Not too terribly long ago, you couldn’t attend a marketing conference without hearing the same conversations on repeat: How should we use AI? What tools should we be testing? How quickly is everything changing?
At Digital Summit Chicago 2026, those conversations were still happening. But something felt different. For the first time, AI didn’t feel like the story anymore. Behavior did. Across sessions covering search, content, analytics, customer experience, and brand strategy, one theme surfaced continually: the real impact of AI isn’t the technology itself; it’s how people are changing because of it.
That distinction matters. Technology comes and goes. Platforms rise and fall. New tools appear every week. But when consumer behavior changes, entire industries have to adapt. As David Shing (“Shingy,” whom I highly recommend you follow) put it, “if it can be automated, it will be automated.”
The takeaway wasn’t that marketers should panic. It was that we should stop treating automation as the differentiator, because if everyone has access to the same tools, the competitive advantage has to come from somewhere else.
More Content Isn’t the Competitive Advantage Anymore
For years, marketers have talked about using AI to create more content, more efficiently, but after spending a few days listening to industry leaders and practitioners share what they’re seeing in the real world, I kept coming back to the same thought: The internet doesn’t have a content shortage problem; it has an attention problem.
Every brand can publish more. Every brand can generate faster. Every brand can automate. The brands standing out aren’t necessarily the ones producing the most content. They’re the ones creating experiences that feel useful, trustworthy, relevant, and unmistakably human.
That idea showed up repeatedly throughout the conference, particularly in conversations around trust and brand consistency. Nate Tower of Perrill Digital Marketing described it as the “quiet erosion of trust.”
“We can put things out that are consistently 70 or 80% there, but over time we run into this quiet erosion of trust. It doesn’t happen with one piece of creative that’s wildly off-base. People quietly slip out of the funnel because we stop looking and sounding like the brand they trusted in the first place.”
That quote stayed with me long after I left Chicago because trust rarely disappears overnight. It erodes gradually through generic experiences, inconsistent messaging, forgettable content, and interactions that feel automated simply because they can be.
Ironically, as AI becomes more capable, brand authenticity may become even more important. The challenge isn’t whether we can create more; it’s whether what we’re creating still feels like us.
People Don’t Care Where the Answer Comes from
For years, marketers have spent a lot of time thinking about search engines. Increasingly, consumers are thinking about answers. Whether those answers come from Google, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or somewhere else often matters far less to the user than marketers would like to believe. They just want the answer.
As search marketers, we’ve spent years focused on how search engines work. Increasingly, we’re being challenged to understand something much bigger: how people discover information. That behavior is changing fast. Consumers are no longer following a predictable path from search query to website; they’re bouncing between a wide variety of sources depending on what they’re trying to accomplish.
More importantly, most users aren’t loyal to a platform. They’re loyal to getting what they need as quickly as possible. That reality has major implications for marketers. If visibility can happen almost anywhere, marketers need to think beyond traditional rankings and consider:
- AI-generated answer visibility
- AI Overview inclusion
- Reddit and community presence
- Video discoverability
- Brand mentions and authority signals
- Consistent information across platforms
- Content that can be easily understood and cited by AI systems
For years, SEO teams focused on earning the click. Today, we’re increasingly being asked to earn inclusion before the click ever happens. Whether that’s an AI-generated answer, an AI Overview, a Reddit recommendation, a YouTube review, or a conversational search result, brands are now competing for visibility in places where traditional ranking reports only tell part of the story.
What struck me most is that many of these conversations weren’t theoretical anymore. We’re already seeing AI-driven referral traffic appear in reporting, though measurement still has room (this is an understatement) to mature. We’re already tracking visibility beyond traditional rankings. We’re already having conversations about how brands show up in AI-generated answers, not just organic homepage search results and ads. The behavior shift isn’t coming — it’s here.
What This Means for Marketers
While AI continues to dominate headlines, I left the Summit thinking less about the technology and more about the people using it. Consumers expect answers faster. They expect experiences to feel personalized. They have less patience for friction. They’re increasingly willing to trust recommendations from sources that look very different from the traditional search journey marketers have optimized around for years.
Those behavioral changes will likely have a greater impact on marketing than any individual AI tool ever could because tools change and people change. And when people change, strategies must adjust with them.
As consumer behavior continues to evolve, marketers should focus on:
- Building trust before chasing scale
- Creating experiences, not just content
- Measuring visibility beyond rankings and clicks
- Showing up wherever audiences seek answers
- Using AI to support strategy, not replace it
That’s probably the biggest irony of the AI era: the technology keeps getting smarter, faster, and more capable, yet the brands that stand out are often the ones doing the most human things well — building trust, answering real questions, creating memorable experiences, and showing up consistently wherever their audiences are looking.
AI may be changing how people discover information, but people are still people.
And that’s the part of marketing that hasn’t changed at all.
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