Incubeta, a marketing outcomes agency powered by AI, released its latest report, “Tomorrow’s World: The 2027 Marketing Outlook,” which outlines how marketers should adjust their strategy as AI agents influence consumer behavior. The report describes that 60% of informational queries are now resolved within the search interface itself and without the user ever going to the brand’s domain, highlighting the shifting demands associated with zero-click searches.
The increasing use of agentic searches has changed the priorities for marketers to such an extent that, as the report argues, marketers should treat AI agents as an audience unto themselves. Instead, the report offers “share of answer,” or how often, and how accurately, a brand shows up in AI-generated answers, as one metric marketers can use to more precisely measure their campaigns by. The report also explores more key themes and insights:
- Product data is becoming the storefront: As AI agents increasingly conduct comparison and buying on their users’ behalf, vague attributes, stale pricing or unreliable stock data make a brand invisible to agents regardless of how good the website looks. Richer product data gives marketers an edge.
- Own your intelligence rather than renting it: Marketers should keep first-party data, brand knowledge and campaign history in one place and incorporate them into one holistic program. Marketers do not need to own everything, but they should be deliberate with what they do develop.
- Synthetic research speeds up learning, but it doesn’t replace customers: Persona swarms can screen ideas in minutes and surface objections, but high-stakes findings still need validation with real customer evidence.
- Marketers are overconfident about measurement: The confidence paradox, outlined in Incubeta’s last industry report, illustrates how the majority of marketing leaders are confident that their budgets are deployed effectively while simultaneously admitting that a portion of that investment is not delivering its full value. This reinforces the report’s argument that marketers need to replace platform attribution with triangulated evidence from MMM, incrementality tests and execution data, reported in CFO terms like contribution margin.
“Your next most important customer might not be human. If an agent can’t read your product data, you don’t exist on the shelf,” said Paul Ruscoe, VP of Marketing Intelligence, Incubeta. “The rules of thumb on metrics and measurability do not apply anymore, and marketers should be thinking about how to reach consumers through their agents.”
To learn more, read the full report on the website, or visit www.incubeta.com.
