Inside the IAB’s 2026 Forecast for Search, AI, and Brand Visibility

Happy Tuesday, y’all 👋.

As 2026 planning ramps up, the advertising industry is staring down a fundamental reset in how discovery, persuasion, and measurement work.

New predictions from the head of the IAB argue that traditional search is losing its central role as AI systems increasingly decide what brands get seen, recommended, and trusted.

The forecast outlines how bots, agents, and opaque models will reshape marketing incentives, agency economics, and platform power faster than most operators are prepared for.

Let’s get into it.

Driving the news: Adweek published a 2026 predictions essay from David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, outlining how AI will rewire the mechanics of discovery, advertising, and brand competition over the next year. Cohen argues that search as marketers know it will fade as large language models become the primary interface between consumers and information, recommendations, and purchases.

• The predictions come from the leader of the trade group representing more than 700 publishers, platforms, brands, and agencies, positioning them less as speculation and more as a strategic warning from inside the industry’s power structure.

• Cohen forecasts that two thirds of global website and app traffic will soon come from bots and agents rather than humans, forcing brands to learn how to persuade machines instead of people. As a result, he predicts marketers will stop optimizing for search rankings and start competing inside AI systems’ latent space, where reputation, third party sentiment, and training data determine what models surface or suppress.

• The piece also points to follow on shifts, including LLM platforms launching advertising businesses, travel emerging as the first major AI ad category, consolidation among agency holding companies, and creative services being purchased against business outcomes rather than output or hours.

The stakes: If these predictions hold, control over discovery moves decisively away from open web mechanics and into closed AI systems owned by a small number of platform operators. Brands lose visibility into how they are evaluated, ranked, and recommended, while becoming increasingly dependent on systems they do not control.

• For agencies, the implications are structural. Automation and AI accelerate workforce reductions while compressing margins, pushing firms away from labor based service models toward outcome based solutions. Measurement, attribution, and accountability all become harder at the same time clients demand clearer proof of impact.

• For platforms, the stakes are power and revenue. Whoever controls AI mediated discovery controls advertising, commerce, and influence across categories. The shift reshapes who captures value across the marketing ecosystem.

The friction: The core tension is opacity. AI systems promise efficiency and relevance, but they operate as black boxes with limited transparency into how decisions are made. Marketers struggle to justify spend without clear metrics, while platforms resist opening their models due to competitive risk, safety concerns, and regulatory exposure.

• There is also a mismatch between brand intent and machine interpretation. What marketers believe their messaging communicates may not align with how LLMs categorize, contextualize, or prioritize a brand. If a model sees no reason to send a user to a brand’s site, visibility simply disappears.

• Regulation lags these changes. Questions around data access, accountability, children’s safety, and AI driven advertising remain unresolved, creating uncertainty just as investment accelerates.

What this unlocks: As search optimization fades, new incentives emerge around brand authority, trusted signals, and AI native reputation management. Brands may invest more heavily in third party validation, structured data partnerships, and content strategies designed for model ingestion rather than human clicks.

• New services are likely to form around auditing how AI systems perceive brands, benchmarking latent space positioning, and influencing model training inputs. Advertising products embedded directly inside AI assistants could collapse the distance between recommendation and transaction, especially in high intent categories like travel.

• Internally, enterprises may deploy AI agents to manage workflows, forecasting, and decision making, pushing marketing closer to predictive systems than persuasive ones.

The bigger picture: Cohen’s predictions point to a broader shift from persuasion to prediction as the organizing principle of advertising. Instead of convincing audiences what to want, brands increasingly compete to anticipate needs and surface at the exact moment systems determine relevance.

• This reflects a larger transformation in the attention economy, where power concentrates not around distribution or audience scale, but around control of interpretation. As AI becomes the interface between people and the internet, marketing, media, and commerce reorganize around whoever shapes those systems first.

• If 2025 was the year AI entered workflows, 2026 may be the year it quietly decides what matters.

For everything else, see below 👇:

Work

1. Why Shift Sulking May Be 2026’s Next Big Work Trend
   Employees Are Quietly Signaling Discontent By Withdrawing Effort Instead Of Quitting — (Jennifer Mattison for Fast Company) — Link

Media

2. Hollywood Studios Are Becoming Wall Street Assets
   Hackman Capital’s Real Estate Strategy Shows How Content Infrastructure Is Being Financialized — (Peter Grant for The Wall Street Journal) — Link

3. How AI Is Quietly Reshaping Hollywood
   Studios, Talent, And Executives Are Adapting Faster Than The Public Realizes — (Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg) — Link

Streaming

4. The Strategic Logic Behind Warner Bros. Discovery’s Netflix Deal
   Why Licensing Select Titles To Netflix Makes Sense For Both Companies Right Now — (Roger Martin for Fast Company) — Link

5. Netflix And iHeartMedia Strike Exclusive Video Podcast Deal
   The Partnership Signals Netflix’s Growing Interest In Podcast Video — (Todd Spangler for Variety) — Link

6. Hollywood Diversity Report Finds Streaming Still Lags On Representation
   UCLA Study Shows Progress Slowing Across Film And Streaming Originals — (Payton Turkeltaub for Variety) — Link

Platforms

7. Roblox Replay Decoded Reveals How Discovery Is Becoming Style Driven
   The Platform’s Year End Data Shows Search Giving Way To Taste, Identity, And Curation — (Roblox Corporate Newsroom) — Link

8. Instagram Is Exploring A TV Style Experience For Reels
   The Company Is Testing Longer Form, Lean Back Video Viewing — (Todd Spangler for Variety) — Link

Culture

9. Watching Office Workers Eat Lunch Is A Thing On TikTok
   The Mundane Ritual Has Become A New Genre Of Workplace Content — (Eve Upton-Clarke for Fast Company) — Link

Marketing

10. The Holidays Came Early This Year, At Least For Advertisers
    Brands Launched Holiday Campaigns Months Ahead Of Seasonal Norms To Capture Consumer Spend — (Suzanne Vranica for The Wall Street Journal) — Link

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