The rise of the “Human Premium”
3 Predictions for 2026
I don’t have a crystal ball. However, if you look at the signals from the field, you can see the shape of what is coming next.
Here is where we think marketing, particularly B2B marketing, is heading in the next 12 months.
1. The “Human Premium” becomes a business model
In 2025, we started drowning in “slop”: mediocre, AI-generated content produced at scale. We learned that just because you can automate everything, it doesn’t mean you should.
In 2026, proven humanity will become a luxury good.
As the internet’s background noise grows louder and more synthetic, we will see a massive premium placed on things that cannot be faked6666. I’m talking about:
• Live events and in-person workshops.
• Video content that clearly isn’t an avatar.
• Writing that has a distinct, idiosyncratic voice and a point of view (hello!)
The brands that win in 2026 will be the ones that double down on being “real”; the brands that try to automate their entire existence will fade into the background noise.
2. PR is back (and AI search is making the old new again)
For a decade, marketers have obsessed over technical SEO—gaming algorithms with keywords to get to the top of Google.
But the new gatekeepers, AI search engines like ChatGPT and Google Gemini—don’t care about your keywords. They care about your authority.
This means that “old school” PR is suddenly the most cutting-edge strategy you can have. Getting featured in respected trade publications, earning citations from real experts, and demonstrating genuine thought leadership are the only ways to convince algorithms that you are a trusted source.
It helps humans trust you and helps robots verify you.
A caveat: Beware of anyone claiming right now to have a “proprietary system” for ranking LLMs. The landscape is chaotic and opaque. Don’t buy the snake oil; just focus on building the authority.
3. The death of the “Brochure Website”
This is the design nuance we will need to wrestle with in 2026: we now have to design websites for two distinct audiences: humans and robots.
I love a minimalist website. Clean lines, three words on a page, lots of white space. It feels elegant.
But when an LLM (Large Language Model) looks at a minimalist site, it sees… nothing22. It sees a lack of data. It lacks the confidence to recommend you to a user because you haven’t given it enough context to chew on.
The challenge for the coming year will be designing sites that are rich enough in deep data to satisfy the AI agents, but clean enough not to overwhelm the human visitors.
The era of “less is more” might be over; the era of “dense but designed” is just beginning.
Ready to hit 2026 hard?
If you want to ensure your brand is ready for the robots and the humans, let’s talk. You can schedule in a chat from the 5th of January.
