Six months of client work, platform changes and increasingly AI-mediated customer journeys later, we’ve returned to our 2025 Digital Trends piece to see what held up, what moved faster than expected, and where brands should be focusing in 2026.
Much of our original thinking still stands; first-party data matters more as ad platforms take greater control of targeting and bidding, full-funnel marketing is proving more resilient than a relentless focus on immediate conversion, and the fundamentals of technical SEO haven’t disappeared just because AI search has arrived, but the language around those ideas has moved on.
More of the buying journey now happens somewhere brands can’t fully observe, in AI-generated answers, forum conversations, review platforms and other sources that may influence a decision before a business records a single trackable interaction.
Rankings still matter, but they no longer tell the whole story of visibility. Automation is becoming more useful, but the strongest gains are increasingly found in the data, creative, customer experience and strategic judgement surrounding it.
This is not another set of predictions but a mid-year check-in from the people doing the work.
The Messy Middle Has Become the Messy Funnel
At the beginning of the year, our Director James Starkey argued that brands needed to stop treating the final conversion as though it existed separately from everything that came before it. Six months on, that view has held up, although the issue now feels broader than a conventional full-funnel debate.
What James has seen through client work is that brands with limited visibility and authority are often paying more for every conversion, not necessarily because their websites or campaigns have deteriorated, but because fewer people reach the point of intent already knowing who they are or why they should trust them:
A prospective customer may encounter an explanation in an AI-generated answer, compare experiences in a forum, read several reviews and then conduct a much more specific search days later. When they eventually click a paid advert, that final interaction may receive all the credit even though it didn’t create the original preference or demand.
PPC Manager, Craig Walshaw, has seen the same issue from a paid media perspective. His original belief that data and creativity would become the new targeting has largely held up, particularly as Performance Max, AI Max and other automated systems take on more of the decisions previously controlled manually.
However, the most revealing shift has been where the meaningful performance opportunities are now being found.
Across client accounts, this has meant placing greater emphasis on the relationship between the advert, the message, the page and the conversion journey, while also diversifying activity beyond an over-reliance on traditional Google Search. Demand Gen and other upper-funnel formats are playing a greater role where brands need to build recognition before a high-intent search takes place.
The warning is particularly relevant for businesses tempted to protect short-term efficiency by removing the upper funnel altogether.
Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Ady Matheson-Bruce, has seen clients become more accepting of brand-led media, but he has also seen what happens when that investment is cut.
In one case, a client reduced its media budget to focus almost exclusively on middle- and lower-funnel activity. The remaining campaigns continued to over-deliver against their immediate targets, but the wider annual objective became much more difficult because the strategy was no longer creating enough future demand. His updated advice for the rest of the year is refreshingly direct:
The lesson for the remainder of 2026 is that measurement, media and planning need to recognise how demand is formed. Last-click efficiency can look reassuring while quietly concealing a weaker pipeline.
Visibility Is No Longer the Same as Ranking
One of the more unexpected changes for James has been how quickly clients themselves have noticed the gap between ranking well and actually being found.
Rank position is not obsolete but remains a useful diagnostic measure and can show whether a page is gaining or losing conventional search visibility. It is becoming less reliable as a standalone proxy for success because an increasing number of search and discovery experiences do not present users with a simple ranked list.
This is where the conversation around SEO and AI visibility needs greater nuance. The arrival of AI Overviews, AI Mode and other generative experiences has not made traditional SEO redundant. In fact, Google’s own guidance states that established SEO best practice remains relevant because its generative search experiences draw upon content from the existing Search index, which means pages still need to be accessible, crawlable, indexable and useful before they can be surfaced.
Technical SEO Manager, Monty Allen, believes the speed of Google’s AI implementation has been faster than many UK marketers anticipated.
Features that might once have taken around six months to arrive after a US launch have, in his experience, started appearing much sooner, making it harder for brands to treat AI search as a distant concern.
The response is not to abandon proven SEO practice in favour of a newly invented checklist because crawlability, internal linking, structured content, careful website migrations and genuinely useful pages remain central to visibility.
For the rest of 2026, Monty is placing particular emphasis on crawler access and internal linking. Across client websites, the team has encountered hosting, security and Cloudflare configurations that restrict bots to reduce bandwidth or unwanted activity, sometimes without recognising that different crawlers serve different purposes.
This does not mean every bot should automatically be allowed access. Search crawlers, AI retrieval systems and model-training bots are not interchangeable, and businesses need to make considered decisions about which systems can access their content. Accidental restrictions can make a website less visible to the very services through which potential customers are now discovering information.
Structured data also remains valuable because it gives machines clearer information about the people, products, services and organisations represented on a page. Google explicitly states that structured data helps it understand page content and entities, although it should support rather than replace strong technical foundations and useful on-page information.
The real move is from treating rankings as the whole outcome to understanding visibility as a broader system of technical accessibility, relevance, authority and recognition across search and AI-led discovery.
Paid Media Is Automating, but the Work Is Not Disappearing
Few areas of digital marketing have experienced more visible change during the first half of 2026 than Google Ads, although not everything has unfolded in the order the industry expected.
Digital Director, Nick Bardsley, had anticipated that Google’s continued push behind AI Max would quickly lead to advertising within AI Mode and AI Overviews in the UK, but that rollout has taken longer than expected. A potentially significant adjustment to target-based bidding arrived with considerably less fanfare.
From 17 August 2026, Google says campaigns using target-based bidding while constrained by budget will be managed more consistently towards their bid targets. The change applies across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and other eligible campaigns, with a bid target adjustment tool made available from 6 July to help advertisers prepare.
Nick believes this could allow advertisers to operate with more budget headroom while maintaining firmer control over target CPA or ROAS, helping campaigns respond to unexpected increases in demand without compromising the agreed efficiency target.
At the same time, Craig is beginning to leave behind the sheer volume of granular keyword work that once defined much of paid search management, but this does not mean understanding search behaviour or language has become unnecessary. Marketers still need to know what customers want, how they describe it and which searches indicate genuine commercial intent.
The change is in how that knowledge is applied. As machine learning becomes better at discovering relevant long-tail queries from broader inputs, skilled account management is moving towards stronger data, clearer exclusions, better conversion signals, more useful creative and landing pages that carry the promise made in the advert.
Ady’s assessment of automation has also become more positive since December. He remains cautious about accepting every platform claim at face value, but the systems are becoming better at delivering what they promise when the set-up is handled properly.
The important qualifier is that automation does not remove the initial work.
Paid media expertise is therefore not disappearing but relocating. Less time may be spent adjusting individual settings every day, while more value is created through strategy, data quality, customer insight, experimentation and the ability to challenge the platform when its recommendations do not reflect the commercial reality of the business.
AI Has Moved From Experiment to Infrastructure
At the beginning of 2026, many conversations about AI still focused on whether teams should use it, but halfway through the year, that question already feels dated.
Ofcom reported in April that 54% of UK adults now use tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, demonstrating how quickly generative AI has entered everyday behaviour. IAB UK has described a comparable shift within digital advertising, where AI is moving from experimentation towards infrastructure across analysis, media, creative processes and operational workflows.
That transition is visible inside Black Lab too, although the practical value is proving more important than the novelty of the tools.
Nick is leaning into AI-assisted analysis, particularly when working across multiple datasets that would previously have been difficult or time-consuming to combine. The opportunity is not to generate a quicker summary, but to identify relationships across media, tracking, CRM and business data that can lead to stronger decisions.
Client Services Lead, Sam Lyon, has also become a more regular user of AI tools to organise meeting notes, consolidate client information and support clearer communication. Her original position on the importance of real human connection still stands, but she now sees thoughtful automation as a way of making more room for it.
For Ady, automation is helping to recover some of the thinking time that had become increasingly difficult to protect amid the pace of account management and platform change. His intention to pause and reflect more often has not become less relevant since December. If anything, it has become more necessary.
Marketing and Demand Generation Manager, Alexa Cobbold, reaches a similar conclusion from a wider marketing perspective. The best marketing she has seen during the first half of the year has often been the easiest to understand and the most closely connected to genuine customer behaviour. AI can help teams move faster, but speed only becomes useful when it is supporting a clear objective.
For 2026 you don’t need to automate everything that can technically be automated, but to use these systems where they can reduce repetitive work, connect complex information or accelerate a well-directed process, while keeping strategy, interpretation, editing and accountability firmly human.
When Everyone Can Execute Faster, Brand Becomes Harder to Fake
More businesses can create variations of content, launch campaigns, analyse data and produce assets at a speed that would have required considerably more resources only a few years ago.
That may sound like an unqualified advantage, but it also creates a new problem because when everybody has access to similar tools and workflows, execution itself becomes less distinctive.
James believes the next source of competitive advantage will be found in the qualities that remain difficult to copy: consistent positioning, genuine authority, recognisable ideas, useful content and a clear understanding of what the brand contributes that others do not.
The distinction matters because the temptation to respond to greater efficiency is often to produce more; more adverts, more articles, more social posts and more variations of the same message can create activity without increasing relevance.
Alexa’s experience during the first half of the year suggests the opposite approach is often more effective, as focused campaigns that are easy to understand, relevant to a real audience and tied to observable behaviour tend to create more value than trying to appear everywhere and communicate everything at once.
This is also why James has been interested in the work of UK footwear brand LANX, as the brand provides a useful illustration of recognisable positioning expressed consistently through its products, people and content. The execution feels rooted in the business rather than applied as a generic marketing layer.
As AI makes polished output easier to produce, authenticity cannot simply mean sounding informal or placing a founder in front of a camera. It comes from alignment between what the business believes, what it makes, how it behaves and what customers experience. That kind of coherence takes more work than generating another asset, but it is also much harder for competitors to reproduce.
Human Connection is Not Set to be Automated Away
One of the most human observations made by Sam in our previous article was the increasing dependence on calls and digital communication in preventing teams and clients from developing the depth of understanding that often comes from spending time together in person.
Six months later, she still believes this strongly because better tools have not made relationships less valuable; they have made it more important to decide what technology should support and what still deserves genuine human attention.
That principle applies both to agency relationships and internal teams. AI-generated notes, shared systems and improved reporting can make information easier to access, but they cannot automatically create trust, uncover an unspoken concern or understand why a commercially sensible recommendation may be difficult for a client to implement.
Our approach has always been built around relationships rather than transactions, working as an extension of clients’ teams across both major strategic projects and the less glamorous problems that need to be resolved today. The technology supporting that relationship will continue to change, but the value of context, honesty and accessibility has not.
What We Are Leaving Behind Halfway Through 2026
The first half of the year has not invalidated the principles the team identified in December, but it has made several habits harder to defend.
We are leaving behind:
- The idea that a strong ranking tells the whole story of visibility, while continuing to use ranking data as one useful indicator among many.
- Keyword volume and campaign complexity as signs of paid media sophistication, concentrating instead on data, customer journeys, creative and the commercial quality of the outcome.
- The expectation that automation should deliver immediately, recognising that the quality of its output still depends on the thinking, information and configuration supplied at the start.
- The assumption that a brand can continue removing upper-funnel investment while expecting its lower-funnel activity to produce an endless supply of ready-made demand.
Perhaps most importantly, we are leaving behind the idea that speed is synonymous with progress because while AI can make activity faster, only good judgement can determine whether that activity was worth doing.
Black Lab’s 5 Marketing Priorities for the Rest of 2026
Taken together, the team’s experience points towards five priorities for brands heading into the second half of the year.
- Build visibility beyond rankings by strengthening technical accessibility, useful content, third-party authority and brand recognition across both search and AI-led discovery.
- Treat first-party data, tracking and CRM integration as infrastructure not an optional reporting project. Platform automation is only as good as the signals it receives.
- Improve the customer journey, not just the campaign; landing pages, messaging, forms, site experience and conversion flows increasingly determine whether media delivers commercial value
- Protect the full funnel by continuing to convert existing demand efficiently while also creating the recognition, understanding and authority that support future demand
- Use AI to create more thinking time by applying it to repetitive work, analysis and organisation while keeping strategy, creativity, judgement and relationships firmly human.
The Second Half of 2026 Will Reward Better Judgement in Marketing – not More Noise
We will be concentrating on the work that strengthens those foundations: connecting paid media to better data, improving the experience behind the click, building visibility across search and AI-led discovery, protecting the full funnel and helping brands invest in the work that creates sustainable commercial value.
The platforms will continue to release features; search will continue to evolve, and the tools will get faster. The advantage will belong to the businesses with the judgement to know what should change, what still works and what should never have been automated in the first place.
Is your digital strategy still built around the journey customers took last year?
Black Lab’s full-funnel Digital Marketing and AI Audit examines your paid media, SEO and AI visibility, content, data, tracking, customer journeys and conversion performance, providing a clearer view of where your brand is visible, where value is being lost and where to focus next.
Our team observes these shifts through our work with ambitious UK brands across automotive, finance, insurance, retail, e-commerce, care and the non-profit sector. As a full-funnel digital marketing agency, our work spans digital strategy, paid media, SEO and AI visibility, content, data, reporting, CRO and website performance, which gives us a broad view of where change is happening and, just as importantly, where the fundamentals still hold.
Speak to the Black Lab team about your digital strategy for the rest of 2026.
