Six Marketing Shifts Coming in 2026

In 2025, we saw marketing teams start wrestling with AI, measurement accountability finally getting serious, and the first real attempts at breaking down departmental silos. These are the six trends we’re seeing build on that momentum in 2026.

They're about the operational changes that determine whether marketing actually drives business results: how teams are being restructured, what they're measured on, and where the real investment decisions are happening.

Trend 1: AI Reads Your Content Before Buyers Do

According to Kantar, 24% of people now use AI to research purchases. Your buyer is using ChatGPT to build a vendor shortlist before they visit your website. That means your content goes through AI first, gets ingested, summarised, and ranked, then maybe a human sees it.

This isn't SEO anymore, it's AI Engine Optimisation. Structure your documentation for machines first: clear headers, FAQs, structured data, and content that answers questions directly. If AI can't parse it properly, you don't make the consideration set.

Trend 2: Service Businesses Are Building Their Own SaaS

The line between consultancy and software company has disappeared. Agencies are building proprietary platforms, and professional services firms are bundling software into delivery. It's not "consulting plus tools" anymore - it's one integrated offering.

If you're running a service business and you're not asking whether software could create a moat around your expertise, you're behind. It changes your product strategy, pricing model, how you position yourself, and how defensible your business is.

Trend 3: Vanity Metrics Can't Hide Poor Results Anymore

Marketing Week reports that only 39% of marketers measure actual business outcomes. The rest are hiding behind impressions and engagement. Privacy changes killed last-click attribution, so you can't fake it anymore with attribution models that give marketing credit for sales that would have happened anyway. Marketing Mix Modelling is back because it's one of the few ways left to actually measure whether your spend is driving business results.

If you can't tie marketing to revenue, margins, and lifetime value, you won't keep your budget.

Trend 4: RevOps is Moving From Buzzword to Actual Restructuring

For years, companies talked about "breaking down silos" between marketing and sales while keeping them in separate reporting lines with separate goals. That's changing; companies are actually reorganising around revenue instead of just talking about it.

What this looks like in practice: unified data platforms that both teams work from, shared revenue targets instead of MQLs vs closed deals, and compensation structures that reward pipeline quality and conversion, not just volume. Marketing is measured on SQLs and pipeline contribution, while sales has visibility into campaign performance and lead sources. Neither team can optimise their piece in isolation anymore.

The shift isn't the concept of RevOps; it's that companies are finally willing to do the hard work of reorganising, rather than slapping a "RevOps" title on someone and calling it fixed.

Trend 5: Product-Led Growth Isn't Enough Anymore

91% of SaaS companies with PLG are increasing investment, but PLG alone doesn't cut it. The winning model is Product-Led Sales, where the product qualifies users based on usage data and triggers sales at the right moment. Self-serve for discovery, sales for conversion and expansion.

This changes how you structure teams, what you measure, and where you allocate budget. Do you invest in product development or sales headcount? The answer is both, meaning cross-functional teams that own the entire customer journey rather than separate organisations pointing fingers at each other.

Meeting the Google Ads team @ Google HQ in London

Trend 6: Paid Platforms Are Giving Control Back After Years of Black-Box Automation

For years, Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ were black boxes where you handed over your budget and "trusted the algorithm" with zero visibility. Advertisers pushed back hard, and platforms finally caved.

Google now shows ad combination data for campaigns with fewer than 1,000 impressions, which used to be available only for big-budget accounts (I told Google this during a meeting in May, so claiming credit). Performance Max shows channel-level reporting and actual search terms. Reddit's ad platform gives you transparency over targeting. The pendulum swung back from pure automation to "automation with visibility," and that matters because you can finally make informed budget decisions based on what's actually working.