It’s budgeting season. Somewhere right now, a marketing team is opening its 2026 spreadsheet, hitting “Save As,” renaming it 2027 Marketing Budget, and beginning the annual ritual of moving numbers around.
Paid search goes up a little. SEO stays about the same. Somebody finds another few dollars for social. And then comes the slightly panicked conversation about how much money needs to be set aside for AI.
I’ve seen this movie before.
When Trivera started in 1996, marketing budgets were pretty straightforward. You had Yellow Pages, direct mail, maybe radio, print, trade shows and a few other familiar line items. Then along came this new thing called a website, and a lot of companies treated it like another brochure that needed its own little box on the spreadsheet.
Then search became a line item. Social became a line item. Mobile became a line item.
The problem was that none of those were really just new tactics. They represented fundamental changes in how customers found companies, researched companies and decided who they wanted to do business with.
And now we’re doing it again with AI.
Your Customers Didn’t Wait for Your Planning Meeting
For years, the digital customer journey was fairly easy to visualize. Somebody had a need, went to Google, typed in a phrase, clicked a blue link, visited a website and hopefully converted.
Nice. Clean. Measurable.
That journey is fragmenting quickly.
Traditional Google searches still happen, of course. But today a prospect might research a problem using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. They may ask an AI system to compare vendors. They may get an answer directly from a Google AI Overview without ever clicking through to the companies being recommended. They may discover a brand through LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube or some channel that barely existed in the old customer journey.
And we’re heading toward even more voice search, visual search and AI agents doing research and evaluation on behalf of customers.
Your customers didn’t wait for your 2027 planning meeting to change their behavior.
Your Website Still Matters. Maybe More Than Ever.
One reaction to all of this is to assume that websites and SEO suddenly matter less.
I think that’s exactly backward.
Your website isn’t just talking to human visitors anymore. Increasingly, AI systems are reading it too. They’re trying to understand what your company does, what you know, whether you’re credible and whether you deserve to be included in an answer or recommendation.
That makes things like clear content, good site architecture, structured data and actual expertise more important, not less.
SEO is changing for the same reason. It can’t just be about matching a specific keyword phrase anymore. Search engines and AI systems are increasingly trying to understand context, relationships, expertise and authority.
The goal is no longer just “How do I rank number one for this phrase?”
Increasingly, it’s “How do I become one of the companies the system understands, trusts and recommends?”
Please Don’t Add an “AI” Line Item
This may sound strange coming from the CEO of a digital agency that spends a lot of time helping companies use AI, but please don’t just add an AI line item to your 2027 marketing spreadsheet.
That’s the wrong question.
AI is already becoming part of search, content creation, analytics, customer service, personalization, research, automation and the way people discover businesses.
Treating it as an isolated silo is exactly what companies did wrong with mobile and social.
Remember when companies effectively had a “desktop strategy” and a little “mobile strategy” sitting off to the side? Then everybody woke up one morning and realized their customers had moved to phones.
AI is another shift that cuts across the entire strategy.
Your 2027 plan shouldn’t ask, “How much should we spend on AI?”
It should ask, “How has AI changed the things we’re already spending money on?”
The Click Is Becoming a Worse Measurement of Influence
There’s another uncomfortable part of this shift.
Marketers have spent decades getting very good at measuring things. Clicks. Sessions. Leads. CPA. ROAS. Conversion rates. We like metrics because they make everything feel accountable.
But visibility doesn’t always produce a click anymore.
Imagine a prospect asks an AI system to identify companies capable of solving a specific supply-chain problem. The AI reads the structured information on your website, reviews your content and includes your company in its answer.
The prospect sees your name but doesn’t click anything. They go to a meeting. Have lunch. A few hours later, they type your URL directly into their browser.
Who gets credit for that lead?
In the traditional analytics report, it probably shows up as direct traffic. SEO gets no credit. Content gets no credit. The work that made your company understandable and credible enough for the AI recommendation disappears from the attribution model.
That doesn’t mean the work failed.
It means the measurement model is getting less complete.
Changing Your Strategy Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Increasing Your Budget
This is not an argument that everybody needs to dramatically increase marketing spending in 2027.
You may need to spend more. You may also discover that you can spend less by stopping things that aren’t working.
There are plenty of places money gets wasted:
1. Paying for traffic that lands on a bad website. If your website is slow, confusing, outdated or doesn’t clearly explain why someone should choose you, spending more to send people there simply makes the leak bigger.
2. Producing content just to produce content. Publishing another generic article because somebody said you need four blog posts a month isn’t a strategy. Useful content has to demonstrate actual expertise and answer real questions.
3. Measuring SEO only by rankings. Rankings still matter, but they’re no longer the whole story. Visibility, authority and inclusion in AI-generated answers increasingly matter too.
4. Paying for software nobody uses. Most companies have at least a few subscriptions somebody bought three years ago that everyone forgot to cancel.
That money may be better spent improving site structure, content quality, analytics, user experience or the systems that help search engines and AI understand what makes your company credible.
The spreadsheet shouldn’t determine the strategy. The strategy should determine the spreadsheet.
What This Means for You
Before you finalize your 2027 marketing budget, I’d ask four questions.
1. Are you budgeting for today’s customer journey, or the journey from three years ago? If your plan assumes customers still discover, research and evaluate companies the same way they used to, you’re planning for a market that no longer exists.
2. Do search engines and AI systems actually understand who you are and why you’re credible? Being online is not the same thing as being understood.
3. Are you measuring visibility, authority and influence, or only the things that are easiest to track? If you only invest in what produces a clean attribution report, you may underinvest in the things influencing the buying decision before the click ever happens.
4. Are your website, SEO, content, paid media and AI efforts working together? Your customers don’t experience your company as separate budget line items. They experience one brand.
If nothing changed in your strategy during 2026 that impacts your 2027 investments, you need to look much, much closer.
The digital landscape changed too much this year to simply move some numbers around and call the budget finished.
Figure out where your customers are now, where they’re going next, and what your company needs to do to remain visible, credible and worth recommending.
Then build the spreadsheet.
