The 2026 marketing trends worth acting on are the ones that change decisions, not the ones that change vocabulary. If a trend does not shift how you allocate budget, build a data foundation, measure impact, or produce creative that stands out, it is usually noise.

This year’s planning reality is simple: AI is changing how people discover and choose, privacy constraints keep tightening in practice, and performance measurement keeps getting harder to defend with a single dashboard. The teams that win in 2026 will make fewer bets, run cleaner tests, and build systems that hold up when channels wobble.

At a Glance: The 10 Trends That Will Shape Marketing in 2026

Here are the ten shifts that most directly affect strategy, budgets, and operating models.

Agentic AI enters the workflow

AI moves from “help me create” to “help me execute,” across reporting, research, segmentation, and campaign operations.

Discovery becomes AI-native

Search results, video, and shopping journeys increasingly start with AI summaries and conversational exploration, not ten blue links.

The bar for content quality rises

Generic content gets filtered out faster, because AI makes generic content abundant. Differentiation becomes structural, not stylistic.

First-party data becomes a growth constraint

Teams that cannot collect, permission, and activate data cleanly will struggle to target, personalize, and measure.

Cookie reliance becomes a liability

You need plans for environments where third-party cookies are restricted or unavailable.

Commerce media expands beyond retail

“Commerce media” is no longer only retail networks. More purchase journeys are monetized where the transaction happens.

Retail media concentration intensifies

Costs rise and competition tightens, especially where spend consolidates into a few large platforms.

Measurement shifts to incrementality and modeled truth

Attribution still exists, but it is no longer sufficient. Incrementality tests and marketing mix modeling become core.

Creative becomes a performance lever again

When targeting and tracking get harder, creative quality, clarity, and distinctiveness carry more of the load.

UX becomes part of the media plan

Speed, accessibility, and landing page clarity are not “website tasks.” They determine whether paid and organic traffic converts.

By the numbers

Research reports 24% of AI users already use an AI shopping assistant, and 74% of AI assistant users regularly seek AI-driven recommendations in its Marketing Trends 2026 work.
Google cites an Ipsos survey in which 83% of global consumers report using Google and or YouTube daily.
EMARKETER projects US retail media ad spending will reach $69.33B in 2026, up from $58.79B in 2025.

How We Built These Predictions

These predictions are based on decision-changing signals, not trend spotting for its own sake. The goal is to identify what forces a different plan, not what makes a good conference slide.

We prioritized trends that do at least one of the following:

Change how people discover information, brands, or products at scale
Change what you can measure reliably, or how confident you can be in ROI
Change what data you can legally or technically use, and how you must collect it
Change production economics for creative, content, and campaigns

A simple way to use this list is a three-part filter. Score each trend on:

Impact: How much it changes performance, cost, or risk for your business
Feasibility: Whether you have the data, people, and tools to execute well
Time-to-value: Whether you can learn something meaningful in the next 90 days

If a trend scores high on impact but low on feasibility, you do not ignore it. You build a plan to raise feasibility, then run a constrained test.

AI Moves From Tools to Agents

Most teams have already adopted AI for production tasks: drafts, variations, summaries, and basic analysis. The 2026 shift is agentic behavior. Instead of giving AI a prompt and receiving an output, you assign AI a goal, constraints, and tools, and then it completes multiple steps.

In plain terms, an AI agent is a system that can plan and act. It can pull data, run checks, generate options, and push work into tools your team already uses.

That creates two types of “agent” pressure on marketing.

1) Internal Agents Change How Work Gets Done

Internal agent use is where most teams will see near-term value. The best use cases are repetitive, rules-based, and measurable.

High-ROI internal agent workflows for 2026:

Weekly performance synthesis: pull top changes, explain likely drivers, flag anomalies, and propose follow-up tests
Creative QA support: check claims, compliance basics, brand tone consistency, and variation coverage
Lifecycle ops: identify segments that should move into a sequence, propose message angles, and draft versions for review
Research acceleration: summarize new research, build a comparison matrix of sources, and extract what decisions it changes

The risk is not that these agents exist. The risk is that they automate messy processes and scale confusion.

A practical control point: every agent workflow needs one human owner, one definition of “done,” and one list of non-negotiable rules.

2) Customer Agents Change How Brands Get Chosen

When consumers brief an assistant to compare products or shortlist options, your brand is competing in a new interface. It is not only competing for attention. It is competing to be recommended by a system that is trained on content, sentiment, and structured facts.

This does not make brand building optional. It makes brand building more measurable in a new way: if the model does not “know” you, it cannot recommend you.

A simple way to prepare is to treat your product and service information as an inventory, not a set of web pages.

What To Do Next: Agent Readiness Checklist

Focus on fundamentals before you chase novelty.

Data and truth layer
- Identify one authoritative source of product truth, pricing truth, and policy truth
- Standardize naming across site, catalog, CRM, and ads
Governance
- Write “allowed” and “not allowed” rules for AI outputs in your brand voice
- Decide what requires human approval every time: claims, pricing, legal, medical, finance
Workflow design
- Pick 2 to 3 workflows to pilot, each with a measurable outcome
- Define a rollback plan for mistakes, including a log of what the agent changed
Measurement
- Track time saved, error rate, and business outcomes separately
- Treat productivity wins as a bonus, not the primary KPI

If you run marketing for a regulated category or a complex buyer journey, start smaller. Use agents first for research, reporting, and QA, not customer-facing decisioning.

Search and Discovery Become AI-Native

Search is still a major channel, but the mechanics of discovery are changing. AI summaries, conversational exploration, and multimodal search move users from “click and read” to “scan and decide,” often without visiting many pages.

Google’s own view reinforces what matters: quality and usefulness, not how content is produced. The company’s guidance on AI-generated content emphasizes rewarding high-quality, original content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust.

That matters in 2026 because more marketers will be tempted to scale content production. The content that survives is the content that adds something new.

What Changes for Content Strategy

Most “SEO content” problems in 2026 will not be technical. They will be similar problems. If your page does not add new information, new clarity, or a better decision framework, it becomes replaceable.

The clearest shifts to plan for:

Fewer clicks on easy answers: definitions and basic comparisons are more likely to be summarized
Higher value on unique evidence: proprietary data, strong synthesis, and clear frameworks stand out
Stronger pressure on credibility: sources, author expertise, and factual consistency matter more

Google’s guidance on core updates is useful here because it reflects how the company expects teams to respond. It recommends avoiding drastic changes to pages that already perform, and focusing on whether your content is helpful, reliable, and people-first.

What To Measure When Clicks Get Less Reliable

If you measure only clicks, you will misread the channel. A more resilient measurement set includes:

Brand search demand and branded conversion rate
Share of qualified impressions for priority topics
Assisted conversions and downstream revenue quality
Landing-page conversion rate by intent segment

This is also where search engine optimization becomes less about single keywords and more about durable topical authority and page usefulness.

What Not To Do

Avoid tactics that inflate output while degrading trust:

Publishing dozens of near-duplicate pages to “cover the topic”
Recycling competitor phrasing without adding new value
Treating AI-generated drafts as finished content

A better approach is to publish fewer pages with more decision value. Make each section self-contained and quotable, because AI systems pull context in fragments.

Privacy, Identity, and Consent Become Growth Constraints

Privacy changes rarely arrive as one dramatic switch. They arrive as a slow tightening of what works reliably. In 2026, the practical trend is that targeting and measurement depend more on what you collect and permission, not what you can infer.

Marketers should plan for environments where third-party cookies are restricted or unavailable. Google’s Privacy Sandbox documentation frames this plainly: design experiences that work “whether or not third-party cookies are available,” and audit cookie use to understand what will break.

This is not only a media buying issue. It affects analytics, personalization, and attribution.

The 2026 Data Foundation That Actually Helps

A useful data foundation is not “collect everything.” It is a small set of reliable signals, collected with permission, tied to business outcomes.

Priorities that tend to pay off:

Consent clarity: users understand what you collect and why
First-party identifiers: email, login, loyalty, or other permissioned IDs where appropriate
Data hygiene: consistent event naming, clean UTM standards, and deduplication
Activation paths: the ability to use data in lifecycle, on-site experiences, and measurement

If your analytics and marketing stack depends heavily on third-party cookies, do a structured audit. List each dependency, the business use case it supports, and a first-party alternative.

A Practical 4-Step Privacy Readiness Plan

Map use cases

Targeting, frequency control, retargeting, attribution, personalization, fraud prevention

Audit dependencies

Where third-party cookies are used and what breaks when they are restricted

Prioritize replacements

First-party events, server-side tagging, consent management, and modeled measurement

Set governance

Define who can request new data collection, how it is reviewed, and how long it is retained

This work is not glamorous, but it changes how confidently you can scale. It is the difference between “we think it works” and “we can prove it works.”

Commerce Media Expands Beyond Retail

Commerce media is becoming a broader category than retail media. Anywhere that shopping intent is present and measurable can become a media surface. In practice, this means marketers will find “new retail media” in unexpected places, not only in big online marketplaces.

The budget signal is clear, even if your category is not retail-heavy. EMARKETER projects US retail media ad spending will reach $69.33B in 2026, up from $58.79B in 2025.

A second signal inside that forecast matters for planning: incremental spend tends to concentrate. When budgets consolidate, smaller networks become harder to justify unless they offer unique data or unique environments.

How To Decide If Commerce Media Fits Your Plan

Commerce media makes sense when you have:

Clear product-market fit and stable unit economics
A product catalog or offer structure that can be advertised consistently
Enough conversion volume to measure lift without guesswork
Creative that can perform in shoppable contexts

It is usually not the first move for brands that are still struggling with positioning, pricing, or conversion rate on owned channels.

A Vendor-Neutral Commerce Media Test Plan

Start with a narrow test that answers one question, not ten.

Pick one objective
- New customer acquisition, incrementality on existing demand, category conquesting, or basket expansion
Choose 2 networks
- One large, one niche, based on audience match and measurement capability
Define success before launch
- Incremental conversions or revenue, not only ROAS
Control variables
- Keep creative and offer consistent across networks where possible
Plan for learning
- A test is successful if you learn what works and what does not, then decide the next step

Commerce media becomes dangerous when it is treated as “easy performance.” It is still media. It needs creative, clean measurement, and clear economics.

Measurement Rebuild: Incrementality, MMM, and Curation

In 2026, measurement is not about picking the perfect model. It is about building a measurement stack that can survive channel fragmentation and partial visibility.

The practical shift is away from single-source truth dashboards, and toward a combination of methods:

Attribution for directional optimization
Incrementality tests to prove causal impact
Marketing mix modeling for budget allocation over time

When To Use Each Method

Use attribution when:

You need quick directional signals for creative, landing pages, and targeting
You understand it will over-credit some channels and under-credit others

Use incrementality testing when:

You need to prove a channel is actually creating net new value
Budgets are large enough that bad assumptions get expensive

Use MMM when:

You need to set budgets across channels and time horizons
Your business has seasonal patterns and a mix of brand and performance activity

Curation also becomes part of measurement. As programmatic inventory changes and attention fragments, “where your ads appear” influences outcomes. You will see more teams treat inventory selection as a strategic lever, not just an operational detail.

A Measurement Reset Checklist

Standardize conversion definitions across teams
Implement test-and-learn cadence: one meaningful experiment per month
Track lift metrics alongside efficiency metrics
Separate reporting into three layers:
- What happened
- Why it likely happened
- What decision it changes

Measurement does not need to be perfect. It needs to be defensible.

Creative and Brand Building in 2026

When everyone can produce content quickly, creative becomes the moat again. Not because creative is “nice to have,” but because creative is what people remember, and what they trust when targeting and tracking are constrained.

The creative trend signals for 2026 point to a simple idea: audiences want work that feels human. Adobe’s 2026 creative trends emphasize multisensory emotion, connection, play, and local cultural authenticity.

Think with Google’s 2026 predictions add a complementary consumer lens. It cites a survey with Ipsos where 83% of global consumers report using Google and or YouTube daily, reinforcing how often brands show up in high-frequency micro-moments.

What This Means for Creative Teams

Creative has to do two jobs at once:

Perform in-platform with fast feedback loops
Build recognition and preference over time

That changes how briefs should be written. A 2026 brief needs more than “target audience” and “CTA.” It needs decision clarity.

A strong creative brief for 2026 includes:

The single decision you want the viewer to make
The proof points that make the decision feel safe
The emotional tone you want to be associated with the brand
The one thing to remember after the ad ends

A Practical Creative System for 2026

Build a modular story, then adapt it across formats
Test concepts, not only executions
Standardize what “good” looks like with a small scorecard:
- Clarity, distinctiveness, trust, and relevance

This is where branding stops being a separate workstream and becomes a performance input.

The 90-Day Execution Blueprint

A good 2026 plan is not “do more.” It is “do fewer things, better, with cleaner proof.” This 30/60/90-day blueprint is designed to create decisions you can defend, even when channels shift mid-quarter.

Days 1 to 30: Build the Baseline and Remove Obvious Fragility

1) Data and measurement

Audit conversion definitions, event tracking, and reporting gaps
Identify one incrementality test you can run with minimal disruption

2) AI workflow pilots

Pick one internal AI workflow with clear value, such as weekly insights synthesis
Establish rules, logging, and human review points

3) Landing page fundamentals

Fix obvious UX and speed issues on priority pages
Ensure the page answers the user’s intent quickly and clearly

If your site experience is slow or unclear, paid and organic performance will both under-deliver. This is where basic web design services and performance hygiene become part of marketing execution.

Days 31 to 60: Run Focused Tests That Create Real Learning

1) Search and content upgrades

Refresh one high-intent content cluster with clear information gain
Add stronger sourcing and simplify structure so key points stand alone

Use Google’s guidance as a guardrail: focus on helpful, reliable content and avoid frantic changes after updates. (Google Search core updates guidance)

2) Commerce media pilot

Launch one controlled commerce media test with a clean definition of success
Plan a holdout or comparison design when possible

3) Creative concept testing

Test two distinct creative concepts, not ten minor variations
Measure lift, not only short-term efficiency

Days 61 to 90: Codify What Works Into Repeatable Systems

1) Governance

Finalize an AI usage policy for marketing, including brand voice, claims, and approvals
Document where data is collected, stored, and activated

2) Measurement operating model

Set a monthly experiment cadence
Establish how incrementality results influence budget moves

3) UX as a growth lever

Create a shared backlog of conversion and content UX improvements
Treat usability and clarity as performance inputs, not design preferences

Improving user experience is one of the highest-leverage moves when acquisition gets more expensive. It also reduces the pressure to “outspend” competitors.

Who Owns What

To avoid “everyone owns it,” assign clear ownership:

CMO or marketing lead: prioritization and budget moves
Marketing ops: data, measurement, governance
Growth and channel leads: tests and learning velocity
Creative lead: concept quality and consistency
Web and product partners: performance, UX, and conversion

This blueprint applies across business types, but the weighting changes. In many B2B marketing environments, pipeline quality and sales cycle measurement matter as much as immediate conversion efficiency.

Key Takeaways: What This Means for Marketers in 2026

Treat AI as an operating model change, not a software purchase. Start with workflows, controls, and measurable outcomes.
Plan for AI-native discovery by publishing fewer, better pages that add real information gain and stand on credible sourcing.
Build a first-party data foundation you can explain, defend, and activate. “More data” is not the goal. Useful, permissioned data is.
Expect commerce media to keep growing, and expect concentration where budgets consolidate. Test narrowly and measure incrementality.
Rebuild measurement around a stack: attribution for direction, incrementality for causality, MMM for budget planning.
Raise creative ambition. When targeting and tracking get harder, creative clarity and distinctiveness do more of the work.
Treat site performance and UX as part of the media plan. Conversion quality is a competitive advantage when acquisition costs rise.

‍2026 Marketing Trends: Predictions and a Practical Playbook for Better Decisions