7 Ways AI Will Reshape Marketing in 2026
If there’s anything I can claim above-average knowledge in, it’s marketing. And the changes in AI are ones I’ve been living and breathing since the launch of ChatGPT.
This post is an attempt to predict what will happen in marketing in 2026 and what to make of it all.
OpenAI Does Ads
The worst-kept secret in AI is that OpenAI is going to become an ad platform. It’s inevitable.
There’s no business that has ever existed at their scale that has not become an ad platform.
The interesting part of this is not that OpenAI is going to become an ad platform, it’s what marketers are going to do with this ad format and how consumers are going to respond to these ads.
Implication: With every major platform shift, people who figure it out early are massively rewarded. This is a great time for brands to take risks and experiment on a platform that’s likely to be generational.
Who to follow to get smart here: Eric Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo
AEO Goes Back to Being Called Technical SEO
In 2025, agents were all the rage.
In the long run, more content on the internet will be written for agents than for humans.
And given how agents crawl the internet, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) has become the new way to describe the evolution of SEO. But that’s mostly what AEO is. It’s just a bigger emphasis on the most technical parts of SEO–not a new paradigm entirely.
Sitemaps, schema, site speed, and backlinks are still extremely critical. Good content is still king.
AEO is not a major shift. It’s just a further optimization on what has worked in SEO land.
Implication: The people who are the best at SEO, especially technical SEO, will be good at “AEO” (although AEO is probably an unnecessary term).
Who to follow to get smart here: Will Reynolds, Seer and Ethan Smith, Graphite
Authentic, Founder-driven Comms Dominate
It seemed like every CEO and founder was making fourth-wall-breaking videos this year. Talking directly to the market, without intermediaries, was given a name, “founder-led comms” or “founder-led marketing.”
Every new YC batch seems to have been given this playbook and the style of creating direct connections, which was once rare, is now everywhere.
While the trend will need to evolve to maintain its effectiveness, the prevalence of AI slop will make people yearn for authentic comms even more.
Implication: It’ll no longer be sufficient to just create a direct communication channel with customers. You now have to also have a distinct voice and be compelling. The founders, CEOs, and executives who can bring personality to the table will win.
Who to follow to get smart here: Lulu Cheng Meservey, Rostra
Zero-click AI Summaries Obsolete Informational Content
AI summaries in Google properties and OpenAI are reducing the number of sites people click on.
Previously, a content creator could focus on creating good content to please the Google gods and expect to be rewarded with traffic and thereby ad revenue.
With its recent AI efforts, Google has broken this covenant. Creating good content now leads to your content being scraped and you making nothing.
Counterintuitively, the better your content and the more authoritative it is the more likely you are to make nothing.
Implication: More content creators will put their content behind paywalls over time.
Who to follow to get smart here: Ben Thompson, Stratechery
Cloudflare Plays Internet Bounty Hunter
If content creators will get fewer views, clicks, and ad revenue in 2026, what can they do about it?
Publishers like Reddit and News Corp are signing licensing deals with the major AI aggregators to make sure they’re being compensated for their content.
And Cloudflare, which sees over 20% of the internet through its infrastructure, has positioned itself as the chief negotiator for large publishing licensing contracts. Cloudflare has the ability to block content from AI crawlers it deems to be publisher-unfriendly.
Implication: This puts Cloudflare in a powerful position to extract value from nearly every content transaction involving an AI crawler.
Who to follow to get smart here: Matthew Prince, CEO at Cloudflare
PR is Back
LLMs rely on reputable sources to provide good answers. It’s hard for LLMs to trust what a first-party source says. So reputable third-party source are returned at higher rates than the average site.
Because of this, PR, which is viewed as a more objective signal of the credibility of something, is coming back.
Implication: Companies will have to get more comfortable with the lack of direct attribution that comes from PR and comms. Good comms people with strong connections will be highly sought after.
Who to follow get smart here: Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing at Hubspot
Marketing Analytics Happen in Cursor
AI is being used by marketers to do everything from conducting market research, writing copy, generating images and video, and creating marketing plans.
One area that marketers will start to use AI is in marketing analytics. Product and engineering teams have already started using Claude Code CLI and Cursor to do analysis.
As these tools move upstream and become less technical, marketers will start to use them for analyzing marketing campaign efficacy.
Implications: The TAM and use cases for IDE and Codegen tools are only increasing, and marketers will need to continue becoming more technical to benefit.
Who to follow to get smart here: Dan Hock, Chief Strategy Officer at Faire
In 2026, I expect to see a new ad platform emerge from OpenAI, big changes in the way content is created and distributed, and better tools to measure marketing performance.
Together, these shifts will reshape how we bring products to market for the next several years.