The Year of Trust, Automation and Slop
It’s December and we all know what that means. It’s time to put the finishing touches on your 2026 budget and plan for what’s ahead.
In order to help our clients prepare for 2026, we asked a variety of Rocket55’s subject-matter experts what trends, changes, disruptions or themes they expect to see in the new year. The predictions generally centered around three major themes:
Trust matters.
Especially as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly prevalent, ordinary people will become more skeptical of what they see, what they can trust, and especially who they can trust.
Automation, especially through artificial intelligence tools, is not going anywhere.
The trick is knowing what you can automate, what you should automate, and how.
There is a rising tide of slop in the world.
By slop, we mean low-effort content that is obviously produced by machines being used by non-experts. Brands have to put enough effort into their work to avoid being considered slop.
With those three themes, let’s look at some specifics quotes and predictions from the Rocket55 team.
Smart automation will drive your growth
Many of our experts believe that automation will continue to be the difference-maker between bad and good and between good and great.
- In 2026, digital marketing, especially inside HubSpot, will shift from building campaigns to orchestrating autonomous, AI-assisted lifecycle stage management that personalizes by intent and behavior in real time, while humans focus on strategy, creative, and building trust with consumers – Joey Merz, RevOps Strategist
- On Amazon, artificial intelligence will continue to expand and take on more functions. It will also improve on its current sub-par quality in many ways and thus be adopted by more merchants and advertisers. – Robert Portnoy, Marketplace Strategist
- Top-tier digital marketing agencies will be using MCP servers in 2026 to interface with data in order to provide more insightful, nuanced and relevant real time information as a basis for their actions. – Mike Voermans, Director of AI Development
- Most AI products are still searching for use cases beyond flashy demos. In 2026 we’ll see more intentional focus on AI addressing specific user needs. – Morgan May, Director of User Experience
If any of the above get you wondering what you can be doing differently, go ahead and reach out. (We have a nice CTA waiting for you at the bottom of this article.)
Trust is the difference maker. Slop is a weakness.
Trust and slop are two sides of the same coin. Ordinary people can no longer tell what’s real and what isn’t. And slop (low-effort, machine-generated design, video and copy made by people who don’t know what they’re making is bad) is ubiquitous.
Here is what some of our experts have to say about how the war between trust and slop will escalate in 2026:
- AI slop will be a major problem in 2026, forcing brands and their digital marketing partners to become more strategic, focusing on quality over quantity while highlighting their originality (especially as search habits continue to change.) – Paul Patane, Copy Manager (You can read more of Paul’s thoughts on this topic here.)
- Use of social platforms will continue to become more diffuse and audiences more difficult to reach on the big platforms of Meta, TikTok and X. YouTube will continue to remain highly relevant to everyone unless they destroy themselves by adding some kind of AI result a’la its parent company Google. Oh, and everyone will sue OpenAI eventually. – Jennifer Kohnhorst, Director of RevOps
- Honestly, I think people are so worn out from what’s real and what’s not real to an extent where people are going to prioritize more experiences that feel real or that are in person versus digital. I think that will change the way brands relate to customers, this is more of a long term thing but I think someday there will be companies where people pay to go on walks/dinner with other humans solely for connection with real life. – Devon Gjebre, Paid Media Manager
- Everyone always wants to talk about AI…how we can leverage it to work smarter, more efficiently, and be more accurate in everything we do. The reality is that what gets people to invest in marketing are the trust and relationships of the people they work with and for. – Kaitlyn Benson, Director of Client Experience
- I think people will start pushing back against AI-generated content. We’re going to get back to the imperfection and creativity that only humans can deliver. I think the revival of Vine, which will be built on a strict “no AI content” rule, is a great example of a cultural turning point. – Courtney Stageberg, Senior Client Success Manager
- Public engagement (likes and comments) will continue to decline while private interaction takes over. Saves, shares, direct messages, group chats, Close Friends lists and broadcast channels now shape how people really talk about and spread content. The conversation and the truly “social” part of social media hasn’t died but it has moved to places brands can’t easily see or track. This means success depends on creating content people want to save privately, not perform publicly. – Veronica Snyder, Director of Social Media
Worried about if your content is slop, slop-adjacent or trust-generating? If you have to ask, it might be slop.
And yes, the field of search won’t stop changing.
Here are three bonus predictions specific to the field of search engine (and search experience) optimization and marketing:
- Due to the prominence of generative results in traditional search, impressions will continue to grow in importance as a metric of visibility for informational queries, while conversions and, specifically, clicks will be marks of success for commercial intent keywords. – Ben Lohrding, SXO Manager
- AI visibility tracking will be more important than keyword rank tracking; and if you don’t know what I’m talking about you’re already behind. – Joe Kerlin, SXO Director
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews… they’re all going to have ads. – Ben Wachholz, Director of Paid Media
Not sure what you mean when we say “search experience optimization”? You should read this.
And here’s the call-to-action! Reach out. We like to talk about this stuff.