Looking Forward: Popular Digital Marketing Trends for 2026
Last month, we discussed the major marketing themes that dominated our world in 2025 including AI tools, Google search changes, content reuse and overuse, headless architecture, and first party data collection. Now, we’re looking forward into 2026 and what we expect to be common trends in the digital world. We anticipate that the major 2025 items continue but with some evolving industry shifts.
AI Practicality
We expect that there will be some big winners and losers in the world of AI technology and business adoption of AI. AI related solutions that were built specifically for market needs will settle successfully into the workplace, but AI features and tools built merely to monopolize on the popularity of “AI” branding will falter.
AI will continue to be a major trend, but we expect to see a little more realism and practicality in the general cultural and business approach to AI. Investments will slow, requirements to integrate AI without a strategic plan will soften, and legal and operational guardrails will start to settle into place impacting what AI companies can and cannot do.
Creative Content
As marketers and websites using generative AI continue to produce a lot of content that tends to look the same, content leaders will start looking for how to push for brand authenticity, produce more creativity in their content, and rely more heavily on authority signals. Brand voices that work to build trust and relevance will stand out.
Rich, Long Form Content Shines
Although we spoke about the problem with content reuse and overuse, what we didn’t spend much time analyzing in the last blog was how some rich, long form content saw big wins in 2025. AIO, ChatGPT, and Perplexity all frequently cite blog articles—in particular unique, expert-level blog articles in niche and in-depth areas. This bottom funnel blog success could mean that we see a rise of blogging again for both B2C and B2B businesses.
Zero-Click Opportunity
In the search landscape, the rise of zero-click search results hit many organizations hard in 2025. Zero-click was often framed as a loss of traffic and website engagement. SEO experts have started to reframe zero-click—looking for opportunities within the change. We expect more strategic AEO projects that will help brands use zero-click search to increase audience touchpoint, improve brand awareness, and increase purchase intent.
Accessibility and Multimodal Experience
Accessibility as a foundational aspect of UX, design, and website infrastructure has been slowly on the rise for years. We might finally see the turning point where accessibility becomes one of our defining conversations. Not only does accessible design widen website audiences and drive ROI, but other trends in UX and design are aligning strongly with accessibility.
Voice assistants have boomed, multimodal experiences are significantly more popular, and more people are designing while thinking about what role motion can play. All of these have commonalities with areas of accessibility design, which could help boost the popularity of accessible design as foundational not supplemental.
What Do You Expect in 2026?
These handful of themes are only the start of some of the digital marketing focuses we will see in 2026. We could spend another entire blog article on social media changes that are on horizon. Have you seen any changes start in 2026? What are you looking forward to and preparing for?
If you’re looking to discuss what marketing help you need in 2026 and how to make sure your business stays on the cutting edge through the year, reach out! We partner with organizations around the world to help them create and implement impactful marketing projects that help them reach their business goals. Whether it’s leveraging AI tools, transition to the new AEO search world, or integrate accessibility more holistically through their ecosystem—we’re here to help.