (FBI IC3; both market context). Without an enforced DMARC policy, mail servers are not told to reject email forged from the company's domain, such as a fake invoice from its accounts team. Session recording, ad pixels, chat and analytics are the tools wiretap and privacy suits target (Husch Blackwell, November 2025).
Whether a site asks for consent before its pixels load is a question a read of the page's code cannot settle: a re-check found consent banners our detection had missed on about half of the sites it flagged, so this report gives no consent figure. The technology group's wider domain and email exposure is the subject of No. 01.
Business email compromise cost US victims $3.05B in 2025, across 24,768 complaints.
Cyber incidents in the hold cost PE firms $2.1M on average, and 26% reported a lower valuation or exit price.
“let's assume that you will get breached ... The question is how quickly can I find them and how quickly can I eject them?”
A PE-backed healthcare IT platform bought a provider of 24/7 threat detection and response for community hospitals and health systems.
One in four service and product companies has the basic systems to trace where its pipeline comes from.
EY's 2026 exit readiness study: 86% of GPs say exit preparation improved valuations, most when it starts 12 to 24 months out, and buyers want the equity story backed by customer- or segment-level data. More than 8 in 10 PE investors in West Monroe's survey see mature digital at a portfolio company as a value driver at exit (both market context).
In the last 12 to 18 months of the hold, high performers shift to credible upside for the next owner, 51% against 21% (Simon-Kucher). A company whose demand still comes mostly by name, with pages already ranking 4 to 20, has that upside, if its systems can show it.
On how Vista checks a thesis: “What is the renewal rate on customer contracts? ... when customers get a chance to decide whether to renew or not, what are they doing?”
“The best firms that are doing aggressive sourcing origination with a data oriented foundation are starting with global public available data.”
32,000 unsold PE-backed companies, worth $3.8 trillion, are waiting for an exit.
80% of PE fund managers and operating partners hold portfolio companies for five years or longer.
“preparing for the exit from the day that you buy a business.”
“For 15 years, the most reliable value creation lever in private equity was the next sponsor.”
Vertical software companies have higher adoption of go-to-market practices than service and product companies in the same sectors.
371 companies in the study sell software built for one of the traditional sectors. They sell to the same industries as the service and product companies beside them, and run their go-to-market the way technology companies do: a primary action on 76% of homepages and a CRM at 89%, against 79% and 88% for technology.
In each of the four sectors with both, they are at least 1.8 times as likely to have the complete path, and two and a half to nearly four times as likely to have the basic systems to trace pipeline. For an operating partner it answers "our industry is different": the software companies in the same industry already do it.
2 of the 499 service and product companies with the nine practices measured run the full set, and 34% run three or fewer.
Counted, not weighted, so each point can be explained: named by AI; found beyond the name; invests in demand; a primary action; booking or chat; proof; CRM or marketing automation; analytics; published in the last 90 days. Pricing is reported but not scored: a quote-based manufacturer is right not to publish one.
The 27% of service and product companies with 6 or more practices have nearly seven times the organic search value of the rest.
135 of the 499 run 6 or more of the 9 practices. Their median US organic search value is $33.3K a month, against $4.9K for the rest ($47.4K against $6.3K leaving out companies headquartered abroad). They are in each sector: 40% of professional services companies, 39% of logistics, distribution and business services, 31% of healthcare and 11% of manufacturers. These are associations: the study does not show which practice drives the difference.
Missing homepage conversion practices among companies with four or five practices.
For companies one or two practices short of the leaders, the practice missing most often is the one an operating partner would add next. Booking or chat is missing from 96% or more of them, and many quote-led businesses have little use for it. After it, the most common gap is the cheapest to close: a primary action on the homepage, in the buyer's own words.
| Missing practice | With 4 of 9 (n=87) | With 5 of 9 (n=105) |
|---|---|---|
| Booking or chat | 97% | 96% |
| A primary action on the homepage | 76% | 59% |
| Invests in search or social demand | 62% | 50% |
| Proof on the homepage | 60% | 45% |
| Named by an AI assistant | 56% | 50% |
| CRM or marketing automation | 51% | 30% |
| Web analytics | 6% | 3% |
Healthcare services have the highest search-to-CRM completion rate; manufacturers have the lowest share of companies with six or more practices.
| Service and product companies | Companies | Complete path | Brand share | Organic value | Named by AI | Primary action | CRM | Analytics, CRM, action | 6+ practices |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 89 | 21% | 39% | $13.7K | 49% | 38% | 58% | 29% | 31% |
| Multi-location and consumer services | 68 | 17% | 46% | $11.3K | 43% | 38% | 44% | 24% | 23% |
| Real estate, hospitality and education | 32 | 16% | 27% | $10.3K | 48% | 34% | 47% | 22% | 9 of 30 |
| Construction, trades and energy | 62 | 15% | 59% | $3.8K | 44% | 37% | 53% | 23% | 19% |
| Professional services | 96 | 15% | 46% | $10.1K | 40% | 30% | 63% | 27% | 40% |
| Manufacturing | 92 | 15% | 50% | $4.1K | 44% | 25% | 48% | 17% | 11% |
| Logistics, distribution and business services | 53 | 14% | 57% | $11.5K | 43% | 32% | 51% | 23% | 39% |
| Financial services | 52 | 3 of 48 | 61% | $8.3K | 49% | 27% | 40% | 19% | 26% |
| Vertical software | 371 | 44% | 40% | $59.0K | 62% | 76% | 89% | 74% | 70% |
| Technology | 492 | 55% | 26% | $135K | 70% | 79% | 88% | 72% | 80% |
Medians for brand share and organic search value. Manufacturing shows the fewest homepage actions and systems to trace pipeline; professional services run a CRM most often. Financial services: lenders, insurers, brokers and wealth managers. Sector groups are small; each is read with its n.
Relationship of observed measures to PE value creation priorities and study limitations.
| What we measured | How it works | The lever other research ties it to |
|---|---|---|
| Found beyond the name | Buyers in a new market, service line or add-on brand can find the company before they know it | Revenue growth (Bain; Gain) |
| A primary action, booking or chat | A visitor becomes a lead without waiting for a rep, as 61% of B2B buyers prefer | Revenue growth, sales efficiency (Gartner; L.E.K.) |
| A CRM behind the website | Each lead is recorded, attributed and followed up | Executing the plan (A&M); evidence at exit (EY) |
| Organic search value | Clicks the company does not pay for | Acquisition cost within SG&A (L.E.K.) |
| The company's own site, cited by AI assistants | The answer a buyer gets to a category question is built from pages the company controls | Revenue growth; exit readiness (EY; FTI) |
| One CRM across a sponsor's companies | Add-ons join one system instead of starting over | Buy-and-build integration (L.E.K.; Simon-Kucher; Bain) |
| DMARC enforced, HSTS, governed tracking | Fewer ways to lose money or value during the hold | Risk (Kroll; FBI IC3) |
We measure the first column. Other firms' research places the value in the third; this study does not estimate it.
First-100-day priorities for service and product portfolio companies and the 2027 follow-up measurement.
This is one measurement, so it gives no forecast: it gives a reference point. We will re-measure the same companies in October 2027 and report what changed, and whether companies that added practices gained non-brand search demand.
- 01Measure where demand comes from.
Split brand from non-brand search demand, and ask the assistants the buyer's category question. Both take days and give the board a baseline to track through the hold.
- 02Give each landing page a primary action.
Request a quote, get an estimate, schedule a site visit, book service: the buyer's verbs. It is the most common missing practice among companies one or two short of the leaders. Attribute phone calls; in phone-led sectors the phone is the pipeline.
- 03Connect each lead source to one CRM before buying more traffic.
33% of the service and product companies investing in demand have no CRM we can detect, so the return on that spend cannot be measured.
- 04Close the gaps a buyer can read from outside.
Move DMARC to enforcement and send HSTS: configuration work that a third of the group has not done. Review session recording and tracking with counsel.
- 05Improve the pages that already rank, and the pages AI assistants cite.
The median company ranks 4 to 20 for keywords with 11,650 US searches a month. When assistants name a service or product company, they cite its own website 55% of the time.
- 06For buy-and-build, set these practices up at the platform.
Larger companies in the set do not run more of them, and 72 of 73 sponsors own a company with no CRM we can detect. Define the actions, the CRM and the measurement once, and roll them out to each add-on.
1,407 companies compared, from a universe of 2,262 (1,969 scored). Each is listed by a named buyout or growth-equity fund, on the record or on the fund's own portfolio page, and is compared only when the website we measured can be tied to the name the fund lists. A classifier read each homepage and placed the company in one of eight sectors or technology, by what it sells; a hand check of 36 agreed with 32. Technology is capped at 35% (492 of 613 measured). 184 funds, including Thoma Bravo, Vista Equity Partners, H.I.G. Capital, Charlesbank Capital Partners and Kohlberg & Company. No fund-level figure is reported.
Six layers per company, October 2026, from public sources only: US search demand and brand share; one AI assistant question per company; what the homepage sells and how, with calls to action and proof read from the full homepage (79% of sites; the first 4,000 characters for the rest); the go-to-market stack, from the homepage, the first contact or quote page, tag containers and DNS; the DMARC policy and security headers; and content freshness. A brand search contains the company's name or domain. Each figure carries the number of companies it was measured on.
Each headline figure was re-derived from raw rows; DMARC and HSTS were confirmed by a second live read; a website matched to a fund's listing counts only when its domain spells or abbreviates the name, which sets aside some right companies with the wrong ones; a consent measure was dropped when a re-check found banners the detection had missed. Level A evidence: reproducible public data with a named source, date and method; other firms' figures are market context. An ad tag shows tracking, not spend; AI visibility is one question per company; CRM detection sees systems connected to the website; at least 101 service and product companies are headquartered abroad, which US search data understates. Relationships are associations, not causes. The evidence-from-the-market cards are market context: other research, podcasts, the deal wire and public posts, quoted verbatim against the transcript or post and linked.
- Bain & Company, Global Private Equity Report 2026 and 2024
- Gain, The Private Equity Value Creation Report 2026
- Alvarez & Marsal, North America Value Creation Report 2026
- FTI Consulting, Private Equity Value Creation Index 2025 and 2026
- L.E.K. Consulting, Private Equity Pulse 2026
- Simon-Kucher, Commercial value creation in industrials and business services 2025
- EY, Global PE Exit Readiness Study 2026
- Kroll, Cyber Risk at Scale, February 2026
- BDO, 2026 Private Equity Survey
- West Monroe, Digital at the Speed of Private Equity
- AlixPartners, Private Equity Leadership Survey 2026
- PwC, 2026 M&A Integration Survey; US Deals midyear outlook 2025
- KPMG, Technology Survey 2026
- Gartner, B2B buying survey, June 2025
- 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report
- Husch Blackwell, website tracking litigation update, November 2025
- FBI IC3, 2025 Internet Crime Report
- Pew Research Center, AI summaries and clicks, July 2025
- Forrester, The State of Business Buying, 2026
Research authorship and professional background.
Research and analysis by the Growth Shuttle × DevriX research program, with Mario Peshev as named operator. Mario is the founder of DevriX, a 40-person PE-focused RevOps consultancy building technology, data, and revenue systems, and of Growth Shuttle, his value-creation advisory practice for private equity and mid-market operators. Six companies founded, two exited, more than 500 advised since 2010, 40+ acquisitions. Advisor to VMware, SAP, CERN, and Saudi Aramco. Featured in Forbes, BBC, Inc, and Entrepreneur. 30,000 operators and investors read the weekly briefing.
Also in the seriesNo. 01: The PE Portfolio Cyber & Domain Exposure Deep-Dive