9 Marketing Trends I’m Seeing Firsthand in 2026 (With Data)

I’ve spent 14 years in marketing. I’ve worked with everyone from teeny-tiny mom-and-pop shops to huge enterprise companies, and in that time I’ve sat through enough “this changes everything” trends to be pretty hard to impress. But truthfully: I have never seen so much change in so short a time as I have in the past year.

Even my own role has changed radically. As Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, I do a lot less writing than I used to, and a lot more building of systems that do the work for me. That might sound hyperbolic, but it isn’t, and it isn’t just me: as this article will show, the search data points to the same transformation happening across marketing as a whole, and across plenty of specific roles within it.

So here are the marketing trends I’ve seen firsthand, and that our data confirms, that are changing how marketing roles actually function in 2026.

The jury is still out, and my money is on subset. But that argument is for practitioners. What’s not up for debate is that this is a channel the C-suite, investors, and your own team all need to understand and optimize for, because the data says it arrived and it arrived fast.

If you want to get started with generative engine optimization, read our full guide to GEO. But in a nutshell, our advice comes down to three things:

Build mentions of your brand in relevant context throughout the internet.
Track your AI visibility, in terms of mentions and citations across a large index of content.
Create content that fills entity gaps, both on your own website and on other people’s.

Keyword	Value	Change
generative engine optimization	12,000/mo	+161% YoY
ai visibility	3,300/mo	+258% YoY
ai search optimization	4,800/mo	+152% YoY
ai overview optimization	900/mo	+625% YoY

Further reading

full guide on exactly that), but it really comes down to three things:

How present you are in the data the model learned from.
How often you show up in the content it retrieves at answer time.
And just as importantly, the context you appear in.

Get mentioned often, by the right sources, in the right context for a topic, and you become far more likely to be the brand an AI names when someone asks about it.

We dug into exactly which signals matter most. In our study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions across the web showed the strongest correlation (0.664) with AI Overview visibility, stronger than backlinks or domain rating. Get talked about in the right places, and AI is far more likely to talk about you.

If you want proof this is happening, look at the tools: an entire category of them sprang up just to measure it. Terms like “AI brand mentions,” “AI citation tracking,” and “AI mention tracking” didn’t exist 18 months ago and now pull steady monthly search demand. Ahrefs’ Brand Radar is built for exactly this, letting you search a massive index of real prompts to see how often, and for which topics, any company gets mentioned across the major AI assistants. Rank tracking for the AI era, basically.

Keyword	Value	Change
ai brand mentions	1,100/mo	new (Jun 2025)
ai citation tracking	500/mo	new (Jun 2025)
ai mention tracking	400/mo	from ~zero
brand mentions in ai	350/mo	from ~zero

Further reading

agentic marketing went from a piece of jargon to a line item in marketing budgets in barely a year.

The search data backs it up. This is one of the fastest-rising clusters in the whole list. The parent term “agentic AI” now pulls 101,000 searches a month, “agentic AI tools” is up 309% year over year, and “AI agents for marketing” is up 145%.

But the biggest growth comes from “agentic commerce,” up 464% year over year to 5,600 searches a month. That term points at the next step: agents that don’t just research and recommend, but actually complete purchases on websites for the person they work for. When the buyer is a bot, the rules of how you get discovered and chosen start to change.

We have gone all in on agentic marketing at Ahrefs. In fact, I’m building this very article with Agent A, Ahrefs’ AI agent. Every chart and every number you’re reading was pulled by Agent A, and I’m essentially narrating this piece in my own voice for it to write up. That’s agentic marketing in practice, not theory. It’s a big trend, and it’s well worth paying attention to.

Monthly US search volume for “agentic commerce.”

Keyword	Value	Change
agentic commerce	5,600/mo	+464% YoY
agentic ai tools	2,100/mo	+309% YoY
ai agents for marketing	1,000/mo	+145% YoY
agentic ai (parent)	101,000/mo	+45% YoY

Further reading

Vibe coding” now pulls 84,000 searches a month, up from effectively nothing, and the chart traces a near-vertical climb through early 2025.

“Vibe marketing” is the smaller, newer cousin following the same path. Marketing processes are more qualitative than code, but no less complicated, and as we’re learning at Ahrefs, plenty of them can be automated too. We wrote up what that looks like after 200+ hours with an AI marketing assistant.

Monthly US search volume for “vibe coding,” showing the 2025 vertical climb.

Keyword	Value	Change
vibe coding	84,000/mo	+17% YoY
windsurf ai	17,000/mo	+77% YoY
lovable ai	44,000/mo	+56% YoY
vibe marketing	800/mo	+15% YoY

Further reading

power AI search engines like ChatGPT.

The Ahrefs data on this is hard to ignore. The visibility of Reddit posts is through the roof: reddit.com’s organic Google traffic grew roughly 21x in five years, from around 58 million visits a month to over 1.2 billion. While plenty of sites got hit by recent Google algorithm updates, Reddit was one of the constant winners, picking up more and more visibility on the way. That makes Reddit marketing harder than ever to do well, and more important than ever to get right.

Here’s how we approach it at Ahrefs. We co-run our own subreddit, our people moderate other popular subreddits, and our CMO Tim hosts a regular AMA in r/bigseo where we ask the community for product feedback. The throughline is that we engage sincerely and we don’t try to market through it, because overt marketing is the one thing that will get you absolutely crushed on Reddit.

(And if you want to measure any of this, Brand Radar has a Reddit index you can use to track your visibility across Reddit threads over time.)

reddit.com estimated organic Google traffic, ~21x growth since 2021 (Ahrefs Site Explorer).

Metric	Value	Change
reddit.com organic traffic	58M → 1.22B/mo	~21x since 2021
reddit ranks top-10 for	10.6B US keywords	~35% of database
cited in AI Overviews	12M+ times	Ahrefs data
reddit marketing (keyword)	700/mo	+1% (flat)

Further reading

AI content process is a good example of using AI as a tool, not a replacement). And the data is clear that careful AI use is not the problem.

The takeaway isn’t “don’t use AI,” it’s “don’t publish slop.”

Monthly US search volume for “AI slop.”

Keyword	Value	Change
ai slop	28,000/mo	+115% YoY
ai detection	84,000/mo	+17% YoY

Further reading

SparkToro, the share of Google searches ending without a click has climbed from 45% in 2016 to 68% in 2026, and AI Overviews have pressed the accelerator.

Our own research first found AI Overviews cut click-through rates on the top organic result by 34.5%, and when we re-ran the study a year later that gap had widened to 58%. For every 100 clicks a top-ranking page used to earn, Google now keeps 58.

Consumer demand hasn’t gone anywhere. People still want to research and buy. What’s changed is the job your content does. Increasingly it works by helping LLMs understand what your brand is about, which entities and topics you should be associated with, rather than by funneling people straight to your site through search. Visibility and traffic are no longer the same thing.

One important caveat, so nobody overcorrects: AI traffic is growing and Google traffic is softening, but Google is still the primary traffic driver for the vast majority of websites, sending on the order of 40% of all traffic. ChatGPT’s click-through rate is roughly 96% lower than Google’s, and Google still sends about 190x more traffic to sites than ChatGPT does.

Optimize for the AI era, but do not walk away from search.

Share of Google searches ending without a click, 2016–2026 (SparkToro).

Monthly US search volume for “google ai overviews.”

Metric	Value	Change
zero-click searches (SparkToro)	45% → 68%	2016 → 2026
AI Overviews CTR impact	−34.5% → −58%	position-1, Ahrefs
ChatGPT vs Google CTR	96% lower	Ahrefs research
google ai overviews (keyword)	1,100/mo	+111% YoY

Further reading

made this case publicly: big corps are doing layoffs and blaming AI, when often it’s just belt-tightening with a tidier story attached. It’s worth holding both ideas at once: the layoffs are real, the stated reason may not always be.

Either way, the downstream effect on how teams work is hard to dispute. Smaller, leaner teams. Senior people back doing hands-on work. Everyone expected to cover more ground. But when every team has access to the same AI, the tools stop being the advantage. The difference comes from the skill of the people using them, the ones who know which questions to ask, what good output looks like, and when the machine is confidently wrong.

That’s why the rest of this list matters. GEO, agents, and vibe-building are the practical ways a smaller team covers the same ground with fewer people.