As the future becomes harder, if not impossible, to predict, let’s frame this 2026 look ahead as a collection of reasonable and informed expectations.
AEO Acceleration
Referral traffic from Answer Engines really took off in 2024. In 2025, early movers started investing to take advantage of this shift. As best practices to capture AE traffic have been established, I expect adoption of AEO investments and optimization to accelerate as they become part of B2B table stakes moving forward.
Answer Engine Advertising Kicks Off
The traditional “10 blue links” are disappearing…fast. In their place, AI-generated answers (from Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and SearchGPT/ChatGPT) will dominate the top of the page. This fundamentally changes the advertising model from “renting a billboard on a search page” to “paying to be part of the answer.” Instead of buying clicks, you’re paying to be cited as a source of truth. Though pricing models and best use cases will differ across the big 3 – Google, Perplexity & OpenAI – there will be early mover advantages to be had, much like AEO in 2025.
Ever-Increasing CAC
“According to benchmarks from ProfitWell and SimplicityDX, B2B customer acquisition costs have risen by approximately 60% in the last five years and over 200% in the last decade due to digital saturation and privacy changes.”
If you are budgeting for 2026, do not plan for CAC to decrease unless you are fundamentally changing your channel mix. If your strategy remains the same as the past few years, assume a 5-10% increase in acquisition costs due to increased competition for attention.
Privacy and AI pushback
You might find it strange to pair these two, but consider their effect on acquisition costs. As the former is usually seen as a compliance concern, decreased abilities to target within ads, for example, create inefficiencies and have a direct increase in acquisition costs. It’s hard to know what’s next regarding online privacy, but most improvements to privacy make marketing efficiently harder, and thus more costly.
Market pushback on what’s acceptable from AI has a similar downside risk to costs. We’re already seeing the limits of AI-generated noise online and in inboxes. I expect the limits of what is accepted by buyers to become clearer in 2026 and the need for sales and marketing teams to adapt accordingly. The proper place for AI in marketing, especially in higher-dollar and strategically considered sales, is in lower-level activities. As a result, I expect human-led efforts to be at a premium going forward.
