Author: Bill Ross | Published: April 18, 2026 | Updated: May 24, 2026 The digital marketing industry entered 2026 in the middle of its most consequential restructuring since paid social launched. Three forces are converging at the same time: generative AI as a primary search interface, retail media maturing into a third major ad ecosystem, and the final phase of third-party cookie deprecation. This 2026-2028 digital marketing projections report walks through the seven shifts most likely to redraw budgets and capability investment for marketing teams over the next two years. Key takeaways from this report: Global digital ad spend will reach $935 billion by 2028 according to extrapolation from the eMarketer and Dentsu 2026 baselines. The total global advertising market will pass $1 trillion for the first time, with digital holding roughly 69% of that pool. Inside the digital number, programmatic accounts for over 80% of placements in 2026, retail media absorbs the bulk of incremental growth, and connected TV pulls budget out of linear television. We see the trajectory as decelerating rather than flat. The decade from 2014 to 2024 averaged 12-14% growth as digital captured share from print and linear TV. With digital now dominant, share gains slow and the growth rate falls back toward single digits by 2028. The Winter Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, and the US midterm elections will add roughly $9 billion of cyclical spend to 2026, which makes the year look stronger than the underlying trend. Where the incremental dollars actually go: The takeaway for budget owners is direct. Top-line growth still exists, but it concentrates in fewer hands and inside ad formats where measurement is tighter. Tactical spending without a measurement system that tracks across walled gardens leaves real money on the table. Roughly 60% of all Google searches now end without a click to any external website. On queries that trigger AI Overviews, that figure rises to 83%. Inside Google’s AI Mode (the dedicated conversational search interface), the zero-click rate reaches 93%. By 2028 the overall rate will sit between 72% and 76% based on Rogers diffusion past the inflection point. This is the single biggest break with the prior fifteen years of SEO assumptions. The traffic that previously flowed to publisher and brand websites is being captured by Google, synthesized, and returned to users as an answer. Cited sources still get named (which is why citation visibility matters now), but the click increasingly never happens. The structural fix is to treat search as an everywhere problem, not a single-engine problem.
“We’ve stopped reporting organic traffic to our content clients as a clean success metric. The number that actually predicts revenue now is share of voice across AI answers plus high-intent commercial click-throughs. Anyone still optimizing purely for ranking is measuring something that no longer drives the outcome.” How the search channel is splitting in two: If we had to pick one capability investment for 2026, it would be technical AI readiness through AI search optimization work. Schema markup, content depth, and brand mention velocity across third-party platforms move a brand from “not in the answer” to “cited in the answer.” Brands that complete this work in 2026 compound an authority advantage over those waiting until 2028. The Seer Interactive November 2025 study (3,119 queries, 25.1 million organic impressions, 1.1 million paid impressions) put hard numbers on the damage. Organic CTR on AI Overview queries dropped from 1.76% to 0.61% between June 2024 and September 2025, a 65% relative decline. Paid CTR on the same queries fell from 19.7% to 6.34%, a 68% drop. Even queries without AI Overviews lost 41% of their CTR. The non-AIO finding is the one most people miss. Users now expect AI summaries everywhere. When they don’t get one on a Google result, they often go to ChatGPT or Perplexity instead of clicking the standard organic results they used to click. Recovery to old CTR levels is not in the forecast. Our projection is that organic CTR settles at a new floor, paid CTR partially recovers as Google ships better ad units inside AI surfaces, and non-AIO queries continue eroding for the next two years before stabilizing. The practical implications for content and SEO teams: The cost of being uncited compounds. AI models develop authority associations early, and reversing that association in 2028 is more expensive than building it in 2026. Brands that wait will spend the second half of the forecast period buying paid placements to replace the organic and citation visibility they failed to earn. Global retail media reached $145 billion in 2026 and will hit $188 billion by 2028 according to GroupM’s trajectory. US retail media specifically claims roughly 18% of US digital ad spend in 2026, projected to climb to 25-27% by 2028. That share would equal what search and social used to dominate a decade ago. The reason retail media matters so much beyond its dollar size is the data underneath it. Retail networks know who actually buys. That makes them a closed-loop measurement channel in a way that paid social can no longer claim. Amazon and Walmart between them absorbed roughly 89% of incremental retail media growth in 2026, but mid-tier networks (Target, Instacart, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Ulta Beauty) are opening up and will reclaim share through 2028.
“Retail media is where the dollars that used to test in paid social now go. Same advertiser, same need, but the attribution actually works. For any brand with a retail SKU, treating retail media as a fourth-priority experiment is the wrong frame in 2026. It belongs on the same review cadence as search.” The retail media players brand teams should track: There is a B2B marketing angle here too. LinkedIn-first commerce media (B2B influencer programs that ladder up to LinkedIn ad spend) generated approximately 3.2 times as many qualified leads as paid social for B2B advertisers in 2025. The LinkedIn share of B2B social budgets will roughly triple by 2028 as the channel and its measurement infrastructure mature in parallel. Daily AI use among marketers crossed 66% in 2025 per HubSpot’s State of Marketing report and is projected to hit 90-94% by 2028. The curve looks like a textbook Rogers diffusion: slow through 16% adoption (early adopters in 2022), steep acceleration through the majority phases (2023 through 2027), and saturation through late majority (2028). When daily AI use saturates the marketing workforce, two things happen at the same time. First, the cost of producing content falls 65% to 75% versus pre-AI baselines. Second, ranking capacity and AI citation slots do not expand to match the output increase. The result is that competitive intensity inside every content slot rises sharply while average cost-per-asset falls. Generic content has effectively zero competitive value in 2027 and beyond. The capability gap that widens over the forecast period:
“The marketers who lose ground over the next two years are not the ones avoiding AI. They are the ones using it without changing their measurement and editorial standards. Volume without a framework just produces more average content competing for the same slots.” Any content program built before 2024 deserves an explicit refresh by mid-2026. AI capability has compounded too fast to assume old playbooks still apply. Brands that update their technical schema and structured data alongside their editorial standards will compound advantages faster than those who only update one layer. The global influencer marketing industry sits between $32.6 billion and $40.5 billion in 2026, growing to a midpoint of $53 billion by 2028 on a decelerating CAGR. The total creator economy (which includes platforms, tooling, education, and infrastructure beyond brand deals) sits at $234 billion to $252 billion in 2026 and will pass $350 billion by 2028. The most important shift inside this category is not the dollar size. It is the structural move from celebrity-led campaigns to nano and micro creator portfolios. Nano (1,000 to 10,000 followers) and micro (10,000 to 100,000 followers) creators together make up roughly 75.9% of Instagram’s influencer base, deliver engagement rates 50% higher than larger tiers, and cost approximately 60% less per post. How budget shape changes inside influencer programs: For brand marketing teams, the operational consequence is that creative production reorients around sourcing and licensing creator work rather than producing in studio. Creator content is projected to make up 55% to 65% of paid social creative by 2028, with brand-studio content becoming the minority. Existing brand storytelling frameworks need to adapt to a sourcing-and-briefing model rather than a hands-on production model. Connected TV historically sat in the brand-marketing budget category. That assumption no longer holds. Amazon Ads reaches 50% or more of the ad-supported CTV inventory in 2026, bringing closed-loop measurement to streaming at scale for the first time. Performance-bought CTV will cross 50% of total inventory by 2028. The practical result is that CTV begins competing for budget that historically sat in search and social, rather than budget that historically sat in linear TV brand spend. CMOs evaluating CTV through a pure brand-reach lens are looking at the channel through 2022 economics. Through 2028 economics, CTV is an addressable performance medium with measurable purchase outcomes.
“Most CTV budgets we audit are still being approved by brand teams using reach-and-frequency math. The numbers a performance lens would generate (cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, incremental lift) would justify two to three times the spend in many cases. The measurement infrastructure caught up faster than the budget process did.” What changes inside CTV through the forecast period: The CTV story compounds with the retail media story. Retail networks are launching their own CTV inventory, which gives brands a single closed-loop buy that crosses the screen and the shelf at the same time. That convergence is the most important media-mix change for retail-adjacent brands in the forecast window. The pattern across all seven shifts is the same. Capability built in 2026 compounds through 2028. Capability built in 2028 starts from behind. Three examples illustrate the principle. Brands that establish AI citation presence in 2026 accumulate authority signals that compound. AI models train on prior citation patterns. A brand cited in 2026 is more likely to be cited in 2027, which makes it more likely to be cited in 2028. Brands that build first-party and zero-party data programs in 2026 and 2027 have personalization depth in 2028 that brands starting in 2028 or 2029 cannot replicate quickly. Data accumulates. Personalization quality compounds with tenure. Brands that complete schema markup, server-side tracking, and technical AI readiness in 2026 will be present in AI surfaces for the full forecast period. Brands completing the same work in 2028 will have spent two years invisible to the interfaces their customers were already using. Capability priorities for the 2026 to 2027 build window: The risks to this forecast concentrate in three places. A forced TikTok divestment or ban remains the largest single-platform uncertainty. The pace of AI capability improvement could push agentic commerce a year earlier or later than projected. Regulatory action on AI-generated content or AI-summarized search could reshape the trajectory more aggressively than current policy signals. 2026 through 2028 is not one transformation but five running at the same time. AI search, retail media, agentic commerce, the privacy-driven data rebuild, and AI as marketing infrastructure are converging into the same two-year planning horizon. The teams that execute against this convergence will define competitive positioning into the late 2020s. The ones treating it as a list of trends to monitor will not. If your team is working through digital marketing strategy questions for 2026 and 2027 (where to put incremental budget, which capabilities to build first, how to read measurement signals when click data is no longer a clean predictor of revenue), we should talk. The Emulent team works on digital marketing services across B2B, healthcare, home services, law, construction, and franchise categories. Contact us to discuss how we can help with your digital marketing strategy through this window of structural change.
The Structural Shift: Digital Marketing Industry 2026–2028 Projections Report
Where is global ad spend headed through 2028?
What does zero-click actually mean for brands depending on organic traffic?
– Bill Ross, Founder, Emulent
How much click-through did AI Overviews really take?
Why does retail media count as a third major ad channel now?
– Emulent Strategy Team
Has AI tooling crossed the line from differentiator to baseline?
– Emulent Strategy Team
What is happening inside the creator economy right now?
When does CTV stop being a brand-only channel?
– Emulent Strategy Team
What should marketing leaders prioritize between now and 2028?
Where this leaves marketing teams entering 2026
