There's a lot of gloom and doom in this industry of ours right now. We see and hear things like “Google is eating its own results”. AI overviews are replacing the clicks we spent years earning, and searchers are getting answers in more and more places. Everyone's got a hot take about what's dying.
We wanted to see past all this, and so we asked 1,000 internet marketers a different kind of question.
Not "what are you afraid of?" Not "what's keeping you up at night?" We asked them what they look forward to and what gets them actually excited about this work in 2026.The answers were more honest than we expected.
AI is the big one. Obviously.
From our survey, 38% of respondents said AI tools and automation are what excite them most about internet marketing right now. Whoopie, what a shock, not really. However, what is interesting is how this excitement changes across age groups.
Marketers 22-29 are most excited about the future of AI, 44% citing it as their top source of excitement. These younger marketers grew up in a world where the tools change all the time, and their ability to roll with changes is almost effortless.
But the 50+ crowd? We still find that 28% of respondents are excited about AI. Some may think that's a sign of adoption anxiety, but I’d call that a sign of curious observation. This generation has watched this industry transform three or four times already, and they know a real shift when they see one.
Content formats came in second
In the results, we found that 22% of respondents said new content formats are what excite them most. Video, interactive content, AI-generated assets that actually perform, formats that didn't exist three years ago. However, the promise of this AI content creation still feels like it's missing the mark much of the time, but with the right prompts and work, it can come around.
Women in our sample were slightly more excited about content formats than men (25% vs. 20%). This points to something real: the creative arts and work of internet marketing is expanding at a rapid rate. There are more ways to say something and create something now than there have ever been.
That's a gift. It doesn't always feel like one, because it also means more to learn, more to test, more to get wrong. But underneath the workload is an industry that still has the capacity to surprise itself.
Audience targeting came in third. Quietly, but consistently.
The survey reported that 17% said improvements in audience targeting are what excite them most. This finding is consistent, 16-18%, across age and gender. This finding isn't a generational trend its just a really cool reality that marketers are excited about. It speaks to marketers' basic desire to develop content and put it right in front of their best audience.
In this audience targeting space, we know that, Meta and Google, are working on and developing this targeting technology every day; it's their main deliverable, and marketers are getting more and more excited about reaching their desired audience.
What the data actually says
Most of the conversation about internet marketing right now is about loss. Traffic loss. Ranking loss. The slow erosion of the world we knew.
But when you ask 1,000 marketers what they look forward to, that's not what comes back.
What comes back is: new tools, new formats, better targeting, and the slow, patient work of building something people trust.
That's the job. It was always the job. The landscape shifts, the channels change, the algorithms rewrite themselves every six months, and underneath it all, the job is still the same: make something good, put it in front of the right people, and earn their trust.
That's worth looking forward to.
