This FAQ covers affiliate market size, publisher types, AI disruption, and what marketers should prioritize in 2026.

As brands incorporate creators and influencers into more of their marketing and advertising strategies, they are fueling the growth of the creator economy, while making it more competitive and complex.

New studies show the limitations of relying on AI tools for health answers. Platforms must tighten safeguards and educate users on smart prompting.

YouTube now outpaces Reddit in AI citations as models prioritize transcripts, metadata, and explanatory formats over engagement signals.

Our analysts (or “bakers”) compete in a Great British Bake Off–style episode, discussing why Google may overtake OpenAI in 2026 and how the AI boom could get a reality check this year. Join Senior Director of Podcasts and host Marcus Johnson, along with Principal Analyst Nate Elliot and Analyst Jacob Bourne. Listen everywhere, and watch on YouTube and Spotify.

Retailers faced a challenging year as economic factors, new technologies, and changing consumer behaviors reshaped the landscape. Here are our top five stories from this past year and what they meant to a tumultuous industry.

Retail media’s early free-for-all is giving way to a more deliberate approach. At last week’s EMARKETER Summit, leaders from Kellanova and Every Man Jack described how marketers are sharpening their focus, rethinking measurement, and preparing for an AI-driven discovery landscape.

Marketing professionals see AI leading to several shifts in consumer behavior that will greatly impact the fundamentals of digital advertising in the next 2 to 3 years, per a Funnel and Ravn Research study of in-house marketers and agency professionals. As AI reshapes digital and search advertising, the brands that thrive will be those who seize the opportunities presented by AI-driven changes.

As shoppers flock to LLM-powered searches to learn more about products and set shopping budgets, Salesforce data reveals new opportunities for brands looking to have a firm hold on their customers' journeys.

Alibaba released two cutting-edge additions to its Qwen 3 large language model (LLM) that are ripe for enterprise application.Qwen3-Omni gives enterprises a rare mix of flexibility, cost savings, and global reach that many proprietary models can’t match. Qwen3-Max could push Alibaba into the frontier of agentic AI, combining massive scale with code-generation tools that could rival other developer-first models. For CMOs, Qwen3-Omni’s multilingual and multimodal skills could power richer customer interactions and unlock real-time insights from video, audio, and text data.

As Google's search changes continue and consumers increasingly turn to alternative platforms, the SEO playbook defined by link building and keyword optimization is losing relevance.

Retailers and brands are racing to deploy AI across the shopping journey, but trust, quality, and execution will define who wins.

By blending fast and accurate reasoning in open-source models, this startup is betting developers want flexibility without licensing headaches

A scrappy Chinese startup disrupts the AI hierarchy with a lean, open-source model, challenging Big Tech’s costly infrastructure and rewriting the rules of AI competition.

For publishers, genAI is changing everything from search referrals to the way they produce content.

As it transitions to a for-profit model, OpenAI’s innovations and investments promise growth, but leadership turmoil and rising competition may challenge its dominance.

GenAI gives banks unprecedented tools to create a more personalized experience for their customers, but some use cases are easier to implement than others.

There’s a mismatch between the operational benefits banks hope to gain from genAI and how they’re allocating their genAI spend.