Digital Marketing Trends We’re Watching in 2026

As we head into 2026, the digital marketing landscape is undergoing one of its most significant transformations yet. The rise of AI-powered search experiences, the evolution of traditional SEO, and the increasing complexity of paid advertising platforms are reshaping how businesses connect with their audiences online. If 2025 felt like a whirlwind of change, then buckle up, because 2026 is bringing even more disruption to the marketing world.

Here’s what you need to know to stay ahead of your digital marketing trends this year.

TLDR

Ok, let’s be honest. These posts are usually way too long. Here is the concise, AI-assisted robot summary of this year’s trends we’re watching. But if you really want to be ready for what’s ahead, I suggest you read more than just the summary!

1. Marketing is changing faster than ever. Adaptability is essential.
   AI-powered search, agentic systems, evolving ad platforms, and fragmented user behaviour require marketers to rethink long held strategies.
2. Foundations still matter.
   Even though the tools and interfaces are evolving, strong SEO fundamentals, high quality content created for real human audiences, technical optimization, and brand authority continue to be the backbone of success.
3. Visibility is no longer just about Google.
   Brands must show up across AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), social platforms, and multimodal content formats.
4. Advertising is becoming more complex and more critical.
   Automated platforms like Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn require expertise, brand risk management, and careful oversight.
5. Marketing Measurement is getting harder.
   With fewer website clicks and more AI-driven searches, marketers must rely on proxy metrics and broader attribution models.
6. Firstparty data and privacy readiness are must-haves.
   Regulatory pressures and platform changes make direct customer data more important than ever.
7. Agility and resilience will define winners.
   Economic uncertainty, platform volatility, and algorithmic unpredictability make flexibility a strategic advantage.

SEO Isn’t Dead. It’s Rebranding

Let’s address the elephant in the room: is SEO dead? The short answer is no, but it’s evolving faster than ever before. The acronyms for SEO are multiplying; GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), AIO (Artificial Intelligence Optimization), and more. But the truth is that good SEO work usually leads to solid SEO results, and that foundation remains essential in 2026.

Google has been clear on this point, stating that the same fundamentals that drive traditional search rankings also determine visibility in AI Overviews. Yet, we can’t ignore the reality that search behaviour is fracturing. Users now turn to AI for quick answers and Google for deeper research, which means brands must optimize for visibility across multiple discovery channels, not just traffic to their websites.

The challenge? AI Overviews and other generative search features are keeping users on the search results page longer, leading to significant declines in website click-through rates, with estimates ranging between 30-60%. While impressions and AI Overview visibility are increasing, actual clicks to websites are plummeting, especially for informational, non-branded search queries.

What These Marketing Trends Means for Your Business

Your organic search strategy needs to expand beyond traditional rankings and traffic metrics. In 2026, organic search success will depend on:

Being cited in AI responses

Getting your brand mentioned in AI-generated answers builds authority and drives indirect traffic through brand searches.

Creating multimodal content

Text alone won’t cut it anymore. Invest in video, podcasts, images, and infographics to capture attention across different search experiences.

Focusing on entity-building:

Use schema markup, earn quality backlinks, and establish your brand as a subject-matter authority in your industry

Diversify your channel mix:

To stay competitive you will need to ensure you have owned digital assets across all the channels your customers are using. That might include a website, social media profiles, newsletters, YouTube channels or podcasts. Paid media (advertising) will also be essential for most businesses.

In our client accounts, businesses with strong brand entity signals and consistent thought leadership are cited more frequently in AI-generated responses than brands relying solely on keyword optimization. The businesses that win organic search in 2026 will be those that show up consistently across the traditional search engines (Google), and chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity AI, and other emerging platforms.

E-E-A-T and Technical SEO: The Foundation Still Matters

While the buzzwords may change, the fundamentals of strong online visibility are still holding steady as we enter 2026. Your technical search optimization foundation is what enables AI systems and search engines to understand who you are, what you do, and why you’re credible. And the content optimization principals of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) aren’t going anywhere, in fact, they’re more critical than ever as AI systems look for credible sources to cite.

The foundational pillars of an effective organic search strategy remain:

• Clean site architecture and fast loading speeds
  Make sure your content is crawlable and usable by AI systems and traditional search engines
• Schema markup
  Helps both search engines and AI systems understand your business entities, products, and expertise
• Mobile optimization
  Remains essential as most searches happen on phones.
• Quality content that demonstrates real expertise
  From real people who have genuine experience in the topic

Google recently tightened its stance on AI-generated content, instructing quality raters to give the lowest ratings to pages where most main content is auto-generated with little originality or added value. The message is clear: invest in quality, human expertise, and genuine authority. AI tools can assist your content creation, but they can’t replace subject-matter expertise.

Search Is Happening Everywhere

People are finding answers on platforms like TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, ChatGPT, and Perplexity AI before they ever visit Google. Social Search is now a top-of-funnel necessity, with a quarter of people preferring social media over Google for search, particularly among younger audiences.

To win at multi-platform search:

• Optimize for in-platform discovery
  Use keyword-rich captions, create explainer content, and pin Q&As on your social profiles
• Understand platform culture
  Each platform has its own norms and algorithm preferences. What works on TikTok won’t work on LinkedIn. And, somewhat surprisingly, using basic SEO keyword principals in posts seems to work great on social search.
• Create content for different mindsets
  Some users want facts (Google, Bing), others want community validation (Reddit), and some seek inspiration (TikTok, Instagram)

Understanding why people search is just as important as knowing where they search. Map your content strategy to your customer motivations. Your content mix should meet your audience needs wherever they are in their search journey.

Welcome to the Age of GEO and AIO

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO) aren’t replacing SEO, they’re a new organic channel to leverage. As ChatGPT processes billions of messages per month and people are using an average of five platforms to search for information, your visibility strategy must extend beyond Google.

How to Optimize Content for Generative Engines

Creating content that performs well in AI-generated responses requires a different approach than traditional SEO. Generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews don’t just look at keywords, they analyze the depth, structure, and authority of your content to determine what’s worth citing.

Here are some ideas to get you started with GEO:

• Make your expertise clear
  Use author bios that establish credentials, include specific examples and case studies that demonstrate real-world experience, and cite credible sources that back up your claims.
• Structure matters
  Use clear headings, concise paragraphs, and direct answers to common questions early in your content. AI systems favour content that provides comprehensive coverage of a topic while remaining accessible and well-organized.
• Master writing for both humans and machines
  Your content should thoroughly address user intent while being easy for AI to parse and extract meaningful information from.
• Focus on building your entity authority
  Ensure you have consistent brand mentions across the web, schema markup that helps AI understand your expertise, and natural backlinks from reputable sources. The brands that get cited most frequently in AI responses are those that have established themselves as go-to authorities in their specific domains. Niche expertise often outperforms broad, surface-level coverage.

Simple, right? Not really. The reality is that businesses that win at GEO in 2026 likely had a very solid SEO foundation and well-established online credibility already. Niche expertise has been consistently outperforming broad, generic content in AI citation frequency. Building digital credibility takes time and investment, but to stay relevant all online businesses will need to adapt and engage in these approaches.

If you are not a business with well-established online credibility, we should talk! Now, keep reading, because advertising will be key to your success this year.

The Rise of the Agentic Internet

As 2026 unfolds, a new player is coming that will fundamentally change how people interact online: agentic AI systems that can take actions on behalf of users.

We’re already seeing the early stages with Google’s AI Mode, which now includes deeper research capabilities, personalization, and the ability to complete multi-step tasks. Apple Intelligence, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and Google’s Project Astra are all working toward a future where AI assistants can book travel, make purchases, compare products, and complete transactions without users ever visiting a website.

What This Means for E-commerce

The agentic internet will be particularly transformative for e-commerce. Imagine a customer asking their AI assistant to “find and order the best-rated coffee maker under $200 that ships within two days.” The AI agent could:

• Research products across multiple retailers
• Compare reviews and specifications
• Check shipping availability
• Complete the purchase
• Add it to your calendar for tracking

How To Prepare for this Marketing Shift:

• Make your product data structured and accessible
  Use schema markup, maintain clean product feeds, and ensure your information is machine-readable
• Build your brand authority now
  When AI agents make recommendations, they’ll favour trusted, authoritative brands
• Focus on the entire customer journey
  If initial discovery happens through AI agents, your post-purchase experience becomes even more critical for building loyalty and repeat business

This isn’t science fiction, Google recently released a “Universal Commerce Protocol” (UCP) to establish a common language for e-commerce website, payment agents, and other 3rd party shopping tools. Agentic shopping is evolving quickly. The brands that prepare now will have a massive advantage over those playing catch-up in 2027

What You Need to Know About Digital Advertising in 2026

Digital advertising has never been more complex than it is right now. Google Ads and Meta have integrated so many AI-driven tools, campaign types, and platform updates that successfully managing campaigns requires deeper expertise than ever before. Across multiple accounts, we have observed automated bidding and AI-enabled creative features optimize for platform efficiency, at the expense of business goals, unless carefully monitored and guard-railed.

Add in the need to diversify across platforms and now you need to also have an expert in LinkedIn, TikTok, Spotify ads, or maybe all of them! As I pretty much say every year, you need an expert to manage your digital advertising, and I don’t think it has ever been truer!

Google Ads

Google’s 2025 platform redesign brought significant changes, and 2026 continues that transformation. The complexity isn’t just overwhelming; it can be costly. It’s extraordinarily easy to waste advertising dollars on Google Ads in 2026, as AI-integrations are optimizing for Google’s metrics rather than yours. Close monitoring, clear campaign structures, and experienced management are essential for success this year. Here are some updates to keep in mind:

Enhanced CPC bidding is gone

eCPC was phased out March 2025, pushing advertisers toward fully automated bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value. Note that full manual control campaigns are still an option (at the time of writing this), but I expect to see manual bidding phased out soon.

Match types are essentially meaningless now

The AI matching algorithm has become so aggressive that exact and phrase match behave more like broad match, triggering ads on unexpected queries. While this has long been true, reviewing search terms is still an essential part of optimizing your campaign spend and performance on Google Ads. Do not leave this to the robots, your human intellect is needed here.

And I would still avoid broad match for most advertisers. Instead, I would broaden reach using Performance Max.

Performance Max (PMax) is maturing

2025 we reinvested in PMAX as Google released better reporting and segmentation features. PMAX is now a very more powerful channel for generating awareness and reach, and can be a good revenue driver, with the right data inputs. We find it works best optimizing for revenue rather than leads.

DemandGen

Although not a new campaign type anymore, I thought it worth mentioning that we have been happy with DemandGen performance this year. It is significantly cheaper than any other campaign type and so has the advantage of delivering awareness at scale. It does take careful audience targeting and placement monitoring, to ensure you are getting real human clicks and not just bot traffic. But dialled in, this campaign type is performing well for us going into 2026.

AI Max for Search campaigns

This new campaign type uses advanced AI to expand reach, generate ads dynamically, and adapt creative in real time. It promises efficiency but at this point requires more babysitting than a regular search campaign, and we have real concerns over brand standards with dynamically generated ad creative, with little to no reporting. AI Max has some potential with specific use cases, but so far, we are not adopting this one for most clients.

Meta and Advantage+

This was the year of Meta ads for me. As we saw declining performance and more challenges deploying the complexity of creative that Meta now demands. Meta ads remain a highly effective channel to include in your marketing strategy but know that it demands more creative assets than ever, and that ultimately means more time and investment compared to other advertising platforms.

AI-integration has brought more challenges to ads management on the platform. Advantage+, promised automation for audience targeting, creative optimization, and placements. The reality? It’s a mixed bag.

Audience targeting automation
AI-enhanced audience targeting hasn’t delivered significant value for most campaigns we’ve tested.

Creative optimization
This feature can adjust ads dynamically based on placement, but this raises real concerns about maintaining brand standards and quality control. We have not been able to use it reliably for most of our clients. The dynamically generated assets are not aligned enough with brand identities, and the control and reporting are very poor.

WARNING: Advantage+ is often auto-applied
During campaign setup there are several points where Advantage+ needs to be disabled, so watch carefully that you’re making intentional choices about where to use automation.

Automation tools in Meta Ads can create efficiencies, but they can also quickly erode your brand identity if campaigns aren’t carefully constructed and closely monitored. While some features show promise, the lack of transparency and control is concerning. We have several documented instances of AI-features being re-enabled after a simple edit was made to an ad (i.e. changing a headline). What this means for advertisers, is that your ad manager needs to carefully review every setting on every ad, to ensure alignment with campaign objectives and brand standards.

Despite its challenges, Meta is still a highly recommended channel for most advertisers for 2026.

TikTok

While TikTok didn’t die after all. It continues to be a growing channel for reaching younger audiences at scale. The TikTok Advertising platform when through many of the same transformations as Meta this year. With similar management and brand control challenges. We like TikTok for reaching a broad audience at a very low cost, but we have not seen much proven ROI from this channel to comment much further.

LinkedIn

One thing I will say about LinkedIn is that their advertising is dialled in. Many of our clients were asking to run LinkedIn ads in 2025. This is a powerful channel for reaching very specific audiences with advertising, but it is very expensive compared to its counterparts.

For 2026, make sure your organic LinkedIn presence is active and dialled in. Once you know exactly who your converting audience is, use LinkedIn ads to reach them. This is not a platform that is ideal for building awareness at scale.

LinkedIn also has AI automations sneaking into campaign setup and audience targeting. Be cautious using these features; they do tend to drive down costs, but your targeting is certainly more diluted.

Ads in ChatGPT and AI Platforms

Speaking of AI platforms, advertising is coming to ChatGPT and other AI interfaces. OpenAI has outlined an ad-driven strategy centered on ChatGPT’s massive scale and media partnerships. As these platforms mature, they’ll offer new advertising opportunities, but they will certainly bring new challenges for attribution and measurement.

Early press releases suggest these ads will:

• Be highly contextual, appearing within AI-generated responses
• Favor brands with strong authority and relevance signals
• Require new creative approaches that work within conversational interfaces
• Need careful testing to understand ROI, as traditional attribution won’t work

Everywhere Else

Website traffic from organic search is declining and recovering that visibility from other channels is likely going to require more advertising dollars in 2026, probably in channels you never considered before. For success this year, you will need to know where your customers are online and reach them there.

Consider exploring the following:

• Spotify
• Reddit
• Connected TV (i.e. Amazon Prime, Disney)
• Snapchat
• Instacart & Uber

Quantifying Marketing Success in 2026: Measurement and Attribution Challenges in AI-Search

As discovery shifts into AI interfaces, traditional attribution models struggle to capture impact.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: as AI search reduces website clicks, your traditional marketing performance metrics are likely already looking pretty terrible, even if your digital marketing efforts are working.

Discovery, evaluation, and decision-making increasingly happen within AI interfaces where traditional website analytics can’t track them. AI-driven visibility often appears downstream as branded search growth, direct traffic, and increased brand recall rather than immediate attributable clicks. This creates a serious attribution problem. When someone asks ChatGPT for product recommendations and later visits your site directly or through a branded search, how do you connect those dots?

Moving Beyond Clicks

The organizations that navigate this challenge successfully won’t rely on traditional SEO metrics like rankings or total organic traffic. Instead, they’ll will need to shift to:

• Revenue attribution
  Track organic search through to actual revenue using multi-touch attribution models or, at minimum, last-touch attribution in your existing analytics
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for SEO
  Calculate the true cost of acquiring customers through organic channels, including content creation, technical resources, and team time
• Lifetime Value (LTV) comparisons
  Measure how long organic visitors stay and how much they spend compared to other acquisition channels
• Brand search volume
  Monitor branded search queries as a proxy for AI visibility. If you’re appearing in AI responses consistently, branded searches should increase
• Share of Voice in AI responses
  Track how often your brand is cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Claude, and other platforms

The reality is that perfect attribution models don’t exist, and setting one up requires significant engineering resources and cross-team coordination. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Start with what you can measure today and build from there.

Proxy Metrics Matter

As website clicks decline, marketers will need to fill those data gaps with proxy metrics that allow you to understand the trajectory of your marketing efforts, even if you can’t measure the results directly. By the end of 2026, standard marketing metrics might include:

• Impressions from Google Search Console
• Google Trends data for your key topics
• Brand mention tracking across platforms
• Direct website traffic spikes (often a signal of successful AI visibility)
• Survey data showing brand recall and authority perception

The downstream effects of AI visibility often appear as “dark traffic”; direct visits, social mentions, or app downloads that can’t be tracked directly but indicate your brand-building efforts are working. Identifying the right proxy metrics that provide insight into your business’ AI-visibility is going to be essential for reporting to your stakeholders at the end of 2026.

Privacy, Personalization, and First-Party Data

The tension between marketing personalization and privacy regulation isn’t going away, and it’s getting even more challenging. While Google ultimately decided not to phase out third-party cookies, the regulatory environment continues to tighten, making it increasingly difficult to freely and legally collect user data.

Your 2026 marketing strategy must balance these competing demands:

• Invest in first-party data collection
  Build opportunities to collect customer data directly through email sign-ups, account creation, and customer interactions
• Use your existing data more effectively
  Use the audience data, market research and website traffic signals you have to build better campaign audiences and personalization. Test your audiences and have a strong understand of what targeting is most effective on which channel. Understand that targeting options are frequently changing, and having a good understanding of your core audience is essential for keeping pace with platform changes and restrictions.
• Explore predictive analytics
  If you’re using GA4 and/or Google Ads, there are now features for anticipating customer needs based on existing data patterns. Make sure you review your insights regularly to capture upcoming demand.

The brands that successfully navigate this balance will build stronger, more trustworthy relationships with their audiences while still delivering the personalized experiences customers expect.

Time to Reinvest in Social Media

Organic social media deserves renewed attention in 2026. As entity-building and digital PR become more important for online visibility, your social presence is a critical brand asset.

Here’s what matters:

Multi-Platform Engagement Is Essential

The average consumer uses nearly seven platforms monthly. Your brand story needs to be consistent wherever customers encounter it, while respecting each platform’s unique culture.

Success requires:

• Integrated storytelling that maintains brand coherence across all touchpoints
• Smart orchestration of content with deployment calendars covering all key channels
• Platform-specific adaptations that feel native to each environment (you can use AI for this!)

Social Customer Care Impacts Brand Reputation

Social media is now a primary customer service channel. People are turning to social platforms for brand information, and slow or missing responses erode trust and damage reputation. Integrate your support and communications workflows so customer service agents can promptly address queries or complaints on social media. Quick, empathetic responses can mean the difference between loyalty and churn.

Reddit Drives Decisions

Reddit has evolved from niche forums into mainstream hubs that shape consumer decisions, especially in B2B and tech. It is the sixth-most visited site globally, and most Google or ChatGPT answers now include Reddit threads.

The opportunity is significant, but the approach must be genuine:

• Respect community culture (overt marketing gets rejected quickly)
• Participate authentically by adding real value to discussions
• Build long-term trust through consistent, helpful engagement

Marketing on Reddit requires a fair amount of time and thought to get it right. However, ignoring Reddit means missing high-intent conversations with highly engaged audiences.

Prepare for Another Year of Market Uncertainty

Economic conditions in 2026 remain unpredictable, with many regions expecting continued slowdown. Combined with uncertainty about platform futures (TikTok’s potential ban, the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google), your marketing strategy needs to be agile and adaptable.

Build Resilience in Your Marketing Plan by:

• Diversified channel strategy
  Make sure you include the standard platforms but set aside a budget for testing on other channels.
• Flexible budgets
  Be ready to shift resources quickly based on performance and market conditions
• Strong fundamentals
  When platforms change, solid SEO, quality content, and genuine brand authority will carry you through. Don’t take shortcuts. In an AI-driven marketing landscape, you will quickly be outpaced.
• Continuous testing
  Run small experiments constantly to identify what’s working before committing large budgets

Economic downturns tempt businesses to cut marketing budgets, but this is often a mistake. Brands that maintain visibility during difficult times build stronger market positions and emerge ahead when conditions improve.

Final Thoughts: Adaptability Is the Advantage for Marketing in 2026

If there’s one theme that runs through all these trends, it’s this: success in 2026 requires adaptability, expertise, and an agile marketing approach.

Brands that invest in clear expertise, strong entity signals, and diversified discovery channels are more resilient to platform volatility and more likely to be recommended by AI systems.

The digital marketing landscape is more complex and fast-moving than it has ever been. The platforms, algorithms, and consumer behaviours that worked last year may not work next month. The brands that thrive will be those that:

• Stay informed about platform changes and industry trends
• Invest in expertise, whether in-house or through agency partners
• Test constantly and measure ruthlessly
• Maintain flexibility to pivot when needed
• Never lose sight of the fundamentals: quality content, genuine expertise, and building real relationships with customers

At Foundery, we’re here to help you navigate these changes. Whether you need consulting to complement your team or full-service digital marketing support, we’ve got the expertise and agility to help you succeed in 2026 and beyond.

Ready to tackle these trends head-on? Let’s talk about how we can help position your business for success this year.