State of AI & Digital Marketing - 2026 Predictions
We’ve moved past the era where AI was just a "helper" tool. It is now the engine driving our entire 2026 strategy. To decode what this shift truly means for our day-to-day work, we brought together 45 industry leaders across SEO, PPC, and Analytics.
What you’ll find here is a collective look at where the industry is headed. From the rise of AI-driven search to why being "human" is actually your biggest competitive advantage right now, these are the real-world experiences of the people living through this shift.
This guide was created as a non-profit effort to give back to the marketing community. We are incredibly grateful to every professional who shared their time and perspective.
The contributions we received are too detailed to be limited to a single page. To ensure these strategic roadmaps get the depth they deserve, we have compiled the full versions into an e-book. On this page, we’re sharing the highlights to give you a quick bird’s-eye view of expert insights for 2026.
We hope these insights help you build a stronger strategy for the year ahead.
AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked.com, said that,
For LinkedIn, marketers (and the ad platform itself) have been making a mad dash to incorporate AI into their strategy. But it's still easy for prospects to identify what's been created by AI, and the messages feel disingenuous. That creates a big opportunity for scrappy marketers to double down on making personal and human connections which stand out.
In 2026, I predict that marketers who create unmistakably human content/connections will win, while marketers who distance themselves from their customer by letting AI do their talking for them, will see stagnation.
Alexandra Tachalova, Founder & Digital PR Consultant of Digital Olympus, said that,
AI proved that the 21st century has close to zero badass marketers. Just open an average blog or any business page on LinkedIn - what do you see? The same templated messages, zero brand authenticity, and no real idea behind them. Basically, it’s an elevated version of corporate fluff that got a rebirth thanks to AI agents like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others.
Personally, this makes me feel like we’ve entered the era of templates, AI prompts, and whatever else, while marketer identity and creativity have left the chat. I’m not sure why, but now anyone who’s even a tiny bit better than the average AI-agent operator feels like gold.
Andre Alpar, Board Member & Advisor of Alpar Beteiligungs GmbH, said that,
As we look toward the landscape of the coming year 2026, it is becoming clear that the search industry is entering a transformative phase where the traditional, pure-play SEO market will likely see a slight contraction as it makes room for new priorities. However, this is far from a decline; instead, we are seeing the emergence of dedicated GEO budgets alongside increasingly common hybrid budgets that blend both worlds.
The most crucial takeaway is that the cumulative volume of investment in these areas together (SEO and GEO) will be significantly higher than what we have traditionally seen in the pure SEO space alone.
Arnout Hellemans, SEO, PPC & Analytics Consultant of OnlineMarkethink, said that,
AI is massively reshaping a lot of the user interactions with search, discovery, and e-commerce. Traffic has been diversifying and the 'messy middle' in the user journey has become even messier. Please consume your content, your brand story, and promise outside of your website.
If you were getting traffic on generic pages with consensus, that will be taken and served by AI in the serp or at any other GenAI interface. Your pure play SEO traffic will be declining; embrace the new reality.
Barry Adams, SEO and Audience Growth Consultant of Polemic Digital, said that,
AI has profoundly reshaped search and the web. The impact of AI-generated answers is felt worldwide, with traffic from Google declining almost everywhere.
New KPIs will need to be adopted, focusing more on brand mentions, consumer sentiment, and AI visibility. For websites that rely on traffic for monetisation, such as news publishers, AI has severely undermined their business models. Monetisation based on page impressions is not sustainable.
Bastian Grimm, CEO of Peak Ace, said that,
Organic search is undergoing a structural shift rather than an incremental evolution. In 2025, AI systems increasingly mediate the discovery, selection, and presentation of information. Traditional rankings still exist, but they are no longer the primary interface through which users interact with content.
For SEO/GEO strategies, the key shift is from optimisation for pages to optimisation for inclusion. Content must be machine-readable, technically accessible, and contextually reliable to be selected by AI systems. In many cases, clicks are no longer the success metric; presence within the answer itself is.
Bian Salins, CEO of Bian Salins Consulting, said that,
I’ve been working in the field of digital and content marketing since 2006. When social and search first made its appearance, it was designed to be un-interruptive to a user’s quest for information. But as all user behaviour and technology evolves over time, AI has now disrupted an entire ecosystem.
The most underappreciated shift is that citations and mentions are becoming the new SERP. Fundamentally, AI does not kill SEO; it just changes ‘what’ wins. If you want visibility in the next era, write for people, format for machines, and earn the right to be consistently repeated.
Brodie Clark, SEO Consultant of Brodie Clark Consulting, said that,
The area of Search that I primarily work in is for large-scale eCommerce and Marketplace brands. This is certainly an area where AI has been highly influential, with many of the most prominent AI-driven developments in Search that I’ve been tracking over the past year being related to eCommerce-related features.
The most noteworthy features include the introduction of free product listing features in AI Mode and, more recently, the rollout of Business Agent within GMC Next, which I now have access to for several US accounts, allowing stores to have greater control over the branding of Google’s in-SERP chatbot and additional analytics.
Burak Pehlivan, Managing Partner of Zeo, said that,
Search is no longer evolving incrementally. It is being fundamentally re-architected. Over the past year, we have crossed a threshold: we are no longer optimizing primarily for search engines, but for AI-driven answer systems, generative interfaces, and discovery models.
Working closely with AI-first products across growth, content, and search infrastructure, one pattern has become clear: visibility today is no longer determined only by rankings. It is determined by whether AI systems can understand, retrieve, trust, and accurately represent your brand.
Dale Bertrand, Founder & CEO of Fire&Spark, said that,
A pattern I keep seeing is that stronger AI makes human expertise more valuable, not less. Generative AI does not create new knowledge; it is very good at finding, summarizing, and combining existing information.
When experts use AI to speed up research, synthesis, and first drafts, they can spend more time on judgment, interpretation, and original thinking. Marketing teams that treat AI as support for expert thinking produce work that is clearer, more credible, and more useful.
Dennis Yu, Chief Technology Officer of BlitzMetrics, said that,
In 2026, we move from AI "generating" content into processing raw experiences into articles, video snippets, social media posts, newsletters, books, and other content.
But instead of trying to fool Google and LLMs that you're not using AI-- by modifying the tone or not using common AI words, why not feed raw ingredients into your favorite AI and then have it structure, repurpose, post, and boost that content?
Notice how the same fundamentals of SEO apply to being recommended by LLMs, since both seek raw evidence from multiple sources.
Diego Ivo, CEO of Conversion, said that,
Much has been written about Query Fan-Out, RAG architectures, and Semantic SEO. What remains largely unexplored, however, is the strategic question: how do we build brands that are optimized for LLM selection?
I call this discipline Semantic Branding, the practice of deliberately shaping how LLM perceive, categorize, and recommend your brand. But the AI layer introduces something fundamentally different. It doesn't just rank pages. It forms opinions and perceptions about brands.
Dixon Jones, CEO of InLinks, said that,
Tools like Google’s "AI Overviews" and ChatGPT will be used more frequently in the future, and many new search methods will emerge from these technologies. However, these tools themselves rely heavily on search engines to keep their responses timely and accurate.
At its core, the trend is a shift from humans reading your website to AI agents reading your website (and others) and synthesising the content to provide a single result that covers all the sources needed to answer the user's query. In short, your content must now use self-contained, unambiguous sentences.
Duane Brown, CEO & Head of Strategy of Take Some Risk, said that,
Even though the visual aspect of AI and what it can produce has grown by leaps and bounds since 2023. We are still very much in the infancy stage of what is possible.Most people are still just using AI to help create ideas for new ad copy or maybe tweak visuals they already made for Google campaigns.
This can be helpful if you are trying to do work at scale and you have enough data and information to train the AI tool you are using. There still needs to be tons of oversight when it comes to pushing out the end product in your campaigns and how that impacts what customers see online.
Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, said that,
AEO is not a replacement for traditional SEO, but an evolution that builds on existing strategies while adding new ones.
Users are moving from short, independent keyword queries to conversational threads. They ask longer, more specific questions and refine them within the same chat. As a result, keyword research is evolving into “question research.” Each follow-up question creates additional opportunities for citations.
Ezgi Gülsen Yaylı, SEO Manager of Zeo, said that,
We’ve just wrapped up a year where the way we use Google has started to shift. We know that in 2026, we’re going to feel this change even more intensely.
These days, the gold standard for AI visibility is having your website cited as a source. Another key factor is having a presence on platforms like Reddit and Wikipedia, where AI visibility is already high. To boost AI visibility, it’s not enough to just create content that matches human search intent; we also need to make that data clean and easy for AI agents to process.
Fili Wiese, Technical SEO Consultant of Searchbrothers.com, said that,
Google will dominate AI search in 2026. New data from Cloudflare confirms something SEOs suspected but lacked the data to prove: Googlebot sees 3.2 times more web pages than OpenAI and nearly five times more than Microsoft.
For AI, it is simple: The quantity and quality of the available data wins in AI. The more training material, the better the model. Crawling and indexing remain the prerequisite for all visibility. If a page is not crawled, it cannot be indexed.
Technical SEO foundations have become more important, not less. No amount of prompt optimization or LLM-specific markup fixes a broken technical foundation.
Ganesh Shanmugam, Founder of Billion Game, said that,
Everyone's talking about AI taking over PPC. But here's what I've noticed working with clients across B2B SaaS and e-commerce: AI is only as smart as the data you feed it.
What actually moves the needle in 2026? Creative. Fresh angles. Hooks that stop the scroll. Whoever can produce and test more variations, faster, wins.
The "we'll manage your ads" agency model is getting squeezed hard. I think agencies will split into two types.
Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing of iPullRank, said that,
From my perspective, the core issue with the future of content is how people decide what feels authentic, emotional, and resonant. That judgment starts at the brand level.
The use of AI in content creation can push outcomes in either direction. That impact will be shaped by culture and society, not tooling. That decision is a real tradeoff, and there is no universal answer.
What deserves close attention is how audience behavior changes once people believe content is AI, or believe it is not. Credentials alone will not carry that weight. Voice, consistency, and perceived authenticity will.
Gus Pelogia, Sr. SEO & AI Product Manager of Indeed, said that,
Without keywords front and center, prompts are the new queries. Even if we get prompt data - and I am hopeful we will at some point in 2026 - it’ll be very noisy.
We'll still use AI or another method to crunch these into topics and pain points. Content optimization will be done per topic and beyond our owned assets because the models are checking multiple sources before reaching a consensus.
There's a race over AI prompt tracking right now, but this is mostly targeting tracking, not optimisation. 2026 will require a huge learning curve for SEO professionals.
Isaac Rudansky - Founder - AdVenture Media, said that,
Custom niche-specific software used to be reserved for enterprises with the revenue and payroll to substantiate 6-figure-plus investments to solve relatively small problems.
Small businesses were stuck with off-the-shelf solutions for larger needs (payroll, CRM, etc.) but couldn't afford to build a solution to a unique middle-of-funnel engagement challenge.
In 2026, I expect to see a real shift in how small businesses think about solutions available to them.
Jeff Coyle, Head of Strategy of Siteimprove, said that,
In 2026, digital marketing enters a more grounded and durable phase of AI visibility.
Accessibility and technical SEO are increasingly recognized as the foundation layer for everything that follows. They are prerequisites for crawlability, interpretability, and trust across search engines and AI systems alike.
Organizations are realizing that sustained success in SEO, AEO, and AI-driven discovery is not unlocked by hacks, but by fundamentals executed consistently.
Jono Alderson, Technical SEO Consultant of Applied Energistics LTD, said that,
A lot of the current debate about search and AI is framed around “optimising for AI answers”. I think that’s already the wrong way to think about it.
We’re moving away from systems that retrieve information and towards systems that make decisions. In that world, being ranked or even cited matters far less than being clearly understood.
Many brands don’t really have a search problem. They have a clarity problem. If an AI system can’t easily articulate what you do, who you’re for, and why you’re the right choice, that’s not an optimisation issue. It’s a strategic one. Humans will fill in the gaps. Machines are far less inclined to. And increasingly, they’re the ones making the first call.
Joyce Collardé, Director of SEO and GEO of FICO, said that,
2025 was a year of significant changes for organic search, affecting both users and SEO professionals. My main key takeaway for 2025 is this: our new objective is to meet users wherever they search; optimizing only for traditional organic search is no longer sufficient.
Luckily, it’s possible to optimize for both SEO and AI search at the same time, and in fact optimizing for AI search can make our SEO best practices better.
In my opinion, the biggest shifts brought by AI search have been anticipating users’ next questions and the weight of a brand’s off-site presence. In 2026, organic performance can’t solely be measured by organic traffic and keywords rankings.
Kaspar Szymanski, Founder & Senior Director of SearchBrothers, said that,
AI players fundamentally crawl the web and use basic SEO signals to both train their models as well as to answer their users initial query. What’s lacking behind expectations is qualitative input validation. Poor quality data input is bound to generate at best varied quality output.
That is users who seek trustworthy, reliable and fast results for whatever it is they need at that moment. This is why foundational SEO, data consistency and user centered strategies continue to prevail in competitive markets such as retail, travel, market places, news media and affiliate.
Kelvin Newman, Founder of BrightonSEO, said that,
There’s a mental model called the Gartner Hype Cycle that I’m a huge fan of. The basic idea is that most new technologies go through a fairly consistent (and surprisingly predictable) pattern of excitement.
And I think in 2026 we’ll see generative AI and its role in marketing, move through some pretty big stages of that cycle. We’ll get past the frothy over-eagerness, see a bit of backlash, and (hopefully) end up somewhere more pragmatic.
Mark Williams-Cook, Founder of AlsoAsked, said that,
In terms of optimising for AI Search, there are a few themes emerging for me that have proven effective.
Probably one of the most important is determining if the prompts around the topic you are interested in are being grounded or not. If this is not happening, it means the answer you are getting is “in model” and there is going to be no quick or easy way to affect this.
A much more fruitful area is the searches that are being grounded. For Google you can actually access the Gemini grounding API which will tell you if a query is going to be grounded, and if so, which searches it will perform in the background.
Matthäus Michalik, Co-Founder & CEO of Claneo GmbH, said that,
As we approach 2026, the transition from SEO to GEO forces marketers to operate in a fundamentally different environment. We are moving from a deterministic model of "rankings and clicks" to a probabilistic model of "visibility and share of voice."
We must stop treating AI visibility as a monolith. Instead, we need a bifurcated strategy. Citations are the new referral traffic, acting as the direct link when AI systems explicitly reference a source.
To succeed, content must be engineered to be "citation-ready": highly current, unique, and structured in a way that compels the AI to use it as a factual basis for its answers.
Mehmet Aktuğ, Managing Partner of Zeo, said that,
Here's the uncomfortable truth: 60% of Google searches now end without clicks to any website.
Brands gain exposure simply by being cited as authoritative sources. If your content doesn't appear in these AI summaries, you're invisible before users even consider visiting your website.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) isn't SEO's successor; it's its transformation. Where traditional SEO is optimized for ranking, GEO optimizes for citation.
To succeed, content must provide succinct answers immediately after question headings, use clear hierarchies, include FAQ formats, and embed specific data points.
Melissa Mackey, Head of Paid Search of Compound Growth Marketing, said that,
AI is impacting the paid search world in many ways.
AI Overviews are starting to occupy the same space as PPC ads, reshaping where and how visibility can be won. CTR has dropped up to 60% since May on informational queries featuring Google AI Overviews in both organic and paid (source).
For advertisers, using AI-based campaign types in 2026 will no longer be optional. The time to embrace and test AI Max is now, as AI Max is one of the only ways to get your ads to serve in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
But don’t set it and forget it. Monitor your search queries carefully and add negatives ruthlessly.
Natzir Turrado, SEO & AI Search Consultant of Natzir, said that,
AI Search is basically SEO, and I challenge anyone to name a genuinely "new" fundamental principle. What worked for Featured Snippets is still the foundation for AI Overviews: get crawled, get indexed, earn trust, satisfy intent, be the best extractable answer.
Yes, the UI changed. But the plumbing is still the same web stack (crawlers, indexing, ranking signals, and eligibility).
The bottom line is that you don't reinvent the wheel. Since models already handle generic info, your advantage is "original signal": real experience, real data, real POV, multi-format proof. Finally, accessibility is a prerequisite.
Navah Hopkins, Product Liaison of Microsoft, said that,
As we enter the AI era, paid media strategists must adapt their approach to stay effective. There are three essential lessons to keep in mind: focusing on conversion thresholds, understanding creative and audience targeting, and prioritizing visual content.
Every campaign type needs a minimum number of conversions to succeed. Conversions provide the strongest signal for algorithms to allocate your budget effectively.
Instead of running highly segmented campaigns as in the past, shift to fewer campaigns with larger budgets. It's crucial to understand who your customer is and why they want your product or service.
Neal Schaffer, Project-Based Generative AI & Digital Marketing Strategy Consultant of NealSchaffer.com, said that,
AI-driven search feels different—it's not replacing a channel, it's reshaping how information gets discovered and consumed. LLMs don't just look at one query. They fan out dozens of background searches, parsing multiple sources.
I think about AI content in three tiers: garbage slop (hallucinated, misleading content—hard no), neutral filler (generic "10 tips" content—meh), and strategic AI-assisted content (accurate, on-brand, designed to answer real questions your audience and LLMs are asking).
Olaf Kopp, Head of SEO & AI Search & Co-Founder of Aufgesang GmbH, said that,
Users are moving away from short keywords towards more complex, conversational questions ("prompts"). AI systems understand the deeper "latent intent" behind these queries and often break them down into multiple sub-questions ("Query Fan-Out").
The focus is shifting from keyword optimization to structured, self-contained text passages. Anyone creating content today should consider every paragraph as a potential AI quote—independently understandable, factually correct, and directly relevant.
Ozan Ketenci, VP of Consulting & Strategy of Zeo, said that,
Let's start with the numbers: AI platforms currently account for just 1% of total web traffic. Google still sends hundreds of times more traffic than ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity combined. 95% of ChatGPT users continue to use Google as well.
But here's where it gets interesting: AI-driven traffic shows a 14.2% conversion rate, while Google organic traffic sits at 2.8%. Less traffic, higher intent.
My expectation for 2026: Obsessing over traffic metrics will become increasingly meaningless. The real competition will shift toward becoming a cited source in AI responses.
Pedro Dias, Independent Consultant of Visively, said that,
The most important thing to understand about AI and search is also the easiest to miss: AI didn’t replace discovery systems. It changed how people interact with them.
Now in 2026, I believe that phase will fade away. AI stops being novel and starts being ambient. The tools don’t disappear — the anxiety around them does.
That change doesn’t reward clever optimisation tricks. It rewards clarity.
When an AI system needs to ground an answer in external information, it has to retrieve that information first. That retrieval step looks very familiar: indexing, semantic matching, relevance scoring.
Purna Virji, Principal Consultant & Global Program Manager of LinkedIn, said that,
If 2024 was the year of AI experimentation and 2025 was the year of adoption, then 2026 will be the year of orchestration. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) requires a new approach. You’re now optimizing for how AI systems interpret, cite, and synthesize.
Data hygiene has become your most important SEO strategy.
And ambiguity is the enemy. If an LLM cannot confidently understand you, it cannot accurately represent you. You can’t “rank” in an AI answer if the system can’t understand who you are.
Richard Baxter, Founder of houtini.com, said that,
A hard, but important lesson: Be useful, complete in your writing and have empathy for your user’s needs, or disappear.
Prolific as it is, using AI to write content is not a sustainable practice. It’s a bad idea.
I’ve done the tests; AI generated content works in search for long enough to give you a false sense that everything is working well, but, if you don’t stay on top of the output or you’re lazy, your rankings will go south really quickly.
AI enables human productivity, it’s not a replacement for human creativity.
Ross Simmonds, Founder & CEO of Foundation Marketing, said that,
One of the most important shifts happening in discovery right now is that fewer people are clicking on things. We’re moving toward a post-click world, where users don’t need to click through multiple links to get answers to their questions.
We’re also seeing LLMs prompt users with longer, more detailed questions than ever before. These longer LLM queries (or prompts) lead people to seek immediate answers rather than clicking through blog posts, recipes, or comparison pages.
Marketers need to think more deeply about the citations being pulled (Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc) and fed into LLM engines.
Samet Özsüleyman, SEO Manager of Zeo, said that,
In 2026, we are moving beyond traditional SEO metrics like clicks or average position and entering a new era with GEO. When a user asks something like "what are the best football boots?", AI models present a summary of the top 5 models, including their features and prices.
Users consume these results directly within the LLM interface and interact with the brand without ever visiting the website. This is why 2026 will be the year to re-evaluate how we measure SEO success and redefine our KPIs.
Serap Yurtvermez, Performance Marketing Team Lead of Zeo, said that,
The marketing world has spent much of the last two years trying to grasp and integrate artificial intelligence. But as we move through 2025, we see that this technology has shifted from a mere assistant to the very heart of operations.
Paid Search has been the frontline where this change is felt most acutely and rapidly.
In 2026, creatives won't just be the visual face of an ad; they will become the "targeting mechanism" itself. Brands without strategic depth that simply drift with the flow of automation risk getting lost in the high-cost, competitive digital market of 2026.
Sevda Yurtvermez, Performance Marketing Team Lead of Zeo, said that,
AI significantly reduces the need for manual intervention in paid search campaigns by optimizing bidding strategies, audience signals, and budget allocation in real time.
The shift from keyword-based management to intent- and behavior-driven campaign structures is accelerating.
By 2026, the operational management of digital marketing campaigns will be largely delegated to AI. Successful brands will be those that balance the speed of automation with human insight.
Talia Wolf, Founder and CEO of Getuplift, said that,
For years, conversion optimization meant optimizing your website: your landing pages, your customer journey, and the assets you own.
2026 is the year that model starts to break.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: people no longer come to your website to decide whether to buy. They come to confirm a checklist. Your feature set. Your pricing range. Your integrations.
Yiğit Konur, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of Zeo, said that,
When people talk about using AI for content creation, the first thing that usually comes to mind is churning out mass content to gain an advantage in search.
There is an unavoidable truth: we are not going to get back the same amount of traffic from AI engines that we are losing on the Google channel.
We will likely have less traffic, but it will be higher quality. To say this will have an overall positive impact on revenue would be overly optimistic.
The real critical point is this: you have to use AI creatively within content marketing.
There is a massive gap between asking a basic chatbot to write a standard article and using an agent fed by truly high-quality sources.
Zafer Yıldız, Web Analytics Manager of Zeo, said that,
In the world of digital analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have evolved from "futuristic concepts" into the fundamental building blocks of our measurement strategies.
As a GA4 and GTM specialist, I evaluate this transformation across three main axes: closing data gaps, strategic decision-making mechanisms, and predictive modeling.
We are living in a privacy-centric era (GDPR, CCPA, ITP/ATT). The "data gaps" caused by cookie restrictions and user opt-outs are now being filled by AI.
