2026 Budget Poll: How 30 Marketing Leaders Are Shifting Spend

SEO and AI Search Take the Top Spot, and It's a Hedge

Search's return to the top of a budget poll is almost funny given how 2026's discourse keeps insisting organic is dying. It isn't dying, it's mutating, and the marketing leaders in this poll are responding to the mutation instead of abandoning the channel. Ten of thirty respondents increasing spend here isn't nostalgia for 2015-era SEO, it's a hedge against a results page that now answers a question before anyone clicks anything.

The hedge is measurable. Pew Research Center analyzed browsing data in 2025 and found that when Google's AI Overviews appeared, users clicked through to a traditional web result in just 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no AI Overview showed up, and only about 1% clicked a link inside the AI Overview itself, according to Pew Research's analysis. That's not a rounding error. That's roughly half the click-through rate evaporating on a huge share of queries.

Google has pushed back on the doom narrative, telling publishers its AI-powered search products still send billions of clicks a week, though it still hasn't shown the underlying data that would let anyone check the math. Marketing leaders increasing SEO and AI search budgets aren't necessarily buying that optimism. They're building coverage for a world where citation inside an AI answer matters about as much as a blue-link ranking used to.

• Audit your top 50 organic pages for whether they get cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity answers, and which ones never show up at all.
• Run those pages through KWFinder to see which queries still send clicks versus which have been fully absorbed by AI summaries.
• Shift content budget from volume (more posts) to structure (clearer answers, tighter schema, citable data points).
• Ask your SEO lead for a quarterly report on share of voice inside AI answers, not just keyword rank.

Paid Social's Strong Second Place Isn't a New Bet

Paid social's 27% is the least surprising number in the poll. Eight of thirty leaders are increasing spend here, and most are doing it because the last two years already proved the channel works for them, not because 2026 delivered some fresh revelation about TikTok, Instagram, or Meta's ad stack. This is confidence compounding, not a bet.

The risk with compounding confidence is attribution laziness. It's easy to keep funding a channel that feels like it's working when the measurement underneath it is soft. If you're one of the eight increasing paid social spend, pair that increase with a harder look at your attribution model, not just a bigger media buy. Our recent breakdown of attribution models for 2026 budgets is a decent starting checklist before you sign off on the number.

Paid Search's Mid-Tier Ranking Looks Like a Plateau, Not a Retreat

Paid search sits at 20%, six of thirty, squarely in the middle. That's not decline. It's maturity. Paid search has been the most measured, most optimized channel in the stack for two decades, and there's only so much headroom left in a channel that's already been squeezed by a hundred consultants and just as many algorithm updates.

Gartner's annual CMO Spend Survey has tracked marketing budgets sliding as a share of company revenue for several straight years, which helps explain why fewer leaders are naming paid search their top growth bet even as they keep funding it. Google is trying to manufacture new headroom by turning Search and Performance Max into something closer to an agent you brief than an auction you manage, a shift our agentic advertising playbook covers in detail, and it's one reason paid search hasn't slipped further down this list.

• Ask whether your plateau is real or a measurement artifact from AI Overviews suppressing clicks on the queries you also bid on.
• Test at least one agentic campaign type this quarter before assuming the channel has hit its ceiling.
• Check for cannibalization: are you paying for clicks that would have converted organically before AI answers ate the top of the page?

Email/CRM and Events Are Trailing, and That's a Risk Leaders Should Name Out Loud

Email and CRM come in at 13%, four of thirty. Events and field marketing trail everything at 7%, just two of thirty. Neither number means these channels are being killed. It means fewer leaders are naming them as this year's growth bet, which is a different and more dangerous thing, because underfunded-but-not-cancelled is exactly how good channels quietly rot.

• Events risk: in longer B2B sales cycles, in-person relationship building has no clean digital substitute, especially against a backdrop of pricier out-of-home and event formats covered in our 2026 buyer's guide to out-of-home costs.
• Email risk: retention and lifetime value depend on it, and cutting it to fund acquisition channels trades a known return for an unproven one.
• Before cutting either, run a martech stack audit to find out if the problem is the channel or the tools bolted onto it.

The Reallocation Checklist Before You Move a Dollar

1. What specific metric moved to justify this increase, and over what time window?
2. Are we counting on a platform's own attribution, or a model we control and can defend to finance?
3. What happens to the channel we're cutting from if this bet doesn't pay off within 12 months?
4. Have we audited the tools supporting this channel, or only the media budget line?
5. Is this increase funded by cutting something structurally important, like retention or relationships, or something genuinely low-yield?

Read the Signal, Not the Sample Size

Every number in this piece comes from a CMO Mag reader poll of 30 marketing leaders, not a nationally representative survey of the entire industry. Thirty responses is enough to see a directional signal. It is not enough to declare a statistically significant trend, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Treat the rank order as a hypothesis worth testing against your own numbers, not a mandate to copy.

The signal is still worth acting on. Ten of thirty leaders betting on SEO and AI search, eight on paid social, and only two on events tells you where confidence is building and where it's quietly leaking, even if it can't tell you the exact split the whole industry lands on by December.