It used to be that marketers could take a beat in January, reflect on the year before, and (preflect?) on the trends to come.

But marketing marches much faster now. To finish the second half of the year strong, we need to think about the shifts from the first six months and what they mean.

Many of the trends I’ve tracked from Q1 and Q2 are, of course, AI-motivated. It’s changing how people search, when you can influence buyers, and how you manage paid ads.

But there are some human-led trends emerging, too. LinkedIn is looking more like TikTok, for example. And big brands, in their ongoing search for authenticity, are tapping “regular people” with a few hundred followers as the next faces of their campaigns.

Let’s dig into eight of the biggest new marketing trends for 2026 and see how you can use them to keep your momentum for the rest of the year.

Contents

1. GEO success is actually built on SEO fundamentals
2. AI is changing the buyer journey
3. Context is the new audience targeting
4. PMax and Demand Gen become must-have strategies for small businesses
5. LinkedIn is becoming a creator economy
6. Big brands are courting small-time influencers
7. Content marketers are choosing sides in the battle of AI
8. Unique tools become a way to AI-proof your content

8 marketing trends you need to know to finish 2026 strong

The dust has settled on the first half of the year. Here’s what happened and how to stay ahead of the curve.

1. GEO success is actually built on SEO fundamentals

There’s been a lot of discussion around how to gain visibility in AI search. For a while, things like llms.txt files, specialized schema markup, and content chunking (the grossest marketing term since SEO juice) were the biggest priorities.

More recently, the prevailing wisdom has evolved to focus more on SEO fundamentals as the best way to get more AI citations and mentions. And some prominent voices in the space corroborated the shift.

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But the concept has really taken hold since Google released its first official guidance on how AI Overviews and AI Mode work in May. It clearly mapped the connection between how its AI systems surface answers to the way its algorithms surface links.

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“We’ve seen that about 80% of the time, what’s good for SEO is good for GEO,” said Nikiya Griffith, Director of Organic Growth at BX Studio.

“Our most successful strategic initiatives over the last year have been ones where SEO and GEO were approached in unison as one holistic strategy. Of course, you still need to devote time and attention to the considerations that are unique to GEO or SEO, but overall, we really see GEO as an extension of good SEO.”

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How to leverage this trend

The new trend is to focus on the basics of good SEO as the foundation of your GEO strategy. 

In part, that means:

• Nail the SEO fundamentals: page speed, mobile usability, site structure, etc.
• Incorporate real-life experiences in your content
• Build local relevance and trust signals (for local SEO)

It’s worth digging into the details of this trend. Get started with this guide to responding to Google’s GEO guidelines.

2. AI is changing the buyer journey

We’ve all heard about how AI search is throttling website traffic (nearly 65% of Google searches end without a click).

But there’s another, possibly more troublesome, trend as more buyers use AI agents to find products and services. Brands are losing the influence they used to have in the middle of the buying journey.

Here’s why. People used to get a list of links when they searched for a lawn care service or yoga studio nearby. Now, AI gives buyers a complete set of recommendations that shapes their perception before they ever click a link.

“The biggest shift in local SEO is that discovery is rarely happening on your website first,” explained Dennis Wilson, VP of Product Management at LocaliQ. “It’s happening across AI-driven platforms, like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Potential customers, even your current customers, are forming and reforming opinions, and comparing options before they ever click.”

How to leverage this trend

The solution is to influence buyers BEFORE they head to search. Generally speaking, that means getting in front of them in the places they trust with relevant messaging earlier in their buying journey.

When you do it right, you can even influence how people search. For example, if you’re the only lawn care service in town that uses environmentally friendly weed control, you can teach buyers to search for that (and be the choice AI recommends).

I explored the origin of this trend and showed some of the specific tactics successful businesses use in this guide.

3. Context is the new audience targeting

Contextual ad targeting—placing ads based on the content around it—is becoming a preferred tactic for marketers. That’s helping marketers show ads that are more relevant to the moment, not just the person.

In part, it’s because of the growing data gap. It’s much harder to collect useful audience data than it used to be. 48% of global internet traffic is now cookie-less.

But an even bigger lever for this trend is AI’s superior ability to understand what’s on a page and match your message to it. It’s no longer about matching a keyword. LLMs can understand intent, semantic context, and nuanced meaning in real time. One study showed that the CPC for contextual ads was 48% less than for similar third-party cookie ads.

With audience targeting, you can show ads to college-educated travelers who have shown an interest in visiting Louisiana. A contextually targeted ad shows right as someone reads an article from their favorite food columnist about the amazing seafood on the Florida coast.

How to leverage this trend

To prepare for this one, audit your ads for contextual relevance, considering where they will likely land. Rethink your keyword and category lists so your ads match the intent and sentiment of a page. Be intentional with negative contextual targeting to keep your ads away from places you don’t want them. And consider adding engagement and relevance metrics, like view time and on-page actions, to your analytics mix.

Additionally, consider some of the contextual placements Google recently announced, like ads in Google AI Mode.

4. PMax and Demand Gen become must-have strategies for small businesses

Google continues to consolidate its advertising products into smaller buckets. This trend continued in early 2026. Two changes in particular are important for small and local businesses to understand.

First, in May 2026, Google announced that standalone Display campaigns will be absorbed into Demand Gen campaigns. The Google Display Network remains, but the way you purchase advertising inventory on it will change.

Display campaigns won’t be a standalone option moving forward.

Second, the Local Services Ads (LSAs) dashboard will sunset, and LSAs will move into the Google Ads interface. After the shift, you’ll run LSAs through Performance Max (PMax) campaigns.

The popular Local Services Ads are moving to PMax campaigns.

Together, these changes mean that many of the businesses that have been holding out on running Demand Gen and PMax campaigns will be pushed towards using them.

“Many small business advertisers have been using standard Display campaigns and legacy LSAs but have been more hesitant to try newer, fully-automated campaign types like Demand Gen and PMax,” said Susie Marino, senior content marketing specialist at LocaliQ. “Now, they’ll have to adapt their strategy to embrace these campaign types in order to still capture the ad placements they want.”

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How to leverage this trend

There are several actions to consider. But generally speaking, this trend means you’ll see more AI and automated control over your ads, a broader pool of ad placements (for Display), and potential changes to your bidding options.

Get the full scoop on the changes to Display ads here, and the updates to Local Services Ads here.

5. LinkedIn is becoming a creator economy

Like TikTok and Instagram before it, LinkedIn is making intentional moves to turn its platform into a creator economy.

A creator economy is a space (usually digital) where writers, artists, educators, and others grow online audiences to earn money from their content.

Jenna St John, Head of Content and Ops at Grizzle, recently broke down the features LinkedIn has launched so far to make it happen (her whole article is worth a read):

• 2023: Thought Leader Ads
• May 2025: BrandLink (reopened to individual creators)
• March 2026: Top Voices 360
• June 2026: Creator Marketplace

That last one is a big step. It makes it super easy for B2B brands and advertisers to connect with a group of vetted, professional content creators.

That’s the pull that’ll help bring more sponsored content to your LinkedIn feed. The push comes from the tightening job market for content marketers (partly created by AI). Some freshly laid-off in-house marketers and highly qualified freelancers are finding it easier to generate revenue streams through B2B brand partnerships than by hustling for their next direct gig.

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The result will be more professional, higher-quality, more promotionally focused content on our LinkedIn feeds.

How to leverage this trend

If LinkedIn is investing in creator-led content, you can bet that’s what its algorithms will favor.

As Jenna succinctly put it, “Every product in that list above moves money, reach, and attention away from company pages and toward individual people.”

The natural reaction for B2B sellers is to find a LinkedIn influencer who works in your niche. But there’s an even better way to leverage this trend: find and foster budding in-house influencers.

The key here is to not just push employees to post about your business on their personal accounts. Instead, give them the tools, training, and encouragement to build their own brand. Help them curate and share your best content (blog posts, videos, etc.), but give them room to do so in their own voice. That will help keep their posts authentic and give them an incentive (a bigger following they can leverage for themselves) to keep going.

6. Big brands are courting small-time influencers

Big brands are betting on budding influencers with follower counts that wouldn’t have interested them in the past.

Micro-influencers (10K to 100K followers) have been a thing for a while. But this new crop of promising promotional YouTubers and TikTokers often have follower counts in the hundreds.

Brands find authenticity and relevance by working with budding content creators.

This trend is fueled by the evolution of social media algorithms. Discovery now plays a bigger part in what you get served, meaning you’ll see more creators you’ve never followed in your feed. And that’s the shift brands are leveraging here.

“The way that the algorithms work on social media now means the majority of what you see comes from someone you didn’t choose to follow,” said Paul Archer, the founder and CEO of Duel, a tech platform for brand advocacy programs, as reported by MSN.

The social platforms are backing this trend with new platform features. LinkedIn’s Thought Leader ads (mentioned earlier) and Google’s integrated YouTube creator partnerships (announced at Google Marketing Live this year) are good examples.

How to leverage this trend

Many of the big brand programs include influencer academies of sorts. Meaning, there will be more ready-to-sell, up-and-coming influencers that still have reasonable rates you can use to promote your business.

I like searching hashtags to find the right persona. Try tags like #DIYAustin or #YogaMomOrlando for locals in your field. Scroll through their account to make sure the vibe is right. And confirm what you get in exchange for what you give. Miscommunication is the biggest killer of influencer program success.

7. Content marketers are choosing sides in the battle of AI

There’s a very civil war brewing in the content marketing corner of LinkedIn. On one side of the trenches are marketers building complex, multi-skill AI content production processes. On the other are marketers who feel most of content creation belongs in human hands.

The pro-AI faction says that, with the right type of layered Claude or ChatGPT skills, you get a great result. It takes trial, testing, and iteration for it to wring out all of the common foibles found in AI content (overusing em dashes, the “it’s X, not Y” structure, etc.). And even more custom-built AI agents to ensure its creations sound like your brand.

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Team anti-AI (or, maybe more fairly, team “don’t automate the entire content process”) aren’t necessarily against any use of ChatGPT or Claude. But they say that when it comes to actually writing the thing, the probabilistic nature of AI means it can’t help but create content that’s comfortably in the middle (neither unique nor pushing any boundaries).

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How to leverage this trend

Whether or not you use AI isn’t the real question. It’s how you use it that matters here. We’ve detailed some ways it can be very helpful in marketing already. So let’s look at a few ways you shouldn’t.

First, don’t use it to mass-produce LinkedIn posts. Readers don’t want that, and neither does LinkedIn. In fact, it recently added a “Seems like AI slop” option to the post drop-down menu.

And second, don’t use it without transparency.

In general, consumers are becoming more concerned than optimistic about the use of AI. If you use it manipulatively, you’ll land on the wrong side of their fears.

Case in point. We recently stumbled on this comparison between WordStream and the publisher’s own marketing agents.

It’s absolutely full of wrong information, an incorrect timeline, and obvious AI tropes. There are dozens of these published on the same day.  Worst of all, it’s framed as a real first-person account. Duping potential customers is not a strong long-term growth strategy.

8. Unique tools become a way to AI-proof your content

As mentioned, Google and AI chatbots keep more of the search traffic for themselves. But building DIY tools is turning out to be a way to fight AI with AI.

Expect to see more DIY tools in blog and social content.

AI search platforms are great at summarizing the words on your website. But they can’t (or at least don’t) spin up a square footage calculator when you Google “how much will new hardwood flooring cost.” It will, however, share a link to your cost calculator.

How to leverage this trend

AI tools are, at least at this moment, one of the best new ways to extract a little more traffic out of stingy AI search engines.

The best part is that building them is now very accessible, thanks to AI (almost ironic). With a basic Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT account, you can quickly create a working calculator which you can then embed in a blog post.

You don’t even need to go super elaborate. Just focus on niche relevance. For example, we built a local SEO ROI calculator and added it to a local SEO tips blog article. It made the piece more useful overall and can be an AI visibility signal when people search “How do I measure the ROI of my SEO?”

If you’re not sure what to build, this guide from Ahrefs shows how to find “tool” keywords worth targeting.

Somehow this year feels like it’s moving even faster than previous ones. It could be that so much has changed in just the last six months.

The silver lining is that where there’s change, there’s opportunity for those who jump on it first. The trends I covered here are mostly still early-stage (or at least early-ish stage). Take the leap and get first-mover advantage over your competitors.

And if you’d like some help staying way ahead of it all, reach out. We’ll show you how we stay on top of these trends, work directly with advertising platforms, and build solutions into our systems so it all just works seamlessly for you.