Our 2026 Content Marketing Predictions: Part One

More noise, more AI, more disruption — and even more opportunities that favor the brave

Last year, marketing, as a practice and a profession, was served a lot of disruption — a mixture of shifting expectations, disorienting technological innovation, and a wild clamor of voices shouting what they purport to be the answers that point to a future of unknowns. But if there’s one thing 2025 made clear, it’s that periods of distortion don’t just create instability, they also create opportunity.

The winners here will be the ones who adapt fastest, rethink their fundamentals, and move with conviction while everyone else waits for the clarity that will probably never arrive. And if anyone is expecting 2026 to “settle down,” don’t bet on it.

But don’t fear it, either. Because this year will bring more of the same: companies struggling between AI possibilities and promises, with the realities and limitations of generative AI continuing. Companies will keep twisting and turning trying to figure out how to keep up, while managing the fear of being left behind.

We’ll see a never-ending trail of new business emails, presentations, and conferences promising new digital CRM, MarTech, and AdTech solutions, all “AI powered” of course. Marketing spend will increase, but it will increasingly flow away from traditional tools and tactics to fund an equally never-ending procession of AI pilot programs.

In other words: more experimentation, more noise, more new things to learn and assess.

The question for 2026 is whether marketers can convert all that progress, churn, and froth into something that actually matters.

To help answer that, I asked my colleagues Dan Rubin, Paschal Fowlkes, Ellen Stark, Josh Lerman, Jennifer Tuozzolo, and Emily Silber to share a few predictions for the year ahead. Their forecasts differed in form, but they shared an underlying message:

In an AI-saturated world, the brands that win won’t be the ones that produce the most content. They’ll be the ones that produce the content with the most meaning.

Here’s Part One with the first six things we’re watching. (We’ll be publishing Part Two with 7 to 12 next week.)

The Big Ideas (the ones that have potential to reshape marketing):

Josh Lerman put it best: “This is the year the great ‘awAIkening’ begins. Marketers will realize that AI isn’t a solution in and of itself. It’s a technology that enables solutions, but only if you do the hard work of defining what you’re trying to change.”

Josh made a great analogy: “Throwing ‘AI’ at marketing is like bringing a bucket of gasoline into Macy’s offices in 1910 and saying ‘this will change everything.’ Gasoline isn’t a strategy. It’s fuel to power a strategy. You still need a plan.”

That’s 2026 in a sentence.

This will be the year brands start replacing AI tests with AI processes that actually deliver value:

Using AI to reduce friction in workflows (not just output)
Rebuilding processes instead of layering tools on top
Making a few intentional bets instead of endless pilots
Investing in governance, training, and measurement

The winners won’t be the ones who talk about AI most. They’ll be the ones who apply it most intelligently.

If 2025 was the year of prompting, 2026 becomes the year of systems.

Emily Silber’s prediction: “Agent-led content strategies will emerge, with brands delegating planning and optimization workflows to agentic AI systems that can autonomously create, execute, and refine multi-step programs.”

This practical shift has enormous potential. Marketers will move from:

Creators → supervisors
Publishers → orchestrators
Campaign builders → system designers

And once that happens, speed becomes table stakes. Strategy becomes the differentiator again.

This is my personal wild-card for ‘26: Jony Ive — what’s he building?

If he cracks the next interface that integrates humans with AI, we may see the first credible signal of a post-smartphone era. And if that happens, marketing changes overnight because users’ attention changes overnight.

Apps were built for fingers on glass.

Agents will be built for intent.

And once consumers can speak, delegate, and automate across their daily lives, the very idea of “traffic” as we understand it now starts to look really different.

We’re living in extremes, where both of these things could become true this year.

Either:

The AI bubble bursts (not because capability disappears, but because budgets and expectations snap back to reality

We get a genuine leap toward AGI and computers become as smart as people in many forms of knowledge work.

And ironically, they could both happen in the same year: investment fatigue at the corporate level, while the underlying technology continues to improve.

This is why 2026 will feel unstable and in a continued state of flux. Not because AI slows down, but because the market’s ability to understand and adapt to it falls behind.

Potential structural shifts (the ones that could quietly change marketing):

One of the most important (and least discussed) shifts is this:

Websites will no longer be destinations unto themselves but provide training content for LLMs.

Owned content becomes less about “visits” and more about:

Credibility and authority signals
Training data and retrieval value
Structured “truth objects” that answer engines can cite
Modular inputs that power an ecosystem across channels

This aligns closely with Emily Silber’s broader distribution prediction: “Distribution will matter more than creation.” As platforms fragment, brands lose control of their narrative to the LLMs, and algorithms become less predictable, the strategy shifts from “where we publish” to “how content moves.”

This is the natural outgrowth of prediction #5 — and as we see in-app purchases in ChatGPT and other AI apps, marketers will have to start to treat answer bots as a distinct audience to target.