Author: Li Lu

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.

Entering 2026, AI tools that were considered cutting edge only a year ago are now embedded across workflows for brands and agencies. Yet this rapid evolution has also brought new challenges, including how to best integrate AI into internal workflows and the complexity around agentic AI.

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The Mail still plays in the big-numbers league. But inside the newsroom, the dials are quietly being reset. Page views, once the dominant metric on every dashboard, are being pushed aside in favor of time spent, repeat visits and what Mail executives call a “golden metric” of quality engagement.

The urgency behind that reset is the rise of zero-click search and AI assistants, which answer user queries on their own surfaces and send fewer people to publisher sites. The goal is to rebalance a business built on high reach into one where loyalty, habit and subscription revenue carry much more of the load, according to Lewis Buttress, chief product and innovation officer of Mail owner DMG Media.

That rethink underpins a wider product overhaul: games upgraded from sideshow to front door, new hubs centered around coverage areas, designed to keep niche communities coming back, an AI-powered dynamic paywall tuned to user behavior; a bigger bet on personalization and the app as a primary destination. Even the upcoming migration from a co.uk. to a .com domain, and the buildout of an internal AI stack, are in service of the same idea — turn fly-by traffic into repeat usage the Mail can own and control.

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