Author: Sam Bradley

Marketing budgets are all but flat, but chief marketing officers are being tasked with juggling investments marked for media, creative and AI on the same departmental balance sheet, according to Gartner.

Advertisers currently spend 7.8% of company revenue on marketing on average, a paltry increase of 0.1% compared with last year, according to the company’s annual CMO Spend Survey of more than 400 marketing leaders in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Ewan McIntyre, vp analyst and chief of research at Gartner, said that single figure percentage budgets were “the new normal” for advertisers following the end of the pandemic-era spending boom.

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This is an excerpt from our Digiday+ Research report “The marketer’s guide to AI applications, agentic AI, AI search and GEO/AEO in 2026,” which explores how marketers are navigating the opportunities and challenges AI brings as it becomes an indispensable part of marketing. The report is based on a survey of 142 brand and agency professionals, as well as individual interviews with marketing and technology executives responsible for AI investments and applications development.

Marketers feel the effects of AI-generated search

The number of AI-powered search applications is growing. Google introduced its AI Overviews search function in 2024, followed by AI Mode in 2025, while OpenAI rolled out its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, later integrating a conversational search feature. Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude and “answer engine” Perplexity also feature conversational search results.

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