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Top Tech Marketing Predictions for 2026 - Firebrand

It’s Predictions Season! Over the past few years, we’ve had a pretty good track record, and sparked some of our most popular podcast episodes. And spoiler alert, we got 85% of them right for 2025. Not bad. Let’s dive in for some tech marketing predictions for 2026:

PR Is Back — Spending Will Go Up

That’s not a prediction, it’s a fact. And in 2026 it will be a factier fact, as brands look to build awareness amid changing B2B buyer behavior. Buyer journeys are longer, with more stakeholders, and a stronger affinity for those on the initial shortlist — all of which means brand awareness is critical. Plus, there’s growing adoption of AI Search, which relies heavily on journalistic citations to raise LLM visibility.

More Execs Will Be Visible — More Leaders, More Thoughts

H2 2025 has been dominated by demand for executive visibility, particularly focused on the CEO. According to their own research, having a high profile on LinkedIn for the CEO directly correlates with increased sales. In 2026, we’ll see exec visibility programs spread to other members of the senior team. Why? Because not all CEOs have the time or inclination to be the primary brand ambassador, and because those execs want in on the action.

LLMs Will Start Sharing Visibility Metrics

Not out of generosity, but because they will ramp up their paid media capabilities beyond shopping. If they want brands to sponsor prompt responses, then they’ll need to share how often those prompts appear and the click metrics for the citations. It won’t be anywhere near the level that GEO specialists want, but it will be a start. That data might be quite hard to access since it’s part of the paid side, not search. Think Google Ads more than Search Console. I imagine the AI Visibility platforms will unlock it.

Leaders in AI Visibility Monitoring Will Emerge

Who is going to be the SEMrush or Ahrefs of AI Search? Well, it might be SEMrush or Ahrefs, but there’s a wave of other startups looking to disrupt them. For the record, we like Scrunch and Gumshoe, but there are many others such as Profound, Bluefish, Otterly etc. I imagine many brands will run a few of these in parallel since the data is so variable. But there can’t be room for all of them, so expect a shakeout.

GEO Will Get Budgeted, Approaches Will Standardize

We’re in an exciting “Wild West” phase of Generative Engine Optimization as brands share what seems to have worked to raise their brand visibility on AI Search. Some catch on like FAQs, others get heavily criticized like LLMs.txt. We’ll likely build towards more standardized playbooks that brands can use to develop and measure a formal GEO strategy. In combination, boards will recognize that this is already 9% of web traffic and will only grow, so the GEO practice will be budgeted for 2026. The risk is too high not to put this in place.

Brands Will Host AI Versions of Their Websites

Remember when you had a mobile version of your website for people browsing on their phone or tablet? Well, you’ll have an AI version for AI crawlers too. Humans are visual animals, so your website won’t go away — it’s not going to turn into a chat interface. But there will be an AI-accessible version so those LLMs can read your site easily and then reflect it to their audiences. I’ve spoken to companies who think this might be a cache, but it could come from your CDN or site host. Or perhaps the CMS has an AI plugin? Whatever the approach, brands need a way for the bots to read their site easily that largely mirrors the copy on their primary domain.

AI Slop Will Stop — the Reverse of Last Year

The tide has turned on purely AI-generated content, comments, and images. Audiences won’t invest their time if the brand producing the content doesn’t. There will still be lazy brands out there, but the savvy ones will be AI-enhanced, not AI-dependent. This will come as a big relief to marketers, buyers, and media consumers.

Signals-Based Advertising Will Become Mainstream

As website de-anonymizers, data enrichment tools, intent data, web scrapers, and LLMs become more integrated and accessible, we’re building a better picture of who is in-market, even down to the contact level. That means it’s easier to reach specific segments of your target account list in a timely manner. It’s been the direction of ABM for a while, and its adoption will be huge in 2026.

What Do You Think?

On the money? Too safe? Let’s do a quick report card for the predictions for 2025 to give some confidence. We got 75% of 2024’s and this year we’re up to 85%!

✅ _Startup marketer staff churn will increase — driven by increasing efficiency, burnout, and career breaks_. There’s limited data here, but we’ve seen entire marketing functions be churned or downsized this year.

✅ _SEO will be just fine in the face of AI Search — the best practices of SEO to create neutral, in-depth, educational content are exactly what will be surfaced by AI search._ We have seen the rise of GEO as an extension of SEO best practices, led by the SEO teams who are expanding their remit. SEO and GEO are more important than ever.

✅ _ABM will face a backlash, but actually deliver._ The ABM market is growing, led by the US, with an estimated 71% of marketers using an ABM strategy. Given the interest in signals-based marketing, this is going to continue in 2026.

✅ _Programmatic podcast advertising will increase from 9% of total audio advertising._ In 2025, eMarketer estimates that the percentage of digital audio advertising that is programmatic will increase to 30%.

✅ _The AI slop won’t stop._ It was a tidal wave across every marketing channel: web, paid, email, SEO, PR, and social.

❌ _AI tool Perplexity will lose the search race._ Completely wrong, according to some sources, it’s actually gaining on other tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, rising from 2.7% of market share in January to 6.4% in October. Still small but growing faster than others.

Original source: https://www.firebrand.marketing/2025/12/tech-marketing-predictions-for-2026

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