The Top Marketing Trends and Technologies for 2026: Marketing’s Age of AI Has Arrived, Now Comes the Hard Part
Three months into 2026, the verdict is in: Artificial intelligence is no longer a pilot program. It’s become a critical era. Marketing teams that have spent the past few years experimenting with generative AI are now being asked to restructure their workflows, demonstrate real ROI, and defend their strategies based on measurable and meaningful results.
It’s a shift that is real, calculable, and accelerating. AI is certainly top of mind these days and prevalent in organizations of all types and sizes. It’s a factor that is embedded in virtually every trend that digital marketing experts have highlighted this year, heavily impacting both content creation and search strategies.
Marketers are scrambling to keep up with the frenzied pace of adoption and new developments, eager to capitalize on the potential of AI while taking steps to avoid the possibility of negative brand impact.
Their anecdotal insights are backed up by real research. For example, HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2026 Report paints a potentially sobering picture. More than half of respondents—58 percent—say that their search volume is down but their searches have higher intent, meaning they are further along in their buyer journeys. Pew Research also indicates that the links in Google’s new AI summary results now appearing at the top of most search results are clicked less than half as often as traditional links.
How are marketers reacting to these impacts? A number of trends on this front are emerging right now and will start to alter the marketing landscape this year.
Trend 1: AI Is Bringing Both Rewards and Potential Risks
For many, AI is no longer an option or a shiny new tool but an essential element of their marketing practices. It’s become a critical part of how they do their work and, at the same time, it’s impacting the entire customer journey.
Jamie Domenici, chief marketing officer of Klaviyo, says that consumers are using AI tools “not just to answer basic questions but to help discover products, make decisions, and feel supported in real time.”
As marketers respond to these shifts, though, Elizabeth Maxson, chief marketing officer of Contentful, warns that they need to be alert to what she calls “AI workslop.”
The number of companies using fully AI-led processes, Maxson says, nearly doubled last year. The result: “generic, low-value messages” that “dilute brand identity and audience trust.”
AI definitely has a place, but it needs to be used carefully, Maxson says. AI insights, for example, can be very useful at the beginning of a campaign to help shape strategy and guide creative direction. But then human judgment needs to come into play. If not, it can be difficult if not impossible to demonstrate value and avoid eroding trust.
She points to Contentful’s own research that found that 40 percent of marketing leaders already feel anxious about demonstrating ROI from the AI deployments.
Trend 2: Zero-Click Search Is Reshaping the Entire Funnel
Arguably, the area where marketers are experiencing the greatest impact and threat to how they’ve come to operate is search. For years now, marketers have been secure in the knowledge that they could readily see and analyze how consumers find out about their companies and their products. Increasingly, though, the buyer’s journey is being masked if not entirely hidden because of the growing use of genAI tools for search.
Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, chief marketing officer of Sitecore, notes that “the most important parts of the journey are now happening upstream, inside systems we don’t control and can’t always track.”
That, she says, creates two compression effects: “First, decision compression: A committee can move from ‘What should we do?’ to a shortlist in one AI-assisted conversation. Second, attribution compression: If influence and evaluation happen inside copilots, private channels, and shared docs, a growing share of marketing’s impact becomes structurally invisible.”
How should marketers respond? Boockoff-Bajdek says marketers need to “stop confusing what we can measure with what matters.” And, she says, they need to design their stories to survive summarization.
When AI compresses message into a few sentences, your differentiation either holds up or it evaporates, she says. That, she suggests, means “fewer vague campaign claims and more verifiable proof—what you do, who it’s for, and what outcomes you can substantiate.”
Trend 3: GEO and AEO Are the New SEO
Some new acronyms have emerged thanks to the proliferation of AI-generated search. They include both GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization), which provide a challenging alternative to standard search engine optimization tools.
Terrence Ngu, founder and CEO of Hashmeta, says that while AI referral traffic only accounts for a little more than 1 percent of website traffic, it’s growing rapidly. Further, Ngu notes, ChatGPT is driving more than 87 percent of AI referral traffic, and Google’s AI Overviews now appear in about 25 percent of all searches. That’s up from 13 percent just a year ago.
“Marketers who are still optimizing solely for traditional blue links are optimizing for a shrinking share of attention,” Ngu warns.
Tony Pearman, president and CEO of AccessU, agrees. “Ranking on a results page is no longer the only goal,” he says. “Being cited or referenced inside AI-generated answers is becoming just as important.”
That drives the need for new ways of measuring views and impact. Pearman’s agency is doing exactly that, as it develops web tools to analyze and adapt site content for AI-driven search.
Even though GEO currently represents a small fraction of overall search, it’s time for marketers to begin shifting their content approaches. Research from Fractl and Search Engine Land found that 66 percent of consumers expect AI to fully replace traditional search within five years. Younger audiences are already adopting it at a much higher pace; among 18- to 24-year-olds, 66 percent already use ChatGPT to find information, compared to 69 percent who use Google.
Skyword’s executive vice president, Dan Baptiste, has some advice for marketers: “Stop optimizing for clicks. Build authority.”
That advice drives another emerging trend: the resurgence of traditional PR strategies.
Trend 4: Thought Leadership as an Authority Driver
Vanessa Errecarte, marketing lecturer at the University of California-Davis Graduate School of Management and author of the forthcoming book Valuable & Visible, has introduced the concept of the “owned line”—original thought as the new growth lever.
“If you can clearly reframe a common problem with non-generic insight, you stop the scroll, influence the summary, and stand out in screening systems,” she says. “Rather than your information being grouped with the general, common trope-based info in the first output paragraph, organizations should strive for their own linked line to show up next.”
That requires moving beyond generic, bland content that anyone could provide to the creation of content that is unique and authoritative. It’s not about more content, but about more relevant content.
AI-enabled search looks for insight and intent, Errecarte says. “To capitalize on this, focus on building [point-of-view] briefs, run customer-insights sprints, and publish fewer, sharper ideas that are hard to generalize.”
CRM won’t expand customer base if the message sounds like everyone else’s, Errecarte cautions. “Organizations will win by using their CRM customer insight data to uncover specific, human truths—anxiety, friction, misconceptions, ‘jobs to be done’—and then translating them into authentic creative that carries a distinct point of view.”
Trend 5: The Need for Authenticity
AI is also placing a new premium on authenticity, says Scott Morris, chief marketing officer of Sprout Social. Faced with a flood of questionable content and the growing use of deepfakes, consumers are becoming wary. They’re seeking content that feels human-generated and relevant.
“The social spotlight is shifting from mass reach to meaningful connections,” Morris notes. That’s driving [consumers] to platforms like Reddit, Substack, and Discord, where private groups and micro-communities “build loyalty and spark movements.”
Susan Ganeshan, chief marketing officer of Emplifi, cites research from her company about how consumers are interacting in the social environment. For instance, she shares, while Instagram’s organic reach has dropped by up to 40 percent, shares have grown more than 150 percent. TikTok is seeing the same trend, with more than 200 percent year-over-year follower growth and industry-leading engagement rates. The takeaway, Ganeshan says, is clear: “Resonance drives visibility. Producing more content will not be enough. Producing content worth sharing will.”
Ganeshan also flags a transparency imperative that is becoming strategic rather than merely ethical. Her company research also found that 83 percent of consumers expect disclosure when AI is being used. “Transparency and governance are becoming strategic priorities, not compliance afterthoughts.”
Some Additional Unusual Trends Worth Watching
Beyond these dominant themes, several experts flagged a few other emerging patterns that are less widely discussed but potentially significant.
For instance, Keran Smith, cofounder and chief marketing officer of LYFE Marketing, identifies a trend that feels counterintuitive given how pervasive AI content tools have become: anti-AI marketing. “I believe 2026 will be the year of anti-AI marketing,” he says, pointing to early movers like iHeartRadio and the creators of Apple TV’s Pluribus. “The general population has voiced that they actually do not like or want to see AI content. Brands that take this approach will need to weigh the upside of public sentiment against the cost and time savings that AI can provide.”
Audiences are also becoming smaller but more engaged and powerful. “You’ll see accounts with 100 followers getting 1 million views while influencers with 500,000 followers are getting 2,000 views,” he says. That has some profound implications for how marketers build and maintain qualified audiences.
One tactic that could prove useful in building these audiences is synthetic casting, according to Aaron Kovan, executive vice president of Create Americas at Havas/Prose on Pixels. Not deepfakes, he says, but “fully owned, ethically licensed synthetic performers—talent with digital likenesses that can appear in multiple languages, reshoots, and regional variations without flying crews around the world.”
If the execution of these performers is “competent, trustworthy, and largely invisible,” audiences won’t reject their use. He suggests that this use will begin in some conservative industries, like healthcare and finance.
The Bottom Line for CRM-Focused Marketers
While marketers themselves might not agree on all of the challenges they will face this year, they do see one major commonality: Companies that win in 2026 will not be the ones with the most AI tools; they’ll be the ones with the clearest point of view, the most disciplined use of data, and the best judgment about where human creativity must lead and where automation can follow.
For marketers, the strategic priority is owning the customer relationship, investing in first-party data, loyalty programs that reward the full spectrum of customer behaviors, and content that earns a cited presence in AI-generated answers rather than simply hoping for organic traffic that is, by all accounts, contracting.
As Boockoff-Bajdek puts it: If AI is going to narrate your brand’s story upstream, make sure it’s repeating your version of the truth.
It’s important to note, though, that despite these shifts, many traditional marketing principles and practices still apply: The need to deliver a quality product that meets the needs of a specific target audience and the ability to communicate value in ways that resonate with that audience are paramount. And, despite an increasingly digital and technology-driven marketing landscape that is thrusting AI upon everything, human nature remains constant.
Linda Pophal is a freelance business journalist and content marketer who writes for various business and trade publications. Pophal does content marketing for Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and individuals on a wide range of subjects, from human resource management and employee relations to marketing, technology, healthcare industry trends, and more.