2025 ~ The Year the Ground Shifted

A Reality Check for CMOs Planning for 2026

Why This Year Was Different

Every year brings change but 2025 was different. This was the year that separated what came before from what comes next—a genuine inflection point where theories became measurable realities and strategies that worked for a decade started failing in real time.

For years, we talked about AI disrupting search. We speculated about zero-click futures. We debated whether Google would cannibalize its own traffic. In 2025, we stopped speculating and started counting the losses.

The data isn't subtle. Organic click-through rates for informational queries with AI Overviews dropped 61% year-over-year. Paid CTRs fell 65%. Even queries without AI Overviews declined 25-41%.

This isn't an adjustment period. It's a permanent redistribution of how information gets consumed.

The Transition in Numbers

Consider what shifted in twelve months:

• AI Overviews went from appearing on 6.49% of queries in January to roughly 16% by November—more than doubling their footprint.

• Navigational queries—brand and destination searches that were supposed to be protected—saw AI Overview presence grow from under 1% to over 10%.

• Google started placing ads alongside AI Overviews, jumping from 3% in January to 40% by November.

• Meanwhile, marketing budgets stayed flat at 7.7% of revenue, a historic low.

• CMOs responded by cutting agency spend (39% planning reductions) while increasing martech investment to 22% of total budgets.

• AI integration doubled since 2022, now powering 17.2% of marketing activities.

• The gap between companies with AI strategies and those without widened considerably. Over 80% say AI is on their roadmap.

• Fewer than 30% have an actual plan. Only about 6% are seeing meaningful bottom-line impact—and those organizations report fundamentally redesigning workflows, not just bolting AI onto existing processes.

Why Transition Years Matter

Transition years are uncomfortable because the old playbook still partially works. You can keep doing what you've been doing and the lights stay on. Revenue doesn't collapse overnight. The danger is invisible—it's the ground you're losing to competitors who moved faster.

In 2025, that looked like:

• Continuing to optimize for rankings while competitors optimized for AI citations

• Measuring success through traffic while visibility shifted to surfaces that don't generate pageviews

• Treating AI tools as efficiency plays while leaders used them to fundamentally rethink how marketing operates

The businesses that recognized 2025 as a transition year made different choices. They invested in brand building because branded queries still outperform. They restructured content for synthesis, not just search. They started measuring share of voice in AI responses alongside traditional metrics.

The businesses that treated 2025 as business-as-usual are entering 2026 behind—and many don't know it yet.

The Measurement Crisis

Here's what kept marketing leaders up at night: how do you prove value when your content influences decisions without generating clicks?

When someone reads an AI Overview that synthesizes your expertise, you've shaped their thinking. But there's no pageview, no session, no conversion path to show for it. The industry hasn't cracked this yet. Some track citation rates. Others monitor brand mention sentiment in AI outputs. Most are still relying on traditional metrics while acknowledging they're increasingly incomplete.

Success metrics are shifting from clicks and traffic to visibility and share of voice. If your attribution model can't accommodate this reality, it's already obsolete—and so is the story you're telling your CFO.

What I'm Looking Forward to in 2026

I'm genuinely excited about what's possible when we partner with AI effectively. Not AI as a replacement for thinking, but AI as an accelerant for better marketing. Faster research. Deeper analysis. More iterations. Less time on repetitive tasks and more time on strategy and creativity.

The teams that figure out the right human-AI collaboration model will outpace their competitors significantly. They'll produce better work faster. They'll spot opportunities others miss. They'll free up senior talent to do senior-level thinking instead of grinding through execution.

That's the upside.

What Concerns Me About 2026

The downside is equally real: a lot of people are going to use AI poorly and do more damage than good.

I'm talking about the flood of mediocre, AI-generated content that adds noise without adding value. The brands that treat AI as a shortcut to volume instead of a tool for quality.

The agencies selling "AI-powered" services that are really just prompts and no strategy. The marketers who stop thinking because they've outsourced judgment to a language model.

We're already seeing it. Brandwatch reported that online mentions of "slop"—low-effort, AI-generated content—rose more than 200% in 2025. The frustration is real.

People are drowning in irrelevant posts and excessive content that buries anything authentic.

The companies that use AI to produce more garbage faster will erode their own brand equity. They'll train their audiences to tune them out. They'll contribute to the declining trust in digital content generally—which hurts everyone.

The Space in Between

Then there's the uncertain middle ground:

• AI search optimization is real, but the playbook is still being written.

• Citation tracking matters, but the tools are immature.

• Brand building is more important than ever, but proving ROI on brand investment remains challenging.

The winners won't be the companies with the most sophisticated AI tools—they'll be the ones who maintain strategic clarity while everything around them shifts. They'll use AI to amplify expertise, not replace it. They'll invest in genuine authority because that's what AI systems are learning to recognize and surface.

The losers will chase shortcuts, produce forgettable content at scale, and wonder why their visibility keeps declining despite doing "all the right things."

Where We Come In

This is exactly the environment we built WSI to operate in. When the ground shifts, businesses need partners who can help them navigate without losing their footing.

In 2026, that means three things:

• First, cutting through the noise. Everyone's talking about AI. Most of it is hype dressed up as strategy.
  

  • We help businesses separate signal from noise—identifying which AI applications actually move revenue and which are distractions.

  • No chasing shiny objects.

  • No implementing technology for technology's sake.

  • Just clear-eyed assessment of what works for your specific situation.

• Second, measuring what matters with imperfect tools. Yes, the measurement landscape is primitive right now.

• Citation tracking is inconsistent.

• AI visibility metrics are immature.

• Traditional attribution is increasingly incomplete. That's reality.

But primitive doesn't mean useless. We're building measurement frameworks that combine what we can track with directional indicators that inform strategy—even when perfect data doesn't exist.

Waiting for perfect measurement means waiting forever. We'd rather help businesses make smart decisions with the information available today.

• Third, ensuring AI makes your marketing better, not just faster. The slop problem is real, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. We're committed to using AI as a tool for quality

  
  

  • better research

  • sharper strategy

  • more refined execution

Not as a content factory that pumps out forgettable material at scale. Every piece of content should earn its existence. AI should raise the bar, not lower it.

Bottom Line

2025 was the year digital marketing's future stopped being theoretical. Traffic patterns shifted. Measurement frameworks broke. AI moved from experiment to infrastructure. The transition is complete—now we're operating in new territory.

The fundamentals haven't changed:

• create value

• build authority

• be findable where your buyers are looking.

But the surface area got bigger, the metrics got murkier, and the penalty for standing still got steeper.

The question isn't whether your digital strategy needs to evolve. It does. The question is whether you'll lead that change or react to it after your competitors have already moved.

If you're ready to stop guessing and start building a marketing approach that accounts for where things are actually headed, let's talk. No pitch deck. No dog and pony show. Just a straightforward conversation about where you are, where you need to be, and what it takes to get there.

Sources

• Seer Interactive, "AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update" (November 2025)

• Pew Research Center, "Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears" (July 2025)

• Semrush, "AI Overviews Study: What 2025 SEO Data Tells Us" (December 2025)

• Search Engine Land, "Google AI Overviews surged in 2025, then pulled back" (December 2025)

• Gartner, "2025 CMO Spend Survey"

• CMSWire, "Agency Cuts vs. Martech Gains: The 2025 CMO Tradeoff" (August 2025)

• Single Grain, "2025 Marketing Budget: Insights from 11,000+ CMOs" (October 2025)

• McKinsey & Company, "The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation" (November 2025)

• WSI Digital Marketing, "The Future of Marketing Strategy: 5 Predictions for 2025" (November 2025)

• Brandwatch, "The Essential Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2025" (December 2025)

• Boston Consulting Group, "2025 CMO Survey"