Recent Platform Updates You Need to Know About in 2026 to Stay Relevant

In this webinar, we break down the massive shift happening in marketing as AI reshapes how customers search, discover, and ultimately choose who to buy from. We explore how traditional search behaviors are evolving, why platforms like AI assistants are becoming the new front door to your business, and what that means for both B2C and B2B brands trying to stay competitive. From rising ad costs to changing user behavior, this session unpacks what’s actually happening right now—and why waiting to adapt could put you behind.

We also dive into what you should be doing about it, covering the role of generative engine optimization (GEO), the continued importance of SEO, and how content, ads, and social strategies are shifting in 2026. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding of where to focus your efforts—from creating higher-intent visibility in AI to leveraging video, platform-specific content, and emerging ad opportunities—so you can stay ahead, capture demand earlier, and turn these changes into a competitive advantage.

Hey everybody. It's your favorite digital marketing, CEO Omar Jenblat. Uh, I am here today to talk to you guys about where we are in 2026 in the shift in marketing that you guys need to know about  all the updates across the platforms to keep you informed so that you are marketing to the best of your abilities.

As you guys may have known, I've been running BusySeed for about 12 years now. Uh, I've been doing marketing for about 20 at this point. The grays are coming in nice and strong there. Um, and across this time there's been so much that has changed.   You know, for the last 20 years, the acquisition playbook was pretty predictable.

Somebody had a problem. You typed into Google, they clicked a link, and boom, they found you. Whether you're a restaurant, a law firm, or you're an enterprise level company,  the funnel really started the same way, the search bar. And really when you think about all the sources you get your, you know, your leads from, um, or your business or customers from, you think they're finding it in someplace on Google or it's word of mouth or referral or something of that nature.

But now that's change and, and that has been shifting entirely so. When we look back at it and we were thinking that, you know, when we did all this search  and we did this before, businesses were spending so much money on and billions were being poured into the game of search. It worked. And we had all this time, you know, for 20 years, just pretty simple methodology.

Wanna get found? SEO for organic on Google paid ads to get found higher than SEO to show up in the first four or the, um, just to get shown up high there.  Now things have changed as of late. 2024 happened then 2025 and more AI just started spewing across the world in the mentality of how we approach things change.

But even from a B2B world a lot, especially with the competition that search has had,  whether search organic or search paid has left the B2B world in a tight stranglehold because the cost per lead started going up. And you're, you're gonna be a real fan of this. We're gonna talk a lot, a lot about these platform changes, whether you are a restaurant, uh, uh, that caters to regular consumers.

You wanna get more people in, or you're an enterprise B2B.  That looks at leads. Today we're gonna be talking a lot about what that's going to look like.

The court core message here. Is that the rules of how customers find you have fundamentally changed. If your marketing strategy looks like what it did, you know 18 months ago, you're gonna start falling behind and you're gonna start to feel this and ultimately acting now and taking care of this now.

Making sure you're staying us up to date as possible is gonna prevent, you know, a year down the line when everybody else is, you know, doing better than you and is running you off the road with their current marketing.  You're gonna have to spend a lot of money to play catch up and a lot of times if you're not fast enough, you'll just die off. 

So let's take a look here to see how we get ahead.  The window of getting ahead is right now. Brands are establishing their visibility in AI and on other platforms as well. So making sure that you're there is gonna be very important. So today we're gonna be talking about a lot of these updates. So let's start over with, you know, let's start with, you know, the biggest, the fundamental, the ai. 

That's where everybody's looking at. It's a new search landscape.  Look at yourselves and the way you behaviorally have changed and looked at your brand. Even just the way you do your personal searching.  You're not going on Google as much anymore just to type in something to find stuff. You are really going to your favorite GPT or your your favorite AI rather.

I've gone between on a daily basis, I'll go between perplexity, Claude, um, I've, uh, moved away from, uh, open AI and GPT. It's, uh, once, once these, uh, guys get too political, it's of less interest to me anyways, and we don't really want our data being used, um, by a lot of these big government agencies. love us.

So pro tip. Maybe not open ai, uh, but anyw, who you're using it. You know, I'm typing, I'm trying to, just even before I did this video, I want to research a set of vitamins that are to, to achieve my health goals for the year. All of that was done through using Claude, using even. Uh uh, Amazon has their own version of it. 

It's wrapped around open ai, I think, but really our research goes through that. So the basic way of searching, clicking on the site, going, reading what the site has, then clicking out,  going back to the Google search region, another one that doesn't happen anymore, and it's actually a breath of fresh air from a consumer behavior side breath of fresh air. 

Well, let's run through the numbers. GPT right now has over 800 million weekly users. It still dominates. It's still one of the best ones. Gemini is actually getting up there, especially with the adoption of phones and such an Android.  Well, we're seeing around 750 monthly users on there, and overviews are starting to appear more and more in searches. 

They're starting to show up 16% on all searches, but as time goes on, that's gonna get higher and higher. Same thing with current ai, um, usage Right now, instead of searching, there's about 30, 40% of people that are going directly into their ais, and that's changing rapidly before the end of the year. We're, we're expecting to see that more than 60 or 70%.

Now, another thing to, to really keep in mind is that. When we look at the total usage of search combining traditional search engines and AI tools,  it actually has increased 26% worldwide and 16% in the us.  So it's wild to think about, but the pie is actually getting bigger.

 And when it comes down to ai, the important thing to keep in mind is the beauty behind it.  By the time your customer gets to you, whether you're a restaurant, whether you're an enterprise, or any place in between, they've researched you. And so all these numbers are great, but what does this really mean?   Well, what this means is that we're seeing that AI is just showing more and more intent across the board because now when we tracked it before somebody went onto your website, alright,  somebody's on your website, why are they on your website?

Maybe they're just looking around, maybe they're curious. Maybe there's a wrong click. That process, that mentality is still happening. It's the discovery mode. People go through their discovery and when they're going through their discovery, they're gonna go, they're gonna click on a bunch of sites. But now with ai, it's doing all of that for them.

It's making discovery easier for them. So they, so what we're seeing generally is with the traffic coming in, it's much higher in 10 people that find you off of ai,  that find your business restaurant, the, you know, legal firm, your SaaS, they have done a lot of research. They've compared you already. So by the time they get to you, they're pretty convinced.

Maybe they wanna have a few extra meetings or such, or, you know, maybe there's still some skepticism, but they, they're still pretty convinced there.  And one important thing too, to think about is. Users that refer from GPT spend an average of 15 minutes on a site  versus people who on average will come from Google.

Uh,  a search will spend about eight minutes. Now there's a lot of shift and there's a lot of numbers in there as well.  But ultimately the biggest thing you need to know is you're gonna get much higher intent coming from AI search. And ultimately, it's going to be the only way you do search, regular search.

Google Search is gonna, it, it's gonna cannibalize itself.

So let's go over changes in terms of what's going on new with general GEO, general engine optimization. So, and we'll talk actually about some SEO down below as well. But one important thing to, to really keep in mind is that as EO, again is gonna be going, you know, further away. And I'm not gonna spend a ton of time this conversation talking about GEO, just wanna talk about the updates since we have a few other, um, webinars already speaking pretty in depth on that.

So, so make sure you go and watch those now. Just some updates in, in some things that we're seeing here is that overall when we have taken a look across clients and we are taking a look across data, we're seeing that when it comes down to just organic searches on ai, GEO, generative engine optimization.

We're seeing that GPT is still dominating a lot of that traffic. So right now we're seeing that it, that citation traffic around 87.4%, um, which is a, a powerful number.  But another thing to keep in mind too is that it's not just GPT Perplexity actually takes a pretty good lead on this as well. And when I talk about citations, I'm saying, you know what you can see on your site.

Overall, not every crawler is very public. Not every crawler wants to mention exactly, you know what it is, what AI it is, but Chat, GPT and perplexity are one of the big ones that you can see attribution with.  The other important thing for us to keep in mind is that there's an overlap between top Google Links and AI cited sources.

There's always been, and that has dropped from 70% down to 20%. Ranking number one on Google doesn't guarantee you you're gonna, that you're gonna show up on AI answers. And appearing on AI answers doesn't require ranking number one. And you know, you might have, you know, heard in some ways like, oh, well, you know, it's still SEO, it's still, you know, being on AI still is the same concepts. 

Not really. There are absolutely dissimilarities and the way we look at it as marketers, there are similarities in terms of the work we did on SEO and the work we did on GEO, but there are far more differences that we need to keep in mind and we need to optimize for.  So that's why everything that you may have done to get that number one Google rank doesn't guarantee you getting the number one AI rank.

Um,  different areas and different reasons for that is really because we look at GEO and we look at how AI pulls and it's very, very intelligent and it understands context to the question. It wants to give you something useful. It looks at authority much more. Again, look at over the GEO uh, uh, webinar that we had, if you wanna learn a little bit more about that. Something important to keep in mind industry wide, regardless of what you are. And the big takeaway from this is that people that adopt GEO early. Oftentimes we'll see 32% of their sales qualified leads, or, you know, customers, you know, whether if you're generating leads or you're really just looking to get, you know, inquiries, people trying to visit, reservations, what, what have you, 32% of those people that are much closer to spend money with you are now coming from generative ai. 

So the takeaway really here is. Make sure you're putting time and effort into it and you are doing it in the right way. Again, we're always happy to help with that.  Look at some of the other videos or feel free, just reach out to us if you don't feel like watching the videos, um,  and we'll help answer any questions that we can for you.

Now, we've talked about all the AI stuff and that's great and dandy. It's still important to remember that SEO exists. It's changing,  it exists, and it's still important. So SEO still drives about 93% of web traffic that we analyze and we look at and overall. When we're looking at SEO, we see generally longer term ROI than PPC.

And when you think about it, when people find you organically or they do the work there or they're really searching for you there, they have already put in more intent into finding you.  So that's why they turn into higher ROI. It's the same thing when we were talking about ai. When you think about it, really  people are putting the effort into researching on the AI platform, and by the time they get to you, they're much more likely to convert.

That's just because they're, they're spending the time and the effort. So instead of, you know, finding you on search, then spending, you know, x amount of time on your site, et cetera, et cetera, they're doing all that and then getting to eventually, um, which is always gonna beat PPC.  But the beauty behind running ads and PPC is that you can get leads or whatever going like that.

The moment you shut it off, it goes away.  That's why SEO and GEO should still be an important part of your playbook.

We all as, uh, marketers and as, uh, salespeople and really along the business world. Um, 2025 was a wild time because AI started getting shoved and it was an over abused, you know, marketing term. And, uh, in the way we look at it, uh, is that. 2025 was a panic year about what AI search would mean for SEO.  2026 is an action year.

Updating your SEO for searches changes. One of the top trends brands are tackling this year and, nope, nope, nope.

If you've seen some of my other, uh, webinars or you've seen, you know, some of my, you know, other conversations on other sites, or even if we have ever had, you know, the pleasure of speaking with each other, you probably know. One thing that I like to mention is that, uh, this is the time to act, especially 2026.

The way I look at it, 2025 was the year of, oh boy, here comes ai.  What do we do with it? Everybody's shoving it everywhere. Every commercial you see has AI in it. Uh, even your toaster had AI in it. Everybody was shoving AI into everything. Well, 2026 is the year of action.  The panic. All of that started happening.

People started getting aware to it and then people started running into it.  This year is gonna be the year where it fundamentally, you get to cement yourself in early. That early mover advantage is beautiful. And two, we even have tools, if you wanna calculate what it would be to be an early mover, we have tools to calculate potential revenue, or on the opposite side, what it's gonna cost you, uh, to not be playing the game.

But overall, this is. An an important factor to keep in mind. So making sure that you are updating your SEO. Keeping in mind your GEO is a, a trend that we're seeing across the board. Around 40.6% of marketers are keeping this very much in mind in, in a poll by HubSpot.

Here are the important things that keep in mind though about measuring SEO As of March, 2026,  organic CTR is going down.  And we're seeing that it's plummeted about 61% with AI overviews present, which makes sense. An AI overview comes in, you look at that. CTR, you know, is the click through rate. You're less likely to kick through if you get your answer right away.

Even more specifically on this, uh, Ahrefs found that, uh.  AI overviews actually reduce CTR for the position number one by 58%. Um,  and Spark Touro puts 58% of Google searches at zero clicks. So it's not just us that we're seeing this,  we're seeing this across the board. Something to definitely keep in mind.

Coming from the top, Google, the kings of SEO, um, and search. They released in February, um, uh, 2026, uh, a uh, new discovery update that actually is prioritizing original in-depth content over derivative material.  And so what that means is making sure that you're writing good content is gonna be critical on the SEO point of view,  also impacts the GEO.

So just changing the way that you think about the way you do content is gonna be important. And doing that now is gonna be good because the gap is really widening for who is gonna be in, who's gonna start, you know, showing in general, SEO is showing in the discovery mode of Google and who's not going to be showing.

For all my analytics guys out there who've been looking at their. Google Analytics or whatever their analytics tool is for measuring website traffic. Um, everybody may have noticed that in 2025, uh, traffic shot down, uh, in December significantly so there was a core update and I almost across the board I talked to.

I talk to a lot of people, 20 people or so. You know, we discussing different brands and such, whether it's clients or prospects.  And every time I take a look at these graphs, it's always the same thing. December drop. Now why is that? Oh, it's the good old core updates. We love to see them. Google loves shaking up the world and, uh, making it difficult for, uh, uh, for us marketers.

But in the core update here, it reinforced a, a clear principle. Content quality must support both rankings and AI interpretation. So what that really means is Gen generic AI generated content without any expertise is becoming less looked at. So if you're on one of those, you know, sites or one of those services and, and they're starting to pop up like weeds, that's saying, Hey, you know, this AI service will produce a hundred blogs for you. 

It'll, the AI will write the blogs for you. No, you still need humans behind that. You still need to have people writing the blog and sure, AI is a great assistant.  It can do deep research, but at the end of the day, humans, the expertise, the points of views that you give are gonna be important. And it's just simply gonna throw away those a hundred blogs that that software is building for you to post on your site and automatically post on your site.

 Yeah, it's bs. It's gonna just lead to a lot of slop. AI's gonna eventually GEO, all these other companies. They're gonna look at it and say, oh, these guys are just becoming just a, a content, uh, a useless content machine.  And you don't wanna ever be labeled as that, 'cause that's gonna go and impact your authority.

So, something to think about. Um, and yes, please, please don't waste your money on those automatic tools that just post to your site. And, and it doesn't really take much feedback and they sound nice on paper.   But think about it. If it's that easy, you're not gonna really get too much. Out of it. So keep that in mind.

Let's talk a little bit about AI ads in the bigger ones that we're gonna talk about are Google and GPT. Uh, I did a conversation last month about, uh, AI ads and what that looks like. Um, but this is a rapidly ever changing platform, so I want to keep you up to date with it. So what we're seeing is that OpenAI has already started testing out their ads and they're making it very clearly labeled sponsored messages.

Um, so, you know, for the, the free and the cheap platforms on OpenAI with chat GPT, um,  you might see people like Best Buy at and t Expedia once we're in the early beta phase of trying these ads out. And so what open AI is trying to do is get early feedback. So the. Important thing to think about is that we still are away, you know, months away from that being available in a self-serve tool for us, as you know, as businesses and marketers to use. 

But it's constantly under development. And one important thing to think about here is really Google who makes most of their money off ads,  is now cannibalizing themselves because they're showing these AI overviews.  That's showing up past the ads, past anything else. So some people aren't even clicking on a link. 

So Google's gonna be getting into the game too with rumors that they have been internally building it out to create ads on Gemini. But let's dive a little deeper into that. So Google is now testing ads inside AI mode. No, what did I say on the last one

to be more specific. What Google has been doing is that they've been testing ads inside AI mode in the US especially, uh, giving the advertiser opportunity to reach people who are asking these, you know, more complex questions, um, which was previously untapped. Uh, these ads, you know, are pairing, uh, below and integrate into the AI responses.

So it's not necessarily the first aspect of the AI response you see,  but it's gonna start showing up more and more. That's gonna be the early sign there. The next move for them is really gonna be to throw it into a Gemini. Um, but Google is testing sponsored ads within AI mode and that signaled to us.

Saying that this is gonna start taking off real fast.  So it's gonna be important for you to make sure that you are prepared.   📍 You have content that answers questions, because this isn't gonna be the same as Google ads. When we think about this AI and those recommendations, they work off not off of keywords, but off of bigger prompts where people are trying to get specific.

So  making sure you have the content to support that so that you can actually run ads is gonna be important because.  People who are preparing for that now great. Because by the time ads hit, they get to run on it.  They get to be first movers. They get to capture so much business from that. So it's important to keep that in mind.

Moving on over to the social world, meta is rolling out ads on threads. Uh, giving advertisers access to its 400 million monthly users. Yeah, sometimes you would always think that threads is, uh, you know, it went through the, the meta makeover, uh, and it got integrated into so many different other meta apps, and now it has a massive adoption rate.

So what we're still seeing though, with meta, and an important thing to, to keep in mind is that short form videos are delivering the highest ROI, um, among all the other content formats as of this year.  And this is where you should be putting a lot of investments. So some people think investing in videos.

Absolutely. One other aspect that we're seeing a lot of and that we're starting to offer here at Buse is AI generated content, AI videos.  It's still, you know, difficult scenario. There's a lot of hallucinations, craziness that happens within AI videos. But ultimately, if done well, we can see higher ROI across the board  so let's take a look at the overall aspect with some other socials as well. Snapchat, they're seeing Snapchat Spotlight clips increase probably about 300% year over year in terms of, uh, in the us. Uh, users are spending more time on TikTok. Uh, the one that famously got acquired by the US government. Again, I am, I, uh, uh, I always love shoving my little personal opinions in there, but not big fans of TikTok these days, uh, especially the censorship that they're doing on there.

But people are still using it and it's still one of the bigger, uh, while even though it's losing some traction, it is still one of the bigger type of social media platforms that, uh, younger generations are on.  And one of the primary engagement areas of Facebook, where it's Facebook or Instagram or really the reels. 

So it's just again, a nod to how important it is to be generating video content. Real ai, you just need to generate video content. Here's another thing that, uh, HubSpot actually recently found. Uh, 49.4% of marketers reuse the same content across multiple platforms.  Now, what I mean by this is, hey, this is a, you know, this video here, this is a 16 by nine ratio video.   We're gonna throw it up on, you know, this platform, on this platform, and this platform.

The same piece of content. Now, 39.5% are actually doing tailored content per platform.  And this is a missed opportunity in a few different ways. If you do content specific to that platform,  specific to the general users on the platform, to what you promote on that platform, again, everything is different. 

You're, you shouldn't be posting the same content that you're doing on Instagram, then to LinkedIn, for example. Two different markets,  two different reasons for while using it, support to keep that in mind.

Moving on to the world of Reddit. Uh, Reddit actually recently reported that 80 million weekly users are using their search merged in with their AI answers feature. And what they're finding in what every AI company is really aiming to do is that these people are staying on the platform, are staying on the Reddit platform.

So instead of, you know, seeing something, an answer bouncing to another site, bouncing to this site, bouncing to that. What a lot of these AI companies want to do and these social companies,  and that's what social has done across the board, is they want to keep you engaged with their platform as long as possible.

The reason why we call it doom scrolling is because they keep showing you content so you stay on the platform. So they make money off ads. Same thing here. They want you to stay on the platform so they can show you ads so you don't have to leave and go to another platform. And what we're gonna see in the future is that people are gonna stick to their certain platforms and get really entrenched in those platforms.

And I'll just note for all my TikTok advertisers out there, I mentioned a, a, a little bit about how, you know, it's gotten unstable, but because this US led joint venture with Oracle Silver Lake and MGX, um, uh, acquired TikTok, it's actually. Really worried marketers. So, um, the marketers are worried about a bunch of different things here, but what we're starting to see is it's less about the censorship that they're worried about and more about the algorithm and user changes, the, the behavior changes that have been happened because of this.

Um, TikTok did survive the ban threat. Uh, but treat it like you treat any other platform going through a leader change. Make sure you diversify your content. Uh, 'cause you don't want to have all of that effort into TikTok go away as the algorithm and behaviors of users change.

  And in general, when it comes down to the ad world, what we're seeing is that ad fraud is generally getting worse. Um, we're seeing that. Bots are really taking over a lot of the internet, uh, making digital ad fraud, one of the biggest hidden costs in marketing. So a lot of these AI tools, you've probably heard of Open Claw, you've, you see Claude Cowork, you know, even perplexity has computer, um, that actually run agents that act on their own.

Um, but  whether it's an agent or whether it's just a really sophisticated bot, we're starting to see that we're, a lot of traffic is coming in from these AI bots. So. It's something to keep your eye on.  And really, this isn't just a tech problem of real attribution. This is gonna be a budget problem. If you're running paid ads, you have to take in this into account, not actively auditing your traffic and understanding you know where it's coming from.

It's gonna burn your money. So it's important to take a look really at where ad fraud is happening and how it's impacting you. 

So as you can see, there's a lot of changes that's happening.  It's only been not even three full months in the year, and we're seeing massive shifts in the AI world. Um, a couple of other mentions that I'll bring out here. It is that Google is shifting how it's doing, its, uh, overall checkout mentality. So Google announced that they are, um, uh, the, they announced rather the Universal Commerce Protocol in January of this year.

It's a framework that's gonna allow purchases inside AI mode and the Gemini app without ever leaving Google. Just like I mentioned, they wanna keep you in their platform. This is actually gonna be a massive thing for e-commerce, local businesses, for everybody. '  cause if someone can research and buy without visiting your website, your traffic metrics are going to lag and they're gonna die off. 

But you're still gonna be getting revenue. In fact, you might be even getting more revenue because friction has been taken away from these people. Other things that we're also starting to see is that unpolished content is actually performing produced content. And uh, this is actually something from ink, uh, that ink reported, but, uh, CMOs of a lot of fast moving brands are calling 2026, the year of unpolished content. 

That means consumers are graphic here to what feels real. And relatable over highly produced campaigns. And again, this is the countering to the shoving AI down  everybody's throats. Now people want the humanity. They wanna see something that isn't necessarily perfect. Um, so that trend has been shifting and this actually.

For small businesses is a really great leveler because you don't need a massive production budget to win on social if you're not gonna use AI to generate something, as long as you have, you know, a phone and you're a founder and you can say something genuine, that's gonna be great. So keep that in mind when you're looking overall at your content and how you're producing.

Other than that, we see measurements have been broken. Um, a lot of measurements, and we can see about 45% of agencies, um, said that their, uh, ad production is one of their biggest creative challenges. And with that, AI creative is delivering such a mixed level of performance and results that it's getting harder to, to attribute and to measure which ones are producing best quality.

So there you have it, folks. The world is changing, but.   At the end of the day, if you are staying laser focused, you're keeping up to date, you're making sure you're pushing content out there,  you are making sure you're staying up to date with how your brand is looked at by all the different AI bots, and you're spending just a lot of time working on your new game plans for marketing.

You are gonna be doing good now. What I'll say is that it takes a lot of work, and there's no doubt in the world that you know, constantly producing content and making sure that you have the right videos, that you're staying on top with all of these changes, understanding what's going on, all that takes a lot of work.

But really for our clients, that's why we're here. So we do this day in, day out, we are, you know, we're, we're very much a leading company in the AI GEO world.  So if this gets ever too overwhelming or you really need help to try to navigate this, to set up plans, to create your content, to make sure that you stay ahead of your competitors, just reach out to us.

We can help you understand, you know, the opportunity cost of not jumping on what potential revenue you can get depending on where you show up in ai, and really make sure that you are staying ahead of the competition.   So that you grow and flourish. It's been an absolute pleasure, everybody. Again, I'm Omar Jenblat, CEO of BusySeed,  and I look to see you guys on the next one.

Thank you.