2026 Predictions: The trends that will fly or flop in content marketing

As a LinkedIn content strategy coach and agency owner, I spend my days deep in the trenches of content marketing trends. And if 2025 was the year of AI slop – “slop” being Merriam-Webster’s word of the year speaks volumes – 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the correction.

We’re about to see the backlash to trends that proliferated in 2025 — overreliance on AI, squeezing marketing teams, betting it all on digital while neglecting other channels. 

People are tired of the scalable, substanceless content filling their feeds. They are hungry for thought leadership that actually thinks. They also want to touch grass – to flip through a zine, make an in-person connection in a more intimate setting, to get away from their screens.

Here are my top 5 predictions.

Prediction 1: GEO software companies and agencies will rake in the cash — but they might as well be selling air.

We can’t agree on what to call it (I’m going with GEO for Generative Engine Optimization, but some people use AEO for Answer Engine Optimization), but the buzz about optimizing for LLMs is everywhere.

In 2026, agencies and SaaS companies will continue to sell it as the new frontier, promising to “optimize” your content so the likes of ChatGPT and Perplexity prioritize your brand over competitors. They’ll make boatloads of cash doing so. 

But don’t buy the hype just yet. Allow me the honor of saving you some budget. 

The GEO “science” being sold right now is mostly guesswork that relies heavily on correlation, not causation. There’s not nearly enough evidence to say “THIS is how we optimize for LLMs.”

We do know that LLMs rely on ranked URLs. What we don’t know is how they judge the content they find and determine what to include or exclude in a generated response to a user. This “interpretability” factor is one that even the most prominent AI leaders don’t understand. So we can’t “optimize” that process.  

GEO is…SEO

All that we really know about GEO shows that traditional SEO methods ALSO seem to work for LLM optimization. That’s because tools like Perplexity and SearchGPT use a method called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). The AI searches the web to find the top 10-20 URLs on the topic. Then it generates a response based on summarizing what it finds. 

If your content isn’t already ranking in traditional search results, the LLM won’t see it. 

In other words, traditional SEO is hardly dead – it’s more essential. You don’t need a shiny new GEO agency charging you tens of thousands to unlock the secret to appearing in ChatGPT — you need an agency with a proven track record of optimizing content to show up where your ideal client searches (I happen to know one). 

Here are two claims you’ll hear this year from people and companies touting GEO services, and why I think they’re dubious at best:

GEO vendor claim: “We’ve done a lot of research.”

The reality: Research on GEO has been largely academic and performed in specific, static environments. Most people point to a single research paper authored by a group of Princeton PhD candidates in 2024. The paper explained the baseline of GEO methodology and claims that optimizing according to their methods can increase visibility by 40%. 

These methods include:

• Making information easier for the model to parse and quote
• Foregrounding statistics and quotations the model likes to reuse
• Presenting claims in citation‑ready structures

If this sounds like SEO to you, that’s because it essentially is. These are valid methods for optimizing content for ALL kinds of search, including Google, so it’s not surprising that they worked to increase LLM visibility. 

Some marketing agencies cite their own client case studies as proof that their GEO approach works. But these aren’t objective peer-reviewed studies, they’re A/B testing. While this is helpful marketing data, it’s not the same as cracking the code on the algorithm’s foundational mechanics.

GEO vendor claim: “Our AI mention-tracking tools show you how you’ll appear in LLMs.”

The reality: We don’t have a fully reliable way to track brand mentions in LLMs. Don’t believe anyone claiming their reporting data is unassailable. 

LLMs are non-deterministic — you’ll get a different answer every time you ask a question. 

Current tracking tools run tests like asking a targeted question 10 times, then counting how many times your brand is mentioned and calling that your visibility score. So if you appear 3 out of 10 times, that’s a 30% score. 

The problem with this is that LLMs adapt to their users. Whether your brand is mentioned will depend on factors such as user history, location, and stated preferences. There is currently no way to test how your version of Claude responds versus your Aunt Sharon’s. 

Take a single query, like “I need some ideas for cheap, easy dinners I can make in under 30 minutes.” A young, single financial analyst living with roommates in San Francisco will get different responses than a stay-at-home mom of five in Minnesota. 

Prediction 2: The “replace your writers with AI” pendulum swings back (and then back again)

In 2026, we’ll see two contradictory trends play out side by side as the corporate world, in cost-cutting mode, grapples with AI. 

One group of companies — the first to fire their writers and other creatives in favor of AI in 2025 — will discover that the ROI on purely-AI-written content is low, at best. 

Another group will, unfortunately, just be getting started on the same expensive (and potentially reputation-damaging) mistake. 

Cycle 1: The great rehiring begins 

The early adopters who rushed to fire writers and replace them with AI are now facing a harsh reality: the promised efficiency gains never materialized into business value. This is a fact backed by data. An MIT study, The GenAI Divide, revealed that a staggering 95% of enterprise AI pilots produce zero measurable ROI. 

The reason is straightforward – LLMs can’t originate ideas. To make content that truly differentiates a brand, you need the idea-generation powers of a human writer. 

Good content requires strategic thinking, nuanced storytelling, and a differentiated point of view – all things you can’t get from a generative engine that remixes what already exists.

Many writers and creatives lean on AI tools to help structure, plan, and edit content. But in the best situations, they’re the ones in charge of the ideas and the outcome.

In 2025, we saw many organizations sack entire teams of writers and tell the lone content manager left to “use ChatGPT” to produce all of their social content, blogs, white papers, videos, press releases, internal comms, etc. That’s led to a huge wave of slop and burnt-out, fed-up creatives.

The takeaway: 

According to Orgvue, 55% of companies that conducted AI-driven layoffs regret the decision. The smart ones will course-correct and bring back the content strategists, brand storytellers, and thought leadership experts who can build real authority and credibility. (That will be hard for brands that have lost trust by churning out AI garbage.)

Cycle 2: The laggards walk into the trap 

While some companies are riding the rehire wave, those lagging behind will embark on their own misguided journey to outsource content entirely to AI. Focusing on short-term cost-cutting, they will begin replacing their writers with AI, ignoring the mountain of evidence that it’s a failing strategy. 

They are destined to repeat the same cycle of failure because they fundamentally misunderstand what they’re paying for. They believe they’re paying for words on a page when they should be investing in strategic thinking. 

This is how it’s likely to play out:

1. A new batch of companies will fire the thinkers to optimize a line item on a spreadsheet. 
2. They will flood their channels with generic, soulless content that says a lot of nothing and repels their audience. 
3. They will watch as their brand becomes invisible in a sea of AI-generated “meh.” 
4. Eventually, they will realize their errors and scramble to rehire at least some of the strategic minds they let go. 

The takeaway: Writing is thinking. Content strategy is strategic thinking on steroids. Without writers and content strategists, AI can only produce empty content. There’s still time for companies in this cycle to heed the evidence and rethink their plans. There are excellent uses for AI tools to aid, rather than replace, creative work. It’s possible to find a middle ground that cuts costs while respecting and benefiting from the expert THINKING of content professionals. 

Prediction 3: High-quality thought leadership content — written by humans — will be the ultimate flex

As earned media opportunities sadly continue to contract, companies need to tell and distribute their own stories. And to get them to actually stand out, they have to be the antithesis of AI — which means human.  

Take this little story (unverified, but speaks to the moment) that made the rounds recently:

This isn’t just an anecdotal preference. Pew Research reveals a fairly mixed public outlook on AI use in everyday life. 76% of Americans say it’s extremely or very important to be able to tell if pictures, videos, and text were made by AI or people. At the same time, 53% are not confident they can tell the difference (and many who are, shouldn’t be).

And people get mad at brands when they feel tricked by AI. McDonald’s recently pulled a commercial after major backlash over using AI instead of real actors. When Coca-Cola released AI-generated ads for Christmas 2025, featuring anthropomorphic animals gazing in rapt admiration at the arrival of red Coca-Cola trucks, the ads were widely mocked, with calls to boycott the brand ringing on socials. 

This creates a big opportunity for companies to loudly brag about their human content creators.

It’s also time to double down on elements that set human-generated content apart from AI slop, including:

• A real, differentiated point of view
• Proprietary data that validates your story
• Expert quotes from credible sources
• Brand new storytelling formats
• Real-life examples woven into narratives
• Emotional resonance 
• Unexpected connections and conclusions

The takeaway:

There will always be people who devalue content quality and “just use ChatGPT” for everything. They are the same people who thought $1/word was an expensive writing rate in 2020, when it’s what a newspaper paid a young Hemingway in 1936. That’s more than $21/word in today’s dollars. Hiring human writers will become the bespoke, upmarket option that differentiates brands and earns trust.

Prediction 4: Offline is the new luxury 

When digital content costs very little to produce (thanks to AI) and we’re all overstimulated by constant screens, physical media and presence become the ultimate signal of investment, intentionality, and status. 

Think: print magazines and intimate, curated (and importantly, phoneless) dinner events. There’s now a tangibility premium: can I experience it in person? Hold it in my hand? 

Print magazines and zines resurge

In 2025, I advised a new brand, Motley Bloom, on a bold venture: launching a print magazine. Here’s what the founder, Tish Cowan, said about this decision:

“Motley Bloom exists to celebrate neurodivergent ways of thinking, feeling, and being. And for many of us, that includes needing to touch the world to really connect with it. […] For me, flipping through pages with a warm cup of coffee, soaking in the vivid imagery our team so carefully curated, feeling the pacing of words and visuals as they unfold… that is a sensory experience that digital just can’t replicate.”

This investment in high-end, smaller-run niche publications will continue in 2026. So will DIY zines, where community is created not just in the distribution process but in the creation process itself. 

There’s also a correlation between bespoke print and causes people care about. Journalist Nick Norlen founded a new print magazine, Paper Airplane, after getting laid off from his writing job. He describes it as “Highlights for adults” and recruited an impressive roster of contributors and subjects for the debut issue of the “no-AI” project. 

The takeaway: 

People are hungry for screen breaks and community. Print magazines and zines can help foster both, and brands can use them strategically to reach people – especially Gen Z – in authentic, novel ways.

Intimate, phone-free “micro-events” will replace massive conferences

The ultimate social motto in 2026? Do it for the memories, not the ‘Gram.

We’re already seeing a revival of Polaroid cameras, thanks in large part to Gen Z’s enthusiasm for 90s-inspired offline trends. Popular supper clubs in cities throughout the U.S. promote their “no phones” policies as a benefit to members; high-end London restaurants are asking diners to hand over their cell phones.

Gen Z and Millennials are feeling digital fatigue and increasingly gravitating toward IRL experiences. A 2025 study found that 81% of Gen Z adults and 78% of Millennial adults often wish they could disconnect from digital devices more easily.

Brand events will get smaller and more targeted in 2026. Instead of setting up a selfie wall and hoping the right influencers show up, brands will host events with curated guest lists, capped at 20 or 100 rather than 10,000. The payoff will be the authentic connections built, and the word-of-mouth cool factor later on, rather than ephemeral TikToks flooding the feed for a single night.

Digital detox retreats are becoming a status symbol in the corporate world, too. Leaders are realizing they need to escape the noise, not spend a week engulfed in talks and events.

The takeaway: 

Brands should think deeply about focusing on quality over quantity when it comes to hosting events. Every invite should be intentional, and the event’s content should feel customized for attendees. Ironically, people will still talk up this kind of experience online – as well as offline too.

Prediction 5: Companies will use AI influencers – to the tune of low-to-zero ROI

Companies will launch AI influencer campaigns – but they will have lost the plot. The whole point of influencer promotions is that followers already trust the person behind the recommendation. And people trust human influencers way more than they trust AI. 

There’s been some pushback from industries like travel that want to skimp on paying real creators. They might save money in the short-term if they don’t have to front hotel costs for actual travel influencers. But the risk to customer trust is huge. 

The takeaway: 

It’s not worth the time and resources required to create AI influencers. If your influencer budget is tight, focus on micro-influencers. There’s someone for every budget, and targeted community engagement will beat generalized AI fluff in 2026. 

Final thoughts on content marketing in 2026

2025 proved how easy it is to flood the market and drown us in volume over value and cheap AI slop. It was the “f**k around,” while 2026 is the “find out.” The correction won’t be easy or subtle. 

Brands that treated storytelling and personality – actually thinking – as expendable will be forced to relearn or perish, while companies that invest in creativity, human judgment, and real points of view will be ahead of the game. REAL thought leadership will be key.

Times change. Tools change. But the advantage will belong to those who remember content isn’t merely output, it’s art, inventiveness, and authority – things in demand that can’t just be generated on demand.