87%
Of marketers use generative AI in at least one recurring workflow
Salesforce State of Marketing 2026
01 — Executive Summary
Digital Marketing in 2026: AI-Saturated, Budget-Flat, and Increasingly Click-Averse
Three forces define digital marketing in 2026, and they are pulling in different directions. First, generative AI adoption inside marketing teams has gone from experimental to near-universal — 87% of marketers now use generative AI in at least one recurring workflow, up from 51% just two years ago (Salesforce State of Marketing 2026). Second, the budgets funding all of this have not kept pace: Gartner's CMO Spend Survey puts marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, effectively flat versus 7.7% in 2025, with 56% of CMOs saying they lack the budget to deliver their strategy. Third, and most structurally significant, the channel marketers have relied on for two decades — organic search — is being reshaped by AI Overviews and AI-native search products faster than most teams have adjusted their reporting.
The result is a market where doing more with less is not a slogan but the operating reality. CMOs are funding AI initiatives by reallocating rather than growing: the average CMO now puts 15.3% of the marketing budget toward AI, while martech's overall share of spend has fallen to a five-year low of 19.4% (Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026). Meanwhile, owned channels — the ones a brand doesn't have to pay a platform to reach — are becoming more valuable precisely because paid and organic acquisition are both getting harder and more expensive.
87%
Marketers using GenAI in ≥1 workflow, 2026
Salesforce SoM 2026
51%→87%
GenAI workflow adoption growth, 2024→2026
Salesforce SoM
7.8%
Average marketing budget as % of company revenue
Gartner CMO Spend 2026
56%
Of CMOs say they lack sufficient budget for their 2026 strategy
Gartner CMO Spend 2026
🟢 What the data confirms
AI adoption in marketing is no longer a differentiator — it is table stakes. Enterprise teams (250+ marketers) report 94% adoption, and even micro-teams under 10 people have crossed 73% (Salesforce State of Marketing 2026 / Omnibound synthesis). Email remains the highest-ROI digital channel by a wide margin, and short-form video has become the single highest-ROI content format according to marketers themselves.
🔴 The structural gap that defines 2026
58–68% of Google searches now end without a click (SparkToro, Similarweb, Bain — estimates vary by methodology and panel), and when an AI Overview appears, organic click-through falls by 34–61% depending on the study (Ahrefs, Seer Interactive). Search is not disappearing as a discovery channel, but it is increasingly a channel you get cited in rather than clicked from — and most content teams have not rebuilt their KPIs around that yet.
★ Why the "digital ad spend" number varies by hundreds of billions
Sources report 2026 global digital ad spend anywhere from $710B to $854.9B — the gap comes from scope, not disagreement about direction.
Statista-anchored figures (cited by Incremys, SQ Magazine, and multiple 2026 roundups) put global digital ad spend around $740–786B, tracking "digital advertising" narrowly. eMarketer/GroupM-anchored figures (cited by PPCChief, Affinco) put it closer to $836B, and include a broader definition that pushes total global advertising — digital plus traditional — past $1 trillion for the first time in 2026. Both are directionally consistent: digital now represents roughly 68–73% of all global ad spend, up from 65% in 2024. Treat the specific dollar figure as scope-dependent and the trendline — digital's growing share of a growing total pie — as the reliable takeaway.
02 — Ad Spend & Market Size
A Market Crossing $1 Trillion Globally, With Growth Concentrated in a Handful of Channels
Global advertising spend — digital and traditional combined — is projected to exceed $1 trillion for the first time in 2026, growing roughly 5–11% year-over-year depending on the source (PPCChief / Affinco, citing GroupM, eMarketer, MAGNA Global, Statista, AA/WARC). Within that total, digital's share keeps climbing, but growth is no longer uniform across channels — retail media, connected TV, and AI-native search advertising are all expanding at double-digit rates while legacy formats like linear TV decline.
| Channel | 2026 Estimate | YoY Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global digital ad spend (total) | $740B–$836B | +5–11% | Statista / GroupM / eMarketer, various 2026 compilations |
| Search advertising | ~$114–268B (definitions vary) | +11% | Foursets / DigitalApplied 2026 |
| Social media advertising | $219.8B–$247.3B | +14–15% | DemandSage / Foursets 2026 |
| Retail media | $62B–$150B | +14–26% | DigitalApplied / Incremys 2026 |
| Connected TV (US) | $33.5B–$51.3B | +13–28% | DigitalApplied / Affinco 2026 |
| Mobile advertising (global) | $400B | — | Incremys 2026 |
| Programmatic share of digital display | 81–91.5% | — | PPCChief / DigitalApplied 2026 |
Sources: DigitalApplied Digital Advertising Statistics 2026; PPCChief Digital Ad Spend Statistics 2026 (GroupM, eMarketer, MAGNA Global, Statista, AA/WARC); Incremys Digital Marketing 2026; Foursets 600+ Digital Marketing Statistics 2026; DemandSage 163 Digital Marketing Statistics 2026. Figures reflect different scope definitions and should not be summed.
✓ Where the incremental dollar is actually going
Retail media is the clearest consensus growth story across every source reviewed — cited as the fastest-growing channel by DigitalApplied (+26% at $62B), Incremys ($150B at a different scope), and PPCChief (+14.1% YoY), regardless of which base figure a given report uses. Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart together account for roughly 78% of the retail media category (DigitalApplied 2026), though new entrants are fragmenting share and creating measurement challenges advertisers haven't fully solved.
03 — AI in Marketing
Adoption Has Moved From Early-Majority to Near-Universal in Two Years
The defining shift of 2026 is not that marketers started using AI — it's that the debate about whether to use it is over. Salesforce's State of Marketing series shows generative AI workflow adoption climbing from 51% (Q1 2024) to 76% (Q1 2025) to 87% (Q1 2026) — a 36-percentage-point swing in two years, among the fastest sustained technology adoption curves ever recorded in marketing. Gartner's independently-run CMO Spend Survey confirms the same direction from the budget side: CMOs now allocate 15.3% of total marketing budget to AI initiatives.
87%
Marketers using GenAI in ≥1 workflow
Salesforce SoM 2026
94%
Enterprise (250+ marketer) team adoption
Salesforce SoM 2026
15.3%
Share of marketing budget CMOs allocate to AI
Gartner CMO Spend 2026
30%
Of CMOs report mature/fully-developed AI readiness
Gartner CMO Spend 2026
| Metric | 2026 Data | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GenAI adoption, enterprise teams (250+ marketers) | 94% (up from 82% in Q1 2025) | Salesforce State of Marketing 2026 |
| GenAI adoption, micro-teams (under 10 marketers) | 73% | Salesforce State of Marketing 2026 |
| CMOs saying "becoming an AI leader" is a critical 2026 goal | 70% | Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026 |
| CMOs with mature/fully-developed AI readiness | 30% | Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026 |
| Marketers who say AI is reshaping their SEO strategy | 85% | Salesforce State of Marketing 2026 |
| Marketers who have begun optimizing for AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, AI Overviews) | 88% | Salesforce State of Marketing 2026 |
| Average time saved per marketer per week using AI | 6.1 hours | HubSpot AI Trends 2026 |
| Companies reporting positive ROI from generative AI | 75% | Marketing AI Institute, cited 2026 |
★ The gap that actually matters: breadth vs. depth
The 87% headline adoption figure and a much smaller number — GenAI applied to roughly 15% of marketing activities on average (The CMO Survey, Duke/Deloitte/AMA) — are both true at the same time, and the space between them is the real story. Most marketing organizations have adopted AI somewhere in their workflow; very few have restructured their operating model around it. Gartner's data reinforces this: CMOs who are AI-mature run marketing budgets averaging 8.9–11% of revenue, well above the 7.8% survey average, and pair AI spend with the budget agility to actually act on it. AI maturity, not AI adoption, is what is starting to separate performance tiers among CMOs.
⚠ Trust hasn't caught up with usage
Only 13% of marketers fully trust AI insights without human review; a majority sit in "trust but verify" mode, either validating AI output with human review (33%) or relying mostly on human judgment with AI as an input (35%) (TechnologyChecker.io 2026, aggregating Ascend2/Sitecore survey data). Adoption has outpaced confidence — which is consistent with the finding that 91% of marketers say full AI implementation "takes too long," even as 93% continue budgeting for it (Omnibound 2026 synthesis).
04 — Budgets & CMO Priorities
Budgets Are Flat, AI Spend Is Rising Inside Them, and the Gap Between Ambition and Resources Is Widening
Marketing budgets have not recovered to pre-2024 levels. Gartner's annual CMO Spend Survey — the most consistently tracked benchmark, drawn from 401 CMOs mostly at $1B+ revenue companies — shows budgets flatlining at 7.7–7.8% of company revenue in 2025–2026, after dropping from 9.1% in 2022–2023. The Deloitte/Duke/AMA CMO Survey, which samples a broader mix of company sizes, reports a higher 9.4% for the same period — a reminder that "the average marketing budget" depends heavily on which companies are in the sample.
7.8%
Marketing budget as % of revenue, 2026 (Gartner)
Gartner CMO Spend 2026
9.4%
Marketing budget as % of revenue, 2026 (Deloitte/Duke/AMA)
The CMO Survey 2026
56%
Of CMOs lack sufficient budget for their 2026 strategy
Gartner CMO Spend 2026
19.4%
Martech as share of marketing budget — a 5-year low
Gartner CMO Spend 2026
| Segment | Marketing Spend as % of Revenue | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Overall average (Gartner, mostly $1B+ companies) | 7.7–7.8% | Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026 |
| Overall average (Deloitte/Duke/AMA, broader sample) | 9.4% | The CMO Survey 2026 |
| B2C product companies | 15.5% | The CMO Survey 2026 |
| B2B product companies | 6.4% | The CMO Survey 2026 |
| B2B services companies | 9.0% | The CMO Survey 2026 |
| Early-stage B2B SaaS | 20–30% | Data-Mania B2B Benchmarks 2026 |
| Companies under $10M revenue | 15.6% | TrueFuture Media, citing Gartner segmentation |
Sources: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026 (401 CMOs, North America/UK/Europe, majority $1B+ revenue); The CMO Survey — Duke Fuqua / Deloitte Digital / American Marketing Association; Data-Mania B2B Marketing Budget Benchmarks 2026.
⚠ AI spend is being funded by reallocation, not growth
Because overall budgets are flat, the 15.3%-of-budget going to AI is coming from somewhere else. Martech's share of marketing spend has fallen to 19.4%, a five-year low, down from 26.6% in 2021 (Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026, via Chief Marketer). At the same time, 62% of CMOs say they plan to invest more in martech overall — the two data points reconcile only if teams are consolidating vendors and shifting toward consumption-based pricing, which 56% of respondents report doing in the past year. The practical implication for any team requesting new budget in 2026: the CFO conversation is not "is there more money" but "what existing line gets cut to fund this."
05 — Search, Zero-Click & GEO
Organic Search Traffic Is Structurally Declining — Citation Inside AI Answers Is the New Competitive Surface
This is the single most consequential shift for content and SEO teams in 2026. Multiple independent panels — SparkToro/Datos, Similarweb, Bain & Company, Pew Research Center — measure the share of Google searches ending without any click, and while the exact number depends heavily on panel and methodology (ranging from roughly 58% to 68%), every study agrees on direction and velocity: zero-click search has accelerated sharply since AI Overviews scaled in 2024–2025, and the trend is not slowing.
58–68%
Of Google searches end without a click
SparkToro / Similarweb / Bain, 2026
34–61%
Organic CTR decline when an AI Overview is present
Ahrefs / Seer Interactive 2026
~48%
Of tracked Google queries now trigger an AI Overview
BrightEdge 2026
+35%
More organic clicks earned by brands cited inside an AI Overview vs. uncited
Seer Interactive, Nov 2025
| Metric | 2026 Data | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Organic CTR decline when AI Overview present | 34–61% (range across studies) | Ahrefs (Dec 2025, 300K–863K keywords); Seer Interactive (Nov 2025, 42 orgs) |
| Position-1 CTR decline with AI Overview present | 34.5–58% | Ahrefs 2025–2026 |
| Zero-click rate, AI Overview queries specifically | 60–93% | Multiple sources; ChatGPT Search / Perplexity / Google AI Mode at the high end |
| Zero-click rate, Google AI Mode specifically | 93% | Semrush, Sept 2025 |
| Session abandonment after seeing an AI Overview | 26% | Pew Research Center, July 2025 (n=68,879 real searches) |
| B2B websites with significant organic traffic loss, 2024–2025 | 73% (avg. −34% YoY) | Bain & Company / Onely, 2025 |
| B2B buyers who purchase from their pre-search "day one" vendor list | 85% | Bain & Company, "Losing Control," Sept 2025 |
Note: Zero-click and CTR-decline figures vary substantially by study methodology, panel composition, and query type (informational queries are hit hardest; e-commerce/transactional queries far less). Where sources disagree by a wide margin — e.g., 58.5% (SparkToro 2024 baseline) vs. 68% (Similarweb 2026) — the range itself is presented rather than a single reconciled number, consistent with how the underlying research firms report it.
★ Why brand visibility now matters more than ranking position
The consistent finding across Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, and Bain & Company is that being cited inside an AI-generated answer now predicts traffic and conversion better than holding position 1 in traditional blue-link results. Seer Interactive measured a 35% organic and 91% paid CTR advantage for cited brands over non-cited brands on the same query. For content and SEO teams, this reframes the KPI: the goal is no longer only "rank," but "get referenced" — by AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini alike — which is a distinct (and only partially overlapping) discipline now commonly called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
06 — Email & Owned Channels
In a Zero-Click, AI-Saturated Market, Owned Channels Are the Asset Competitors Can't Take Away
If 2026's central tension is that paid reach is getting more expensive and organic reach is getting harder to earn, the logical response is investing in channels a brand fully owns — starting with email, which every major benchmark study still ranks as the highest-ROI digital channel by a wide margin. Litmus and Omnisend both put average email marketing ROI at $36–42 for every $1 spent, ahead of paid search (~$2), social advertising (~$2.80), and organic search itself by several sources' accounting.
$36–42
Average return per $1 spent on email marketing
Litmus / Omnisend 2026
30.7%
Average email open rate, 2025 (5th consecutive year of growth)
Omnisend, cited by TMB
37–41%
Share of email-driven revenue from automated flows (≈2% of send volume)
Litmus 2026
+17–26%
Revenue lift from AI-driven email personalization
DigitalApplied 2026
| Metric | 2026 Data | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Average ROI, all industries | $36–42 per $1 spent | Litmus / Omnisend 2026 |
| Marketers ranking email as their most effective revenue channel | 59% (vs. 14% social, 12% paid search) | HubSpot State of Marketing 2026 |
| Revenue share from automated vs. campaign sends | Automated: 37–41% of revenue from ~2% of sends | Litmus 2026 |
| AI subject-line lift on open rate | +26% vs. human-written | DigitalApplied 2026 |
| Segmented campaign lift (opens / clicks) | +30% opens / +50–760% clicks (source-dependent) | Mailchimp / Campaign Monitor 2026 |
| Mobile share of email opens | 41.6–60% (source-dependent) | Litmus Email Client Market Share 2025–2026 |
| Enterprise email programs using AI for ≥1 campaign element by late 2026 | 61% | DigitalApplied 2026 |
Sources: Litmus State of Email Reports 2025–2026; Omnisend Email Marketing Statistics 2026; DigitalApplied Email Marketing Statistics 2026 (Litmus, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Salesforce, Validity); TMB 50+ Email Marketing Statistics 2026 (Omnisend, Litmus, Mailchimp, GetResponse, Statista). Open-rate figures should be read alongside the Apple Mail Privacy Protection caveat below.
Email production itself is also getting faster and more distributed. In 2024, 62% of teams took two weeks or more to get a single email out the door; by 2026, 76% deploy within three days (Litmus State of Email 2025–2026). That compression is largely a template and workflow problem, not a strategy problem — teams running multiple concurrent campaigns, product launches, and lifecycle sequences across dozens of ESPs need a design system that doesn't require rebuilding from scratch for every send. Stripo is built around exactly that constraint: a standalone template builder — not tied to any single ESP — that lets marketing and lifecycle teams maintain one consistent template library and export it across 90+ ESPs and CRMs, so campaign velocity doesn't come at the cost of brand consistency across every automated flow and one-off send.
⚠ Open rate is an increasingly unreliable headline metric
Apple Mail Privacy Protection auto-loads tracking pixels for Apple Mail users (roughly 35–58% of tracked opens across sources), which inflates reported open rates by an estimated 4–15 percentage points regardless of whether a human actually opened the message (Litmus Email Client Report, cited across DigitalApplied, Mailneo, and InboxAlly 2026 roundups). Most 2026 benchmark reports now recommend click-through rate, conversion rate, and revenue-per-send as the more trustworthy engagement signals — a shift mirrored in Litmus's own State of Email findings, which show reporting moving "beyond opens" toward multi-channel, revenue-anchored attribution.
08 — First-Party Data & Privacy
The Third-Party Cookie Story Keeps Shifting, But the First-Party Data Imperative Doesn't
Google's plans for third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome have been delayed and revised multiple times — as of 2026, Google has paused full deprecation in favor of a Privacy Sandbox / user-choice model, while Safari and Firefox have already blocked third-party cookies by default for several years (Experian Marketing Services 2026; Ethyca 2026). The net effect for marketers is functionally the same regardless of Google's exact timeline: cross-site tracking is measurably less reliable than it was even two years ago, and first-party data has moved from "nice to have" to the primary targeting and personalization asset most teams have left.
92%
Of organizations increasing investment in first-party data strategy
TechRT 2026
78–87%
Of marketers say first-party data is their most valuable data source
TechRT 2026
Up to 50%
Lower customer acquisition cost with first-party-data-driven targeting
McKinsey, cited by StackAdapt
71%
Of consumers more likely to buy from brands transparent about data use
McKinsey Digital Trust Report 2025
| Metric | 2026 Data | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Companies planning to reduce third-party data reliance | 75% | TechRT 2026 |
| Marketers who consider first-party data their most important data asset | 78–87% (range across surveys) | TechRT 2026 |
| Revenue lift attributed to first-party-data-driven personalization | Up to 15–20% | TechRT 2026 / StackAdapt 2026 |
| B2B marketers increasing first-party data investment | 70% | EMARKETER, cited by StackAdapt 2026 |
| Marketers globally planning further personalization investment in 2026 | 38% | EMARKETER, cited by StackAdapt 2026 |
| Consent Mode v2 adoption among EEA advertisers | 90%+ (implementation quality varies) | Secureprivacy.ai 2026 |
Sources: TechRT First-Party Data Statistics 2026 (synthesizing multiple industry surveys); StackAdapt First-Party Data Strategy Guide 2026, citing EMARKETER and McKinsey; Experian Marketing Services, "Cookie Deprecation: What Marketers Need to Know," updated June 2026; Ethyca Third-Party Cookie Deprecation guide, April 2026.
⚠ "First-party data" figures vary widely because the surveys measure different things
Reported figures for "marketers who prioritize first-party data" range from 78% to 92% depending on the source and exact survey question (sentiment vs. active investment vs. stated priority ranking). Rather than reconciling these into one number, the consistent and better-supported takeaway is directional: every study in this space — regardless of methodology — shows first-party data investment rising and third-party data reliance falling, and none show the reverse.
09 — Sources & Methodology
Primary Sources & Methodology
Benchmarks in this report are drawn from named industry surveys, platform-reported data, and analyst research published between mid-2025 and July 2026. Where independent studies disagree — particularly on global ad-spend totals, zero-click search rates, and first-party data adoption rates — both figures are presented with the scope or methodology difference noted, rather than collapsed into a single reconciled number. Figures aggregated by SEO-content roundups from named primary sources (e.g., Litmus, Gartner, Salesforce, Ahrefs) are attributed to the original research organization where identifiable.
- Gartner — 2026 CMO Spend Survey — Source of marketing budget as % of revenue (7.7–7.8%), AI budget allocation (15.3%), martech share of spend (19.4%), and CMO readiness data. Survey of 401 CMOs, Jan–Mar 2026, majority $1B+ revenue.
gartner.com - The CMO Survey — Duke Fuqua / Deloitte Digital / American Marketing Association — Source of the alternate 9.4%-of-revenue budget figure and broader-sample segmentation by company type.
cmosurvey.org - Salesforce — State of Marketing 2026 — Source of GenAI workflow adoption (51%→87%), enterprise vs. micro-team adoption, and AI-driven SEO behavior change.
salesforce.com - SparkToro / Datos / Similarweb — Source of zero-click search rate tracking (58.5% in 2024 to ~68% in 2026), based on clickstream panel data.
sparktoro.com - Pew Research Center (July 2025) — Source of AI Overview click-behavior data (26% session abandonment), based on tracked behavior across 68,879 real Google searches.
- Ahrefs (Dec 2025) / Seer Interactive (Nov 2025) — Source of organic and paid CTR decline figures when AI Overviews are present (34–61% range), based on 300K–863K keyword and 42-organization datasets respectively.
- Bain & Company — "Losing Control: How Zero-Click Search Affects B2B Marketers" (Sept 2025) — Source of B2B-specific traffic decline (73% of sites, −34% YoY average) and the "day one vendor list" finding (85% of B2B buyers).
- Litmus — State of Email Reports 2025–2026 — Source of email ROI ($36–42 per $1), open-rate trend data, Apple Mail Privacy Protection impact, and AI adoption in email production.
litmus.com - HubSpot — State of Marketing 2026 — Source of channel-effectiveness rankings (email 59%, video-format ROI rankings) and marketing spend expectations.
- Wyzowl — Video Marketing Statistics (annual survey) — Source of video ROI and business-adoption trend data, tracked annually since 2016.
- DigitalApplied — Digital Advertising, AI Marketing, and Email Marketing Statistics 2026 — Aggregation resource citing GroupM, eMarketer, Statista, Litmus, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Validity; used for cross-referencing ad spend and AI/email benchmark ranges.
- TechRT / StackAdapt — First-Party Data Statistics 2026 — Source of first-party data adoption and personalization ROI figures, synthesizing EMARKETER and McKinsey research.
- Experian Marketing Services / Ethyca — Source of third-party cookie deprecation timeline and regulatory context (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, EU AI Act enforcement dates).
Short-Form Video Is the Highest-ROI Content Format Marketers Report — By a Wide Margin
Video's share of internet traffic and attention keeps climbing, and within video, short-form (sub-60-second, vertical, mobile-native) content has become the format marketers most consistently point to as their best performer. HubSpot's 2026 data puts short-form video at the top of the ROI-driver list at 49%, ahead of long-form video (29%) and live-streaming (25%) — with no non-video format in the top three (cited via AutoFaceless / ShortsIntel 2026 compilations).
Sources: Wyzowl Video Marketing Statistics (annual survey, since 2016); HubSpot Marketing Statistics 2026; Vidico / Marketing LTB Short-Form Video Statistics 2026; ShortsIntel Video & Short-Form Video Marketing Statistics 2026, citing Sprout Social, Buffer, and Socialinsider.
The consistent thread across every source in this section is that short-form video's advantage is engagement and completion rate, not raw reach: 60% of short-form videos are watched through 41–80% of their total length, a completion pattern long-form content rarely matches (ShortsIntel 2026). That's a production-planning signal as much as a channel-choice one — a short, high-completion clip embedded consistently across email, social, and landing pages compounds engagement in a way a single long-form asset generally doesn't.